Well, yesterday I finished up the RSS For Beginners series, so here is a list of the 10 posts for it.
What Is RSS - A Quick Look At The History Of This Internet Phenomenon
Promoting Your RSS Feed
Getting Started With FeedBurner
Full Feeds vs Partial Feeds
Quick Tip: Using RSS For Google Sitemaps
Creating An RSS Landing Page
Manually Creating An RSS Feed
Some Cool RSS Widgets
Some Good Feeds You *Must* Subscribe To
15 Last Minute Tips To Improve Your RSS Feed Readership
Alright so you have your feed set up, you’re publicizing it, yet still no one seems interested in it? Not a problem, here are 15 quick tips that can quickly increase the amount of subscribers to your feed.
There are so many feeds out there nowadays it is hard to know which ones are worth subscribing to, and which ones are worthless. Here are the feeds that I think every blogger should be subscribed to.
One of the best decisions I have ever made was subscribing to the del.icio.us feed. In case you have been living under a rock, del.icio.us is an online bookmarking system that posts the most popular bookmarks on the front page. Although during your subscription there may be some really wacky posts, every once in a while a golden gem may appear. The hotlist feed is especially helpful when you are running out of ideas.
To subscribe to the del.icio.us hotlist you can use the browser button (assuming your browser has that) or there is a small RSS button tucked away at the bottom of the page. You can also view just the popular posts or the recent posts and subscribe to their respective feeds as well.
Techmeme is a technology news site that gives a quick summary of popular stories and links over to the source. Their subscription button is also hard to find, it is on the bottom of the sidebar.
You should subscribe to Techmeme if you run a technology news site, but even if it is completely off topic from your blog, it can provide a nice read in the morning.
And finally we have Digg. You knew this had to be on here, right? Although 90% of the stuff posted on Digg is crap, there are some valuable stories thrown in there every once in a while. It also isn’t uncommon to see del.icio.us and Techmeme link over to Digg.
The thing about the Digg feed is you should quickly glance at it, and that is all. There are far to many posts every day to worry about reading every summary. If the title ain’t interesting, don’t bother reading the post.
Oh yeah, and don’t forget to subscribe to Nusuni.com’s feed either 
In the past year the number of RSS widgets has exponentially grown. It seems like wherever you go a new widget pops up. In case you don’t know, widgets are basically small scripts that you can put on your site, blog, etc. There are all sorts of them, but today I’m going to talk about the RSS feed widgets.
Freedo Style is number one because it is really cool, and it has a cool name. You can customize everything about their widget, and I mean everything.
Widgetbox lets you create a widget for your feed. You can then add a small “get my widget” button which will let your readers add the widget to their blog in a couple of clicks. This is used on many high traffic blogs.
I can’t post a link to the FeedBurner Headline Animator, but I can tell you it is inside the “Publicize” tab of FeedBurner. This lets you cycle through the top five headlines of your feed, a useful tool for advertising your content.
Just like with the above widget, this one can be found in the “Publicize” tab of FeedBurner. The FeedBurner counter lets you show off how many subscribers you have. However, I wouldn’t recommend posting a counter unless you have a lot of subscribers.
And finally we have MuseStorm. This service lets you create a widget and post it all over the place, and it also provides some nice statistics about where your widget is being used.
Anyone who publishes an RSS feed on their blog should know what their RSS feed actually looks like. Here is a quick rundown of the various parts of a simple feed.
The beginning of the RSS feed defines what the file is, in this case it is an XML RSS feed.
<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<rss version="2.0">
That is easy enough, isn’t it?
The next part is the channel, which basically tells us the meta information for the feed like the description and title. The channel is also where all of the actual feed content is defined as well (next section).
<channel>
<title>My Feed</title>
<description>A cool feed</description>
<link>http://www.example.com</link>
Finally we get to deal with each individual entry for the feed. All of the sections are pretty self explanatory, so I won’t be going over them.
<item>
<title>A post</title>
<link>http://www.example.com/post/</link>
<description>This is just a post, do you like it?</description>
<pubDate> Sat, January 5, 2029 11:59:34 EST</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>Another post</title>
<link>http://www.example.com/anotherpost/</link>
<description>This is just another post, do you like it?</description>
<pubDate> Sat, January 5, 2023 11:59:34 EST</pubDate>
</item>
Now we need to close off the tags for the feed, and it will be complete!
</channel>
</rss>
The posts for the feed should be in reverse chronological order, meaning newer posts are inserted at the top, and older ones are pushed down.
RSS feeds can be made in practically any text editor which can save plain text files. The file can end in .xml or .rss.
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