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How to Use RSS Feeds On Your
Site
Back To Tutorials Using RSS feeds for
your existing site can be a very good strategic tool you can use to
bring fresh content throughout your site. With RSS feeds, you can bring in fresh
content from other websites such as news and entertainment
sites. Free scripts like Drupal allow you to create forums,
blogs and
more with a ready made RSS feeds that you can use yourself for your
other existing pages, and hopefully other webmasters will use your RSS
feed on their site which will bring more links and visitors to your site. First if
you are new
to RSS feeds, you might be asking how do I use it, or what is it? If
you've done a search in the news sections of Yahoo or MSN you will see
on the right of the page in Yahoo a small orange box that says XML, or at the
bottom of a MSN news search you'll see a orange box that says RSS. The
MSN box leads to a page with an address you can copy and paste into a
RSS reader. The Yahoo box goes straight to the XML feed. The address
at the top of the browser would be the equivalent of the address MSN
asks you to paste in your RSS reader. Whenever
you use an XML feed for your site make sure you check for their usage
policy. Major sites or news organizations may object to their feed
being used for commercial reasons. Most of your average sized sites
will appreciate your using their RSS feeds as it gives their site free
links. The Process of
Using RSS for Free Content
Entertainment TV and Movie sites are great for getting free
content through their RSS feeds. We'll use the TVcrazy.net feed for an
example from one of my sites. Go the TVcrazy.net entertainment
blog section
http://www.tvcrazy.net/messageboard/ . Once there you'll see the orange XML box
at the bottom of the page. Pick it and right click on it and
click copy shortcut. For now paste the address in notepad for later
use. Now that you've got the
address, you'll need a script that will read the feed and have
it somewhere on your site. There is more than one script
available that would do the job, but let's use Carp at www.geckotribe.com/rss/carp/. Click on the download link at the top. Even though there is a paid
version the free version is completely adequate for our
purposes. It comes with
a read me file that explains the installation, which you should read, but we'll go over the
basics here. Here's another page that
might prove helpful as well http://www.tvcrazy.net/tvclassics/articles/rss_feed.htm. Once
you've installed Carp you are ready to get some
updating content for your site. During installation, the carpsetup.php
page should have created some code for you like this
<?php
require_once '/home/subscrib/public_html/yoursitename/carp/carp.php';
CarpCacheShow('http://example/xml_feed_address');
?> This of course is
php code. Change this line "CarpCacheShow('http://example/xml_feed_address');
" to show the XML address you acquired from TVcrazy.net or from
any feed address you prefer. If your site is written with php code just plug the code
created by your Carp installation into wherever you want it on your
php page and ftp it to your server. You should have a news feed coming
through your website. You can add lines like this " CarpConf('maxitems',5);
" to control the number of links shown at one time. Go to www.geckotribe.com/rss/carp/
for more settings. Now, what
if your page is html, as most likely will be? What I do is create a
php page with the above code, then I use a SSI Include to insert the
newsfeed into wherever I want it.
Carp also creates javascript for inserting code into a web page. There
are more tips here www.geckotribe.com/help/carp/
. Here is a page detailing the use of SSI include Movie-Poster.ws
also has an XML feed in the blog
section.
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