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Write the Web™ 
The Web for You
Archive for the ‘RSS’ Category
Saturday, July 19th, 2008
Listgarden is a very powerful RSS creation and management tool that runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux platforms, and can be configured as a Web-based application.
For those of you who subscribe to all of my feeds, let me apologize…I know that I’ve mentioned Listgarden several times: in this blog, the Lockworld Herald News, and my Resources feed.
I think the program deserves all of these mentions, however, because it is so versatile and so simple. Without any knowledge of RSS or XML structure or rules, you can create and edit as many feeds as you want to. You have the options of creating the feeds as local files on your computer, or uploaded to your FTP server (or both). My favorite feature of Listgarden is that you can optionally export an HTML version of your feed containing some or all of your feed items as a Web-based file. This can allow you to offer a preview of your latest feed items to your site visitors or an alternate way to view “what’s new” on your site.
The program uses a Web-based GUI, which makes it a little bit unusual to work with at first. But once you get the hang of things, you can be publishing RSS feeds in no time. The only downside is that there is no WYSIWYG (What You See is What You Get) editor, so if you want to include rich text, images, or links in your feed items, you will have to write the HTML codes for these items.
You can completely customize both your feed and your HTML output any way you want, which is very nice. For example, if you sell advertisements in your feed, or want to offer between-item ads from Google AdSense or other sources, you can easily modify your template to accommodate this. Furthermore, since you can completely customize your HTML output, you can ensure that your page is ready for viewing as soon as it’s exported, with any navigation structure, introductory text, links to the RSS feed for subscriptions, footers, etc.
I use Listgarden to create and manage my Lockworld Herald News feed. Because this feed is entirely self-promotional, I don’t expect many people to subscribe to it. However, for visitors to my site, glancing at the HTML version of the feed (the link above) will give them an overview about any recent changes I’ve made to the site, without having to subscribe to the RSS feed.
Of course, most modern Web browsers now have the capability to display RSS feeds in readable format, rather than the raw code they used to show. Furthermore, services like FeedBurner offer a Web-readable version of your feed automatically. So the HTML version is not essential. But the advantage is that it can contain all of your navigation structure so visitors can see what else you have to offer, and that it can be designed to match your site’s look and feel.
Listgarden can also be used as a PortableApp (run from a USB drive, rather than installed locally). You can even use multiple instances of Listgarden (not simultaneously) by installing them in different folders on your computer to manage different sets of feeds. This can be particularly useful for those who manage RSS feeds for other people’s sites, or for multiple sites of their own. Of course, with Listgarden you can have as many feeds as you want to in each application folder on your machine, if you only want to run one copy of the application.
Because it is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux and can be used portably, it is ideal for people working on the same projects on multiple platforms. For example, I use both a Linux-based Eee PC and a Windows XP PC to work on my site. Fortunately, I can manage my feeds on either computer (although I have to be using the right computer to actually publish the local file once I’ve made changes, because the file locations on the two machines are different).
I’ve tried using several different RSS feed creation tools in the past, but none have offered me the power and flexibility of Listgarden. So if the other methods I’ve used (here and here) don’t quite work for you, Listgarden might just be worth a try.
That’s all for today…now get out there and Write the Web!
Posted in Content Management, Level: Intermediate, Product/Service Review, RSS | No Comments »
Monday, March 31st, 2008
In my last post, I explained how you could use del.icio.us to add a simple RSS feed to your site. The benefits of this method mainly lie in your ability to quickly and easily add any Web page to your feed, particularly if you make use of the browser buttons available from del.icio.us. Just navigate to the page you want to include in your feed, click the button, and enter a title, description, and tags. This method also allows you to easily create many feeds, and add items to as many of the feeds as you need all at the same time.
While this method should work well for the average Web site owner looking to create an RSS feed, it might not be suitable for every purpose. The two primary limitations to using del.icio.us to create and publish your RSS feed are the lack of rich text editing, and the 255 character limit to the description field. Many users may want to include more information in their RSS feed, or include graphics, links, and other information. For these users, del.icio.us may not be the best solution.
However, before you start creating a detailed RSS feed with lots of custom information in the feed itself, you need to understand the wide variety of standards for feed readers. Most importantly, it is important to understand that many feed readers are unable to capture both the Web page and the feed details together. Most online feed readers will only capture the description you enter into your RSS feed’s description section, and will give the users a link they can click on to view the page that you’ve referenced in the feed’s URL section. Locally installed feed readers, on the other hand, may have any number of different ways to display this information. For example, the feed reader I use at home is the built-in RSS aggregator available in Mozilla Thunderbird. This feed reader allows me to choose whether I want to view the feed details for all of my feeds, or just view the Web page (which is not available when I’m offline). I don’t have the option to customize this for individual feeds, and I don’t have the luxury of viewing both automatically. This presents a problem for me, since I read most of the RSS feeds I’ve collected while I’m offline. If I set my preferences to automatically show the Web page, I get a blank screen when I’m offline. However, if I set my preferences to view the feed details only, I typically get only a short paragraph or two, and have to wait until I’m online to read more. There are other applications, however, that do a better job of handling the problem of how to deliver a Web page and an RSS feed together. My favorite is the Microsoft Outlook plug-in, IntraVnews. This handy plug-in is free for personal use, and manages to download the RSS feed details as well as a copy of the referenced Web page. This is particularly handy for news feeds, as the articles may not be available on the Web for a long time. But since they’ve been physically downloaded and embedded into an Outlook message post, you can read them whenever you want.
