Web Feed Directory – Dr. 5z5 Open Feed Directory Official Blog

Common questions about RSS, feeds, syndication, namespaces, extensions, and podcasting.

• What is a Web Feed?

I have heard the phrase web feed but I’m not really clear on what it is. Can you explain what a web feed is?

When people use the term web feed it is typically used synonymously with an RSS feed, but not always. The phrase web feeds can also refer to data feeds or XML feeds. Both data feeds and XML feeds might use a different format (tag structure) than RSS. If a website is asking you to submit your web feed it is safe to assume they will accept RSS. If a website is providing you a web feed to display content on your website it may or may not be in the RSS format.

• Is RSS Only Available Through a Computer?

No, many mobile devices all support RSS feeds.

• How Do you Monitor and Track a Feeds Popularity?

There are a number of ways to track an RSS feeds popularity. Unfortunately because of the nature of syndication the tracking is not always reliable or accurate. Use the followng to track the consumption of RSS feeds.

1. Tracking URLs
2. Transparent Gif
3. Web logs
4. The 3rd Party Services (like FeedBurner, Pheedo, FeedCraft, MeasureMap, SiteMeter, Dr.5z5)
5. Use Unique URLs

The best tracking will result when a combination of tracking methods are employed. More information on tracking RSS feeds.

• Is There any Free Way to Create RSS Feeds?

While it might be difficult to locate rss software free of charge, you can always hand create an RSS feed. There is a step by step tutorial at Make RSS Feeds that will walk you through the process of hand creating RSS feeds.

If you find the process cumbersome you may need to buy software that will handle all the encoding for you. Often the time saved by using the software, the software will quickly pay for itself.

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About the Author:
Sharon Housley manages marketing for FeedForAll http://www.feedforall.com software for creating, editing, publishing RSS feeds and podcasts. In addition Sharon manages marketing for NotePage http://www.notepage.net a wireless text messaging software company.

Just as optimizing an HTML web page will increase exposure, so too will an RSS feed that is properly optimized and promoted. Use these simple tips to improve your web feed exposure. There are a number of different things that you can do to use RSS feeds to improve your search engine ranking.

RSS Feed Tips to Help Search Engine Optimization
RSS feeds are a great communication medium, and when properly managed, web feeds can bring in significant Internet traffic. RSS feeds should contain compelling themed content with episodic titles that are united in common broad theme. Use RSS feeds as an online marketing and search engine optimization tool. Just as optimizing an HTML web page will increase exposure, so too will an RSS feed that is properly optimized and promoted. Use these simple tips to improve your web feed exposure.

Channel Title
The channel title in your RSS feed is one of the most important aspect. The channel title should be keyword rich and contain information related to the general theme of the RSS feed. In order to maximize compatibility with RSS readers, it is best not to include any HTML in the channel title. The channel title is a website visitors first glimpse at the RSS feed, so its important to make an impression and attract the interest of casual browsers. Additionally, many of the RSS feed directories and search engines use the information contained in the RSS feed’s channel title and description to index the feed. In order for the feed to be properly categorized, it is important that the information contained in these fields be relevant to the contