Implementing RSS, things you HAVE to do on your site.

Are you considering implementing RSS on your website? If not, you should. This article is not going to cover what RSS is & how to implement it. We are assuming that you have already an RSS feed. What will be covered is implementing RSS on a website that will allow users to easily subscribe.

First up, the icon, the standard RSS icon is orange. As seen in Firefox, then only later adopted by Internet Explorer

Make it easy for visitors to subscribe to your RSS feeds. Firefox, Opera, probably IE7, Google Reader, Google Toolbar and many others make it really easy for users to subscribe to any RSS feed. If there is a feed available on your site the orange RSS icon will be found in the address bar (firefox) or your Google Toolbar’s RSS icon will also ‘light up’. This will allow you to subscribe to the current web pages’ RSS feed.

Now your wondering why you’ve got RSS but the icon is not lighting up. Look at Bizcommunity for example. Bizcommunity have so many feeds available now but they make their users think really hard & click click click just to get a simple RSS feed. RSS means Really Simple Syndication. Subscribing to RSS should be Really Simple then, shouldn’t it?

Seeing that I had to think to subscribe to the Bizcommunity RSS feed heres some free advice to Bizcommunity to make subscring to RSS really simple.

How you are currently required to subscribe to the BizCommunity RSS

1. Click on the RSS page.
2. Select your Region (South Africa)
3. Select your Topic (news)
4. Wait for page to reload (a bit of ajax can fix)
5. Select your Section (CRM)
6. Click ‘Get RSS feed’
7. Wait for page to reload
8. Right-Click ,Copy or Ctrl-C the link http://www.bizcommunity.com/rss/196/33.html
9. Paste the link into your RSS reader

Nine Steps to subscibe to something that should be Really Simple?.

How would your Web AddiCT(s); impelment RSS on Bizcommunity? Pretty easily, seeing that the Bizcommunity – South Africa – CRM page is http://www.bizcommunity.com/196/33.html and the same page’s RSS on Bizcommunity is http://www.bizcommunity.com/rss/196/33.html simply put the folliwng tag into the head of the page

(click image to see code)

The only differentiator between the two is the /rss/ bit. It would literally take minutes to write the code to do this on ALL bizcommunity pages that have an RSS feed available.

This will cause the RSS icons in your browser or Toolbar to come alive. Subscribing to Bizcommunity RSS after implementing the above would be:

1. Click the highlighted RSS icon in your browser

Would you prefer doing something in nine steps or one?