Understanding the different ways your viewers will see and interact with your feed is very important. For example, if you are creating a feed that often refers people to external Web sites, you need to understand that many of them may never see your RSS feed description, which explains why the link was chosen for your feed. In these cases, it might be useful to use the Awesome Highlighter recently featured on Lifehacker. This service allows you to send people to a unique URL that will display the page you want them to see, with the text you want them to see highlighted for them. It might not be as good as providing a brief description of the page, but it’s certainly better than nothing. Incidentally, the service is also good for providing a shortened URL to the page your referencing.
All of this is very important to understand if you’re serious about publishing an RSS feed, but it’s a bit beside the point for today. Since del.icio.us may not be the best solution for everyone’s RSS needs, I wanted to point out a way that you can create a free RSS feed that can contain more details, formatting, images, and other links (but try to remember that some people may never see all of the “extra” details you provide). If you need to provide a more detailed RSS feed, simply start a blog using one of the many free blogging tools available, such as Blogger.com, TypePad.com, WordPress.com, or the like. Once you’ve created your blog, you can easily add new posts with full rich-text capabilities. If you want to point the RSS feed to a location other than your blog, simply enter the appropriate URL into the “Link” field under your post title (at least, that’s where it is in Blogger…other services may vary, but should give you the option to specify a URL for your post). Your resulting RSS feed will simply refer to the Web sites you’ve entered, and no one will ever have to know that the feed originated with a blog, especially if you’re using FeedBurner to track your feed traffic.
Between del.icio.us and Blogger, anyone can quickly and easily create an RSS feed in minutes. And, if you follow the instructions in my last post, you can track how many people are subscribed to your feed, allow e-mail subscriptions, and enable visitors to your Web site to automatically “find” the RSS feed(s) you’ve made available.
If you’re still not sure about starting an RSS feed, here’s a quick tip….go ahead and start one using either of the two methods I’ve described (or both). Your feeds will never be noticed until/unless you start promoting them by telling people how to find them. So, if you need to practice a little bit before you’re ready to commit to creating a formal RSS feed for your site, you can!
Once you’re confident that your RSS feed will be a valuable tool for your site visitors, just embed the links to it on your site and let people start subscribing. One word of caution, though…don’t get too hung up on checking your feed’s stats on FeedBurner. If you have a personal or small business Web site, you’re not likely to get thousands of subscribers to your feed right away, if ever. The stats FeedBurner provides are simply interesting information, but unless you have some serious goals for your Web site, trying to keep too close a tab on your stats will just be a waste of time, and likely a huge disappointment. As I’ve said before, the average personal or small business Web site is never going to directly compete with the “big dogs,” so don’t go in believing that just because you have a Web site you’ll have thousands of people visiting your site every day.
That’s all for today. I hope you’re ready to create your RSS feed to start delivering your updates directly to the people who need to or want to know, rather than waiting for them to check in with your site.
Posted in Level: Novice, RSS | No Comments »
Sunday, March 23rd, 2008
A few months ago, I thought I was “back” to blogging, but it turns out I still had some unresolved issues. I’ve had a lot of trouble lately getting online to post to this blog and continue my explorations of all things Web-related. Fortunately, however, I think I’m finally ready to get back online on a regular basis to keep all of the tips and tricks coming here on The Web for You. I’m not making any promises at this point, but I’ll do my best.
In my last post, I told you I’d be describing how to add an RSS feed to your Web site. When I first conceived of this project several months ago, I wasn’t sure how to proceed. For one thing, Microsoft Office Small Business Live (MOSBL – formerly Microsoft Office Live) had several restrictions in place that made it difficult to add an RSS feed to your site. While several of these restrictions may still be in place if you’re using the default Web page editor, the good news is that even the free (Basic) version of MOSBL now allows you to use “third-party” design tools to build your site. That means that you’re no longer restricted to using only the existing design tool, and you can write your own HTML codes, including the META tags needed to add an RSS feed to your site (more on this later in this post).
Aside from the design issues with MOSBL, I was still at a loss with how to proceed. I came up with several ideas to use Web-based RSS-creation tools (such as the now-defunct FeedCraft as well as my favorite app, Zoho Creator). Unfortunately, both had serious drawbacks. FeedCraft, when it was available, only permitted users to create a single RSS feed. This was workable, but not ideal. Zoho Creator worked well, but unfortunately the links would only take you to the Zoho Creator record view, and not directly to the page referenced in the feed. Due to these drawbacks, I started experimenting with several offline feed creation tools, such as ListGarden (A very handy, free, and portable application that allows you to easily create both an RSS feed and an HTML version of the feed to display on your site). While these worked adequately, they all shared one common flaw…I had to manually upload the RSS feed to my Web site every time I modified it.
