RSS, it’s big and getting bigger

Category: e-marketing
Posted by Lloyd on 3rd September 2006

RSS – Really Simple Syndication – fills the gap between email and your website. If you’ve just updated your website with some new content (e.g. a blog entry, a new edition of your newsletter or a press release) your next task is to let the world know. Most likely you’ll email your contact list with a short synopsis of the new content and a link to the website for the full article. RSS provides a means of doing this automatically.An RSS feed isn’t email, it’s a file with a list of items and links that is periodically checked by RSS feed readers. There are various types of RSS feed readers – ones that are part of normal email programs (like Thunderbird), plug-ins to email programs (like Newsgator in Outlook), stand-alone readers (like FeedReader or FeedDemon), plug-ins to browsers (like Lektora into Internet Explorer), browsers (like Opera and Firefox) and aggregator sites (like my.yahoo, popurls.com etc.). All of these readers require the recipient to subscribe to the feed once and then the reader automatically gathers any updates to the feed. This pull mechanism means that your feed is differentiated from push marketing such as email and spam.

An RSS feed contains a synopsis of the content on your web page - this “description” is used by aggregator sites to provide content-rich looking pages with links to your source web page. Your web page can contain anything from text and graphics through to videos and podcasts. A reader will deliver this content directly to the subscriber’s desktop – your content delivered instantly without any emails needing to be sent and bypassing any spam filtering.

It’s also possible to create pages on your website built from other RSS feeds. For example, we provide a snapshot of client news on our website (e.g. VeriFone.php) using feeds dynamically created by news sites such as Google News. The whole point of syndication is to have others publicise your feed. This content is freely available to anyone prepared to follow straightforward usage terms and conditions.

RSS forms a key integration between new content on your website and your audiences – a critical function for your PR and web activity.

Geek stuff

A basic RSS file is an XML (eXtensible Mark-up Language) file that describes the ‘channel’, where the channel is from (your website), and a list of ‘items’ with descriptions and links to your web pages. Creating a feed is slightly more complex than HTML since XML is less forgiving, with errors and character set issues (utf-8 encoding for example).

It is also possible to style XML using an XSL (eXtensible Stylesheet Language) style sheet so that your feed looks like the rest of your website with your branding and navigation. XSL is a powerful language using XSLT (XSL Transformations) using the XML Path Language. An example of this is on our website, all the feeds listed on client_rss.php have been styled with an XSL file.

Basic RSS feed generation is built into blog software and some web publishing suites are beginning to incorporate it. But since it’s complex and error prone, we’ve decided to automate it. If you’re interested in getting your content into RSS, then let us know and we’ll do it for you.

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