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Adding an RSS Feed to Your Blog or Web Site

We'll be launching a Web site and blog for a new client in the next couple of weeks. One of the things the client wanted was to keep their home page fresh by feeding snippets from their blog on a regular basis.

In doing some research into this, it seems there's a number of ways to accomplish this feat, including javascript, PHP, ASP and other solutions. In fact, I found a whole slew of ideas from the ever helpful Robin Good and his post RSS To HTML - How To Convert RSS Feeds Into Published Web Pages - A Mini-Guide.

As Good points out, javascript is perhaps the easiest method to implement an RSS feed on one's Web site, but comes with one caveat: since the javascript code you add doesn't actually include the text from the feed, the search bots don't pick up that content, just the visitor to your page. However, if you're the author of the blog and Web site, I don't see this as a major problem, since your blog is there to warm leads and feed them to your site for conversion.

Good offers a number of free and paid services in his post, and is worth checking out if you're still mulling your options.

We chose Feedburner's BuzzBoost, which is free for all Feedburner accounts, which is also free. Every day I'm more impressed with Feedburner's offerings, and my only concern is that I'm becoming too dependent on them, from their great feed options, their email signups, their feed options, their stats program and more. They were recently purchased by Google, however, so I guess they're not going anywhere.

Using BuzzBoost was easy. A couple of clicks on some configuration items and the javascript was generated. I just need to add the following to any Web page:

<script src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/FlyteWhatWorksOnline?format=sigpro" type="text/javascript" ></script><noscript><p>Subscribe to RSS headline updates from: <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/FlyteWhatWorksOnline"></a><br/>Powered by FeedBurner</p> </noscript>

And away we go:

If you're looking for a way to drive more traffic to your blog from your Web site or to keep your home page fresh with info, BuzzBoost or one of the other RSS to HTML options is just what you're looking for.

Rich Brooks
Feed Me, Seymour, Feed Me!

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