At long last, I realized that I was wasting my time. The simplest (and most efficient) tool for creating an RSS feed was right under my nose from the very beginning…Del.icio.us. I imagine most of you are familiar with del.icio.us, but in case you aren’t, it’s one of the first and most successful social bookmarking sites around. Del.icio.us allows you to quickly and easily bookmark any Web page and tag it with any tag you want. The piece that I was forgetting about was that del.icio.us allows you to turn any tag (or your entire set of bookmarks) into an RSS feed automatically. After spending long hours with other solutions, I finally realized that I had the perfect tool to build an RSS feed for my Web site with my old friend, del.icio.us.
Getting started is simple…if you don’t already have a del.icio.us account, sign up for one at http://del.icio.us/ (free). To make things easier for you, del.icio.us offers you “browser buttons” – links you can add to your bookmarks that allow you to add new items to your del.icio.us favorites with just one click. Alternatively, you can manually add a favorite by clicking on the “new post” link. There are a few fields you need to fill in (filled in automatically if you use the browser buttons): The link URL, a name for the link, a description, and your tag(s). The first two are self-explanatory, but the description is the field where you can enter the text you want your readers to see when they click on or subscribe to your feed (sadly, there is a limit to the number of characters available, and it only supports plain text). The tags are where things get really useful. Create a tag that matches the name or title of your RSS feed, and that’s easy to remember (I might use LWHRSS for “Lockworld Herald RSS feed”). Once you have at least one item bookmarked, you can get the RSS feed link by going to del.icio.us/{username}/{tagname} and looking for the “RSS” link near the bottom of the page.
TIP: If you want to offer multiple RSS feed options, just create different tags to signify the different feeds. The nice thing is that you can add a new item simultaneously to as many of your feeds as you want just by adding the tag for each of your feeds to the same item.
Once you have the link, you’re ready to get going. But I’d recommend adding at least one extra step before you publicize your feed…connect it to FeedBurner to track your subscribers and allow people to subscribe in any reader or via e-mail. That way, you can keep an eye on how many people are subscribed to your RSS feed at any point in time.
Setting up FeedBurner is as easy as creating a del.icio.us account. Simply log in or create a new account, then enter the URL of your RSS feed (the one you copied from your del.icio.us page) into the “Burn a feed right this instant” section. You will have to enter a feed title, so pick something short for your feed title (For example, this feed’s title is the easy-to-remember TheWebForYou. This will form the basis of your feed’s new URL (for example, http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheWebForYou). Once you’ve added this feed to FeedBurner, you will be able to generate a new, unique URL for your feed. This FeedBurner-based URL is the one you want to distribute to people, as it allows FeedBurner to track how many subscribers you have.
Once you have your new feed’s URL, you’re ready to add it to your Web site. The simplest way to do this is to just add a link to it on one of your Web pages. However, many modern browsers offer the ability to “auto-find” RSS feeds on a site. This is based on a META tag added to the HEAD section of the page’s HTML contents. For example, I’ve added the following META tag to each of my pages:
<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”The Web for You (Blog)” href=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheWebForYou”>
The “rel” and “type” arguments should not be changed, but the “title” and “href” arguments should be customized to your new feed’s title and URL, respectively.
I’ve used one of my content management systems (ajaxincludes) to add this code (along with similar codes for each of my RSS feeds) to every page of my site automatically. First, I created all of the codes in a separate file, called inc-meta.inc (you can name it anything you want). Then, I used the AjaxIncludes script to dynamically add this to every page in my site using:
<script src=”/documents/script-ajaxinclude.txt”></script>
<script>
ajaxincludes=”inc-meta.inc”
</script>
In this example, I have the main AjaxIncludes script stored in a separate file on my site at http://lockworldherald.com/documents/script-ajaxinclude.txt (Note: I use the .txt extension because of a javascript-caching restriction with MOSBL that prevents changes in javascript codes from showing up on the site immediately. You can use either the standard .js extension or the .txt extension).
By adding these few lines of script to every page of my site, I’ve enabled most browsers to auto-discover the RSS feeds I currently have to offer. And if I need to add or delete a feed, I only have to edit one file: inc-meta.inc.
By creating your RSS feed using del.icio.us, redirected through FeedBurner, and auto-detected on your site, you enable your visitors to quickly and easily subscribe to your feed using almost any browser, RSS reader, or even e-mail. The whole point of RSS is making it easy for your users to find and subscribe to your feed, and this serves the purpose quite well.
By using del.icio.us to add feed items, you have a quick and easy way to turn links to any Web page (or file, such as a PDF) into a custom RSS feed for your site.
TIP: Want to add an item to your RSS feed, but aren’t quite ready to make it visible to the whole world? You can either create a separate tag called “RSSDrafts” (or something similar that works for you), or just check the “make private” link when you add the bookmark. This will allow you to add the bookmark whenever you want, but wait to publish it until the time is right.
That’s all for today. See you next time (hopefully soon) here on The Web for You.
Posted in Level: Intermediate, Microsoft Office Live Basics, RSS | No Comments »
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