The RSS Module - How to use RSS on Squidoo

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Squidoo - The RSS Module

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and that's just what it is. This lens discusses the RSS Module of Squidoo, the many, many ways that it can be utilized to add unique content to your lenses daily which could help boost your lens rank and keep more readers coming back for your fresh content.

RSS This 

RSS This
RSS This

What Wikki Says about RSS 

RSS (most commonly expanded as "Really Simple Syndication") is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works?such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video?in a standardized format. An RSS document (which is called a "feed", "web feed",

"Web feeds | RSS | The Guardian | guardian.co.uk",

The Guardian, London, 2008, webpage:

GuardianUK-webfeeds.

or "channel") includes full or summarized text, plus metadata such as publishing dates and authorship. Web feeds benefit publishers by letting them syndicate content automatically. They benefit readers who want to subscribe to timely updates from favored websites or to aggregate feeds from many sites into one place. RSS feeds can be read using software called an "RSS reader", "feed reader", or "aggregator", which can be web-based, desktop-based, or mobile-device-based. A standardized XML file format allows the information to be published once and viewed by many different programs. The user subscribes to a feed by entering into the reader the feed's URI or by clicking an RSS icon in a web browser that initiates the subscription process. The RSS reader checks the user's subscribed feeds regularly for new work, downloads any updates that it finds, and provides a user interface to monitor and read the feeds.

RSS formats are specified using XML, a generic specification for the creation of data formats. Although RSS formats have evolved from as early as March 1999, it was between 2005 and 2006 when RSS gained widespread use, and the ("Category: File - :Feed-icon.svg|16px") icon was decided upon by several major Web browsers.

read the rest of the Wikipedia article

How to Use Squidoo's RSS Module 

and what you can link too.

It's really pretty simple. I believe it is defaulted on just about every possible lens layout. You simply edit, select the feed (link) you want, customize how many post you want to display and how you want the post to display, either everything available, first 100 characters, whether you want to allow html, and how often it should check for updates. That's it. Once added you have it set up you get fresh content for your lens and requires no more interaction.

Now that's simple. But what you probably aren't aware of is all the things you can link to from RSS. You can virtually link to just about any updated content on the web, seriously!

RSS to your own Individual Squidoo Pages 

You can add an RSS Feed from any single Squidoo lens, but, its not real effective, see how to add them all below. When adding a feed from another lens the URL is always:


http://www.squidoo.com/xml/syndicate_lens/YOUR LENS NAME HERE


where you actually insert your own lens name instead of the bolded text.

Unfortunately even though you can do it, Squidoo lenses in RSS simply provide a link to the whole lens rather than separate modules so its not real effective, but here's what a feed looks like to my Haunted Ohio Lens, displaying everything available, which shows the Introduction Module and the beginning of the first module on the page, along with the link timestamped to show when it was last updated.

My Haunted Ohio Lens RSS 

Another downfall to an RSS feed to another Squidoo lens is that it seems to time out (fails after searching 8 secoonds)many times before it can find the feed. If that is the case the feed will not show up here.

Loading Fetching RSS feed... please stand by

RSS to Individual Squidoo Groups 

You cannot link to RSS from a Squidoo group because it uses a top level Squidoo feed (but you can add one for all of your groups, see below). If you try to create an RSS feed for a single group, you'll get the error message at the bottom of this section.

The top level feed to your group would be


http://www.squidoo.com/xml/top_lenses/group/Your Group Name


but there is a way around this but it produces the same results as if you RSS you lens with just a link to the group but if you really wanted to do that the URL would be:


http://www.squidoo.com/xml/syndicate_lens/groups..Your Group Name


and the two dots are important.
Speaking of Groups why not join my Squidoo Addicts Group

Now here's the ugly error I mentioned above: (this is in fact an RSS Module trying to link to it)

Loading Fetching RSS feed... please stand by

RSS to all your Squidoo Lenses and Groups too 

Thankfully there is way to get all your Lenses and groups in one feed, that is by using Squidutils. The SquidUtils allows you to create a feed from either:
  • all of your lenses and groups

  • all of your lenses

  • all of your groups

  • Your Favorite's Lenses and Groups

All of my lenses served via RSS 

Can you say, "Lensroll Lens made super simple"

I cut it down to only show the top ten, but trust me it will show them all along the text from the first module.

Loading Fetching RSS feed... please stand by

So that's what you can RSS in Squidoo 

What else can you use the RSS feed in Squidoo for?

 

RSS for Blogs 

This should be a given

Of course you can use Squidoo's RSS Module to syndicate blogs. Virtually every blog type has an RSS button somewhere, simply click it to be taken to the feed. On the feed page copy the entire URL from your address bar and paste into Squidoo's RSS Module. Here's an excerpt from a video blog of mine featuring Punk Rock Videos.

