Tuesday, 26 October 2010

How News Aggregators / RSS Readers Work

1.) Websites summarize content in an RSS feed. (see FeedForAll a feed creation tool for help)
2.) Visitors download an RSS readers. There are generally two different types of RSS readers. The first kind of feed reader is a self contained program, the second kind of feed reader use a web browser. Many of the programs are free, but generally those that have a small fee are more robust.
3.) Visitors select the content and summaries they wish to view in a news aggregator or RSS reader. (news aggregator and rss reader are essentially interchangeable).
4.) Content is added to the news reader by entering the url or web address of the XML file. Sites that have an RSS feed available typically have an orange rss or xml graphic like this -. Clicking on the graphic will provide the url of the feed. Some RSS readers will auto-detect an xml file on a site indicating that a feed is available.
5.) Each time the feed is updated the content being viewed in the RSS reader indicates that there is new content. This insures that the customer has current information related to the topics they choose.
6.) Professionals estimate that RSS will soon rival email's popularity as a content delivery method.

Monday, 18 October 2010

How to make an RSS Feed?

Today, thanks to new "html scraping" services available to everyone, RSS feeds can be automatically generated for just about any web site, no matter what kind of layout, coding or language it is written in. In some situations, to create a standard RSS feed from any web page that does not have one may take less than a minute, while in other cases, where your needs for customization are higher, you may need to spend a little more time. 
Any web page today can be made to generate a RSS feed automatically. By the owner or, as it will increasingly happen, by someone else who wants to be informed in near-real-time of any news and content updates made on it.



FeedYes is the latest entry in this small group of online services which allow anyone to create/generate automatically a RSS feed for any web page. FeedYes, has really found a simple and truly effective route to simplify this task while providing good enough a solution to satisfy most needs.


While it is not perfect, it is quite good and fast at doing what it does. It is also rather simple to use, and once you have gone through it once, creating a second feed for another site, may take literally only a few seconds.
FeedYes is a three-step process that involves:

a) providing the URL of the page out of which an automatic RSS feed needs to be created,
b) indicating among the dynamic links found by FeedYes on the specifiied URL, which one is the first that refers to the content section that you are interested in (all web pages have different content sections in the same page, and you probably do not want to create a feed for the comments section or for the most recent articles appearing on the same site), 
c) indicating in the updated list of links FeedYes will spit out the last relevant link pertaining to your selected content section.
In this way, FeedYes isolates with good precision (you are the one effectively guiding) the specific content section you are interested in (say the Latest News) and creates an RSS feed for it.



Feed43 is an online service that converts standard web pages or XML documents to RSS feeds. Feed43 does so by extracting snippets of text or HTML by applying specific search patterns to the document from which the feed needs to be extracted. The search patterns help Feed43 understand exactly which content to grab from a page and which not. 
This allows for a much more precise control of what will be contained in a feed at the expense of the ease of use and accessibility of the overall product itself. For technically savvy users this is in fact an excellent and very reliable approach to RSS feed generation but for non-technical users Feed43 may scare off lots of users in a matter of minutes. 
In Feed43 the set of steps required to create a custom RSS feed for a web page that has none are as follows:

a) Identify the web page from which to generate a RSS feed.
b) Create a RSS feed on Feed43 pointing to that web page.
c) Define search patterns required.
d) Specify output templates required.
e) Generate the new RSS feed. 
All feeds created with Feed43 are "public", but optionally Feed43 also allows you to protect any newly created RSS feed with a password. The service is free.

This video shows you how to make an RSS feed both from coding and using freeware.Click the link below to view:
http://www.5min.com/Video/How-to-Make-An-RSS-Feed-197312754

Tuesday, 12 October 2010

What do I need to do to read an RSS Feed?


           News and current affairs have never been as dynamic as they are today. Gone are the days when we used to wait for the newest or hottest information across the globe. 

           Feed Reader or News Aggregator software allows you to grab the RSS feeds from various sites and display them for you to read and use.

           A variety of RSS Readers are available for different platforms. Some popular feed readers include Amphetadesk (Windows, Linux, Mac), FeedReader (Windows), and NewsGator (Windows - integrates with Outlook). There are also a number of web-based feed readers available. My Yahoo, Bloglines, and Google Reader are popular web-based feed readers.

          Once you have your Feed Reader, it is a matter of finding sites that syndicate content and adding their RSS feed to the list of feeds your Feed Reader checks. Many sites display a small icon with the acronyms RSS, XML, or RDF to let you know a feed is available.

          An RSS aggregator can come in various web-based forms which are easily accessible anywhere as long as there’s internet. Bloglines and Google Reader are good example of it. An aggregator can also be integrated in common computer applications like aggregating OPML files, email processing and documentation in which it functions as a plug-in that work from within a host application collecting and alerting the computer user of the newest RSS feeds. Nowadays, another type of RSS aggregator has come up and is referred to as media aggregator. It is just an RSS aggregator that not only collects written feeds but also those in audio and video formats. One can use a media aggregator to download, playback and even upload the feeds collected into a portable devise.

Monday, 4 October 2010

RSS. Introduction

Let me introduce an extremely useful theme about RSS Aggregators. To begin with, I'd like to explain, what RSS is. RSS is an acronym for Really Simple Syndication and Rich Site Summary. RSS is an XML-based format for content distribution. An RSS feed is a set of instructions residing on the computer server of a Web site, which is given upon request to a subscriber’s RSS reader, or aggregator. The feed tells the reader when new material—such as a news article, a blog posting, or an audio or a video clip—has been published on the Web site. The aggregator monitors any number of sites’ feeds.