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Free RSS Resources: How Do You Generate An RSS Feed?
By | March 13, 2008
There are several ways to generate an RSS feed:
1) Directly from your blog software (if you blog), optionally enhanced by FeedBurner or a similar service. This is how I currently generate all of my feeds.
If you haven’t chosen your blog software yet, I highly recommend WordPress. It’s got a great feature set, it’s been around long enough to have a lot of the bugs fixed, lots and lots of loyal users of other blog software have moved to WordPress because it’s so much better, and it’s free, even for commercial use. It also seamlessly supports audio enclosures (podcasting) in your RSS feed.
If you need a place to host your blog and feed, iPowerWeb is by far the best low-cost service I’ve ever seen. Everything just works, they provide great statistics, site features and documentation, lots of storage and email accounts, proper and current PHP and MySQL support (necessary for many blogs including WordPress) and their tech support folks are responsive and follow up to make sure any issue gets resolved. WordPress installs and runs like a dream on iPowerWeb. With some other hosting providers, I’ve had to rewrite PHP code and place files in all sorts of unnatural places on my site to get it to work, due to silly restrictions and limitations of the hosting providers. I’ve tried several low-cost and medium-cost hosting services and now would never use anyone but iPowerWeb.
You can get your blog’s domain name from iPowerWeb as part of your hosting package, or from any other provider. I’ve had excellent service from GoDaddy for domain names (it usually takes only two or three hours from my order to having an active, redirected domain name live on the net, as opposed to waiting several days from some providers). Stick with iPowerWeb for web hosting services though.
2) Directly from your blog service (such as Blogger), if you use one.
3) By using one of many free or paid third-party RSS feed generation products, which generate feeds from sets of text items or files.
4) Directly from your full-featured autoresponder email service (like Aweber), if you use one in your business to handle your opt-in email list and follow-up messages. That service should provide you with the option (at no extra cost) of automatically generating an RSS feed (from their site) whose content consists of the same emails which you’re already sending to your email list through the autoresponder service.
5) By hand with a simple text editor, if you’re familiar enough with the syntax of HTML and RSS/XML, have a lot of patience and are a careful typist. This gets old really quickly, unless you have a very limited set of text-only messages which you need to get into an RSS feed in a hurry, and you don’t have any of the other tools above available to you.
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Brought to you by Free RSS Resources, the web’s most up-to-date collection of RSS feed directories, podcast directories, blog directories, blog pingers and RSS marketing tools. Powered by iPowerWeb. Come learn how to increase your blog and website traffic, and profit by setting up and marketing your own RSS feed. My free 2005 e-book shows how.
Topics: RSS in Business |