Loading Fetching RSS feed... please stand by

RSS to YouTUBE 

Of course you can get feeds from YouTube

You can use Squidoo's RSS to pull videos feeds from YouTube. YouTubes RSS feeds are explained here.

Here I have added the daily favorites, but in addition to that you can add videos from utube by tags, users, playesets, or just about anything else you can think of. Unfortunatly. with Squidoo, they are not playable without opening a new YouTube Window. There are some PHP applications, like feedforall that will allow you to embed them directly into a webpage and play them from within that page, but Squidoo's just not there yet, give it time! ;-)

Loading Fetching RSS feed... please stand by

RSS to eBay 

Hands Up, Who has an eBay Store? Well I do.(Well I did, I closed it! eBay keeps ticking me off with all the changes) Hands Up who is ticked off by eBay, ME, ME, ME for sure.

Anyway though you can RSS to your eBay store or any eBay seller for that matter, click here to see how

Below is an RSS Feed directly from my eBay Store - OOOPS - FORGOT I CLOSED MY STORE - LEAVE ME A COMMENT ON WHY I SHOULD RSS TO YOUR EBAY STORE AND I JUST MIGHT LINK TO IT HERE

But for Now I will just RSS to eBay's search for Money

Loading Fetching RSS feed... please stand by

So what do you think so far? 

There's more so keep reading, just thought you might want a break to comment

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RSS to your own Image Galleries 

I bet you would be surprised to know if you host your own image gallery chances are you can get a plug-in to enable it to be syndicated via RSS. Then you can use Squidoo's RSS Module to have it display on your lens. For this example, I am going to use a one of personal image galleries, which is powered by Coppermine. Coppermine like most other image galleries (worth anything) is based off PHP, so no matter what you use for your own image gallery, chances are that you can find a plug in to enable RSS feeds off of it. For Coppermine, the plugin is Coppermine RSS Feeder and is extremely simple, just copy one php file to your coppermine install folder. That's it.

Here's my coppermine image gallery via RSS 

This will show random (seriously, refresh the page to see a new set) pictures from all albums, so there is quite a variety. A little info, I used to use this image gallery for items I was selling online, but have recently added lots of Tattoo pictures and old skateboard pictures but it's a good sample to show the RSS feed to my personal image gallery.

Loading Fetching RSS feed... please stand by

RSS to your Forums 

How about showing an RSS feed from your own forums, did you know that was possible, it sure is. I use phpBB for all of my forums now, but I have tried others. In order to do this you have to install a mod (modification) to your forum. The Mod is phpBB Smartfeed and is incredibly easy to install. Once phpBB smartfeed is installed it will add a smartfeed link to your navigation menu. Click it to customize your feed settings and then click the generate URL, which gives the URL used for the feed. Even though I used phpBB and phpBB Smartfeed, I am sure that just about every forum software has some sort of mod to allow this. Once you have the feed link simply insert into Squidoo's RSS Module to show post from your forums as I have in the example below.

RSS feed from my phpBB forum 

This is a feed from my MTG Players forum.

Loading Fetching RSS feed... please stand by

Yahoo Answers 

Has anyone noticed recently the surge of top Search Engine Results being pages for Yahoo Answers, well, I certainly have. And naturally you can RSS to just about anything from Yahoo. Since I have been answering many questions, I wanted a way to link relative questions and answers to my own websites and at last, I can. The cool thing, it works just as well with Squidoo's RSS Module. The downside, I wanted list my answers and Yahoo's RSS is strictly based on questions. I usually answer questions rather than ask them on Yahoo answers. If I asked questions then I could set up an RSS feed to show my questions exclusively, but since I ask no questions on Yahoo Answers, I thought I would add an RSS feed to Yahoo Questions about Squidoo. How to do it use yahoo's answer search with a an extra parameter. The default RSS answer search is

http://answers.yahoo.com/rss/allq


which will return an RSS feed for all questions. Simply modify that to

http://answers.yahoo.com/rss/searchq?p=squidoo


to get all questions containing Squidoo somewhere in either the question or answer. If you want to search for anything else just simply replace Squidoo with whatever you want to search for. I used this same technique on my Magic the Gathering Lens with the folling RSS feed URL

http://answers.yahoo.com/rss/searchq?p=magic+the+gathering



Of course there are lots to RSS to within Yahoo and many parameters you can add but that is all explained by Yahoo very well here

Loading Fetching RSS feed... please stand by

More RSS info 

Coming Soon

Start fast perfect it Later - Squidoos Motto - as is the case with this lens.

There is so much info you can add via RSS you should definately check back, as I will be updating this with how to add much much more via RSS!

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