Most webmasters appear to know by now that RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and that it is a means for dynamically delivering content to PC’s and websites. However, many do not appear quite as certain how to implement RSS for their own sites, nor which sponsors provide RSS feeds. Let’s try to shed some light.

If you are running a blog, you don’t have to worry about the technicalities of RSS feeds, because your blogging software produces feeds for your site automatically, updating the necessary files each time you add, delete or change your content. But if you want feeds on a site which doesn’t have such support, you will need a script like Feed For All. No matter how your feeds are generated, validate them! These are the feeds that your visitors may be adding to their desktops and when you ping other sites, they pick up. If your feeds are unreadable or garbled, all that potential for repeat visitors and traffic goes to waste.

The output from these scripts mostly isn’t hard to make sense of, but quite obviously it isn’t in a format which can simply be included on a page. So at the very least you need something called a parser to identify the tags in the feed and translate them into an HTML-compatible format. WordPress and other blogging software come complete with simple parsers. Sites without parsers will need a standalone parser such as RSS2HTML.

Now let’s get WordPress-specific. I wrote “at the very least” just now because with a simple parser, the contents of a single feed are (usually) displayed dynamically. On a busy site anything dynamic can be bad news, so you will usually be better off with an aggregator. Within WordPress, the job of an aggregator is to periodically collect content from one or more feeds and turn it into posts. If you are using a cacheing plugin on your site, that gives you almost the loading advantages of totally static pages. Using multiple feeds also goes some way, particularly if you rely heavily on such feeds, to help prevent you being penalized by the search engines for having unoriginal content. That said, imported feeds should never be all you display: add your own material too.

One of the most popular RSS plugins for WordPress is FeedWordPress. Installation is almost normal: unzip, FTP feedwordpress.php to your wp-content/plugins directory and then activate the plugin from inside your WordPress admin. But you will also see an OPTIONAL directory after the unzip. I strongly recommend that you go to wp-includes on your server and rename rss-functions.php to something like rss-functions.php.old and then upload rss-functions.php from that OPTIONAL directory.

After you have activated the plugin, go to Options –> Syndication and choose your settings. There aren’t any nasty traps, although you may want to experiment with some to discover the differences. Then over to Links –> Syndicated and enter the URL of a feed you wish to include in your site. This is when the fun starts.

For reasons best known to themselves, a lot of sponsors require you to have the detective skills of Sherlock Holmes to find their RSS codes. The next issue is validation and once you have entered a URL, on the next screen you should see a yellow arrow which you click to have the feed validated.

I prefer to right click the arrow so that the validation opens in a new window. However you proceed, unfortunately, all too often you will get a response like this:

There are a number of possible responses and unfortunately from adult sponsors’ feeds you will get very few “Congratulations! This is a valid RSS feed.”. The worst result is when the validator cannot read the feed at all: don’t waste your time with these feeds. Others you can try and see what happens. When you merely get warnings, in my experience the feeds will work perfectly well about half the time (interpretation of RSS standards is far from written in stone). The likely result of a response like the one above is that some of the fields will not appear on your page, but there is only one way to find out.

What people providing feeds are supposed to do, apart from forming their feeds properly, is to use only tags which are commonly recognized. Otherwise the only way to display such feeds properly is to use a parser which was either written for them, or which can be told what their special tags are intended to display. If you are a truly dedicated geek, you can likely handle that without too much trouble, but all the possible solutions are beyond the scope of this article.

So the bottom line is that apart from the feeds which fail totally, you will likely want to test the rest (which, by the way, is often the only way you can see what the feeds will actually look like on your site). So you either click on Use this feed or back up and try another.

Some feeds will destroy your site layout, so you must test after each addition. Before you can do that, for the feeds to appear on your site, go to http://www.yourdomain.com/wp-content/update-feeds.php, select the newly-installed feed and click on Update. A few seconds later you will get a message that the feed was successfully updated (or not). Now check your site to see how it looks. If all is well and you like the feed, fine, move on to the next. But should you want to delete it, go back to Options –> Syndication and in the Syndicated Sites section, select the feed you wish to delete. After clicking delete, you will have a choice as to whether or not to delete the posts which were imported. Usually you will choose that option.

If a third of all the feeds you test both work and look good on your site, consider yourself lucky. Getting them installed can be a very frustrating and time-consuming business, the benefit being that once you have a selection up and running, your site will be updated automatically with new content, several times a day. If you post your own material, it can blend seamlessly with the syndicated content without any further preparation.

Well not quite. Dynamic, single-feed parsers update each time a visitor loads your page. But aggregators generate posts and not pages, therefore they must be told when to carry out updates. You could update manually a few times a day (using the method above), but a cron job is better solution. Instructions for that, along with alternatives, are detailed in the plugin’s Read-Me.

Click here for a listing of Adult Feeds