Clever tricks for your site's RSS feed [BT broadband office]

Clever tricks for your site's RSS feed

Posted 24 October 2007 at 8:33AM by Simon Dickson in Website development

'How did I cope before RSS?' With so many websites to keep an eye on, and so little time, it just wouldn't be practical for me to browse my key information sources each day, to see what new stuff they had. People are waking up to the possibilities, both in terms of supplying and receiving information via RSS, but it's slow going.

I wish we'd reached the point where it was enough to have an RSS feed, but of course, that just isn't the case yet. In the meantime, email remains the instinctive choice for clients wanting to be kept up to date about your business, and for marketing managers who want to get the message out. But doesn't that mean all sorts of extra technical and management headaches? Thankfully, no.

We mentioned a while back that Google had bought RSS services provider Feedburner, and made all their features free. But one feature we didn't mention was the ability to turn the items in your RSS feed into a daily email.

You can't do anything to 'brand' the email, as such: but you might well feel this is a fair price to pay, since the emailing side runs itself. No worries for you about running a mail server, processing subscribe/unsubscribe requests, handling lost passwords, and so on. You just keep posting the items; the RSS feed lists the items; and Feedburner transforms the RSS feed into an email. Everyone's a winner.

You'll find the 'email subscriptions' option under the 'Publicise' tab in the Feedburner interface, along with a few other 'value add' features which may appeal. For example, if you've ever wanted a BBC-style news ticker on your homepage, Feedburner has a 'headline animator' which is remarkably easy to customise with your own colour scheme and background image. Or for something even slicker, you can pump your headlines into a branded Flash widget, courtesy of SpringWidgets.com.

Tags: email newsletters, feedburner, google, rss, tickers, widgets

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Comments

1. At October 24, 2007 3:36 PM, anjanesh wrote:

Any suggestions on how to sort and classify multiple feeds without cluttering up the browser ?
Never used a standalone program before for RSS - prefer my firefox for displaying them.

2. At October 25, 2007 8:45 AM, William Baskerville wrote:

Yet another Google take over! RSS Feeds are good for providing up to date information to people, but what would be good is a peice of software to allow RSS feeds to go directly to a website, like one you create yourself on a server, and update there, and instead of a client on a pc.

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