RSS Feeds Display with RSS FeedsMaster

RSS Feedsmaster is the next generation of RSS Feeds displayers, and it's available now.

It offers serious power for the serious user. But it also offers some great advantages even if you just have a nice site you'd really like to get some ranking for and some more visitors. Maybe even get indexed in the SEs without actually driving yourself totally insane.

Well, I suppose you could still go nuts. But it might be worth checking what I'm up to anyway.

RSS FeedsMaster, which is my fourth script product using RSS Feeds and/or RSS Feeds Display.

As an aside, my existing customers get a shot at every one of my new products at big discounts. And since some of my best customers have come from the Warriors Forum, I also like to give them a major break on whatever I do. (Hint, join the Warriors - I'm certainly not the only one who offers good stuff at bargain basement prices).

There are several places on this lens you can find more of the specifics about FeedsMaster as well as learn more about RSS. There's also a video showing some of the features (plus a little intro video from YouTube).

I've tried to provide some useful information about RSS and not just a sales pitch, so take a look and enjoy.

RSS Feeds are just another way of moving data around. They do have some features that are very handy.

Generally they update on a more or less regular basis. So if you have an RSS Feed Display on your site, it changes with time. We know this is a GOOD THING for the SEs who like updating, non-static pages.

Oh, but it is a BAD THING if it updates on every page refresh. Nasty spiders might just trigger a refresh to see if you have an ugly "I'M AUTOMATED" type footprint. Oops.

Then there's this other minor problem of how some RSS feed display programs just use one feed at a time. Like a zillion other sites. And that's only the beginning. Number of items, format, does it do keyworded feeds, what about multiple pages with displays on them. On and on.

Maybe you'd like to put multiple displays on the same page and still have them be unique? Maybe you'd like to use the same feeds but pass them in different keywords for the RSS feed display output on each page?

Maybe you've got a ton of PLR or access to some neat public domain text or you want to recycle blog posts or ...?

So try to find a package that will let you do all that and more. Now there are some programs out there that will do some very tricky stuff. My impression is that you could buy yourself a world of hurt by scrambling articles from article directories or synomizing them or whatever. Far as I know it can run about $100K per infraction if someone catches you at it and decides to nail you to the wall.

On the other hand you can do whatever you want with your own feeds, PLR, your own content or public domain content.

Let's say you'd like to have some short items like typical RSS Feed items and you'd also like to, cleverly, use some article length stuff that changes veeerrry slowly. Oh, and maybe you'd like to insert some nice links with keyworded anchor text that exists in the items (good for linking to other sites you own), or add some inserted text in various places you choose, or, now this is insane, insert a keyworded RSS feed display inside an item that's being displayed as an RSS Feed display item?

Yeah that last one's kind of a mindbender, you need to think it through to see what it's all about.

Don't think you can do all that without getting your hands on RSS FeedsMaster.

I've spent a couple years working with RSS Feeds and they've been around a lot longer than that. But, it looks like there's still a lot of confusion.

To simplify a bit, RSS can be INPUT or OUTPUT. Blogs (and Squidoo lenses have their own RSS feeds - these are OUTPUT. You can submit them to RSS and/or blog directories. People can subscribe to them using readers and so on. That is data from your site, excerpts usually from your pages or posts, that goes OUT from your site.

As INPUT to your site (or Lens - look at the Feeds showing up below in "Some RSS Input" which is the "RSS - Add your own feed" module). It's a way to add some content to your site or Lens that updates regularly. The items become part of your content. That's what RSS Feed display scripts can help you do.

To get just a little techie here. RSS is a subset of XML which is just another markup language like HTML. However, it is not designed to be read by browsers (though more and more will allow you to subscribe to Feeds or will display the output in an odd format). Think of it as a way to move data in a highly structured form that any program that understands the structure can do things with (like an RSS Reader or RSS aggregators do when they display the feed content for you).

RSS as a specific XML format, is set up in a specific way with defined parts. In thinking about RSS Feed Item Display, the most important parts are:

Title - this is the name describing the particular item's content (more or less, it may be an extract from the item content, something like a newspaper item headline, etc.)

The Link - usually this is the URL (the location) of the full content that the item content is usually a summary or extract of. Most commonly, when the item is output for display the Title becomes linked to this Link so that if it's clicked on off you go to the full ocntent source.

The Description - this is the actual content of the item. For most RSS Feeds this is an axtract, sometimes only a few hundred characters, to provide an idea of what the full content is. However, there is nothing that says it MUST be an extract. With blogs, you can often choose a blurb/extract or the full text of posts to go into the outgoing blog feed.

Date - Generally this will be the date/time that the specific item was first published.

There are other elements, including header elements that define the name of the feed, type, the date/time the current feed as a whole was published/updated, etc.

All right, let's actually look at what an RSS XML feed might look like if you open it in your browser instead of in a Feed Reader. True, you might never want to do this but it will help give you a better idea of how RSS feeds actually work.

I was going to use a Google news feed but some of the links are way too long to format for the module and it has some tags that aren't really necessary for my purposes, so I decided to use the SiteFeed RSS instead.

======================================================
<rss version="2.0">
  <channel>
    <title>FeedsMaster Features</title>
    <link>http://rssfeedsmaster.com</link>
    <description>Some of the Features and Benefits of the RSS FeedsMaster Package</description>
    <language>en-us</language>
    <copyright>Copyright </copyright>
    <lastBuildDate>Sat, 24 Mar 2007 23:10:00 -0400</lastBuildDate>
   <item>
      <title>Overall Keyword Fetching Control</title>
      <link>http://rssfeedsmaster.com</link>
      <description>
      <br><br>You control whether items are fetched using the secondary and tertiary keywords or phrases depending on how many items your primary keyword or phrase returns - and you can shut off further keyword fetching at a specified number of items you enter.
      </description>
      <pubDate>Sat, 24 Mar 2007 23:10:00 -0400</pubDate>
   </item>
  </channel>
</rss>
======================================================

This sample just contains the header information and one item. As you can see the header portion (from the top down to the first <item> tag) defines the feed and what it's about as well as indicating the language and the last time the feed was built.

The items (surrounded by <item></item> tags) are the actual content which would be dislayed on your page. At a minimum the <item> will contain a title, a link to the site or the specific page the item is from, an extract from (or the full content of) the source, and a publication date.

After the last <item>, there is a closing </channel> tag and a closing </rss> tag.

In most cases feeds will contain somewhere between 5 and 10 items. How

This is down here because it can take a while to load which would be a nuisance at the top. Your browser does need to have javascript enabled and a recent flashplayer.

I've pretty much covered the idea of RSS Feed displays both above and below. You should have a pretty good idea what they can do for a site in terms of spider activity in particular.

But there's another whole aspect to this. Does your site have it's own RSS Feed that pings RSS ping sites such as pingomatic.com, icerocket, yahoo, technorati and so on?

FeedsMaster SiteFeed (which is an add-on package to RSS FeedsMaster, delivered 4 to 6 weeks after you get FeedsMaster) can be used to give your site an updating, pinging RSS feed based on content you select and control. You can see an example above in "An Example of an FM SiteFeed."

That content was collected by me into a text file with break separators and then processed by FeedsMaster DataManager to prepare it.

FM Data provides the raw material to SiteFeed which can ping and output the items as a valid RSS 2.0 feed.

Think about this. What was once a static site without a feed, now is pinging an updating feed filled with links to the pages on the site. And that feed can be submitted to RSS directories, burned at feedburner to make it available to every type of reader or aggregator, added to your My Yahoo page as an RSS Feed and on and on.

While I think putting article length items on your page with RSS and inserting feeds within feeds and all the other things FeedsMaster does are nearly unique and definitely powerful, I also think that SiteFeed combined with the power of DataManager and FM Data may be the real, and semi-hidden, power in this package.

Getting your head around the possibilities in this package isn't easy. Hell, understanding RSS can be plenty confusing. It's kind of a problem for me because it can be hard to make it really clear just how creative you can get with this package.

RSS Feeds can come in different forms, so lets look at some examples. And I'll show you how to add a news search feed into your lens with your own keywords.

WordPress blogs have two or more URLs you can use. One just looks like this:

http://domain/blog/feed/

Pretty simple, right?

Another might look like:

http://domain.com/blog/wp-rss2.php

The php file produces an RSS 2.0 feed.

This is the RSS Feed URL for this lens:

http://www.squidoo.com/xml/syndicate_lens/rssfeedsdisplay

Now that's somewhat more complicated. Since RSS is often referred to as Really Simple Syndication and since it's structure is XML (eXtended Markup Language), you can see how Squidoo uses a nice logical URL to keep things in their proper place.

Now the one I promised. At the moment I have a google news search feed in the "Some RSS Input" module below. It uses a keyword phrase to do a search and looks like this:

http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&q=rss+feeds&ie=UTF-8&output=rss

Just looking at it you see right off that it's a news feed. After the "news?" you can see first the "hl" and then a series of items separated by "&". "hl" sets the language which is English (en). I'm guessing here but I believe "ned" indicates what news edition to search, here the US.

The next part is the cool part. q indicates a query and what follows are the keywords. Since this lens is about RSS, I used "rss+feeds". You can enter a single keyword or a multiple word phrase. If you want to put in more than one word, don't use spaces use a "+" between each word where there would normally be a space. This, naturally, is the most important part if you want to use a feed like this on Squidoo - you'll want to do a search related to your lens, right?

Next is "ie" setting the character set encoding. This may depend on the language, but mostly you'll see UTF-8.

And finally "output". Output could be delivered in different forms so this specifies "rss". If you copy and paste that URL into your browser address/navigation bar and then change the "rss" to "html", you'll get a nice browser page and not some weird XML code.

Now. Get an "RSS: Add Your Own Feed" module and put an RSS Feed on your lens. It's really easy. You can copy the google search above and put in a keyword or phrase related to your lens and get fresh updating content on your lens everyday. TEST it and make sure your phrase returns some items. If not, use a shorter phrase or just one keyword.

I thought I'd break up the blocky text with some of the manga-type drawings Stephanie does. Stephanie is my 14 - almost 15 - year old daughter and despite being prejudiced in her favor, I think she really does do nice work. Hope you enjoy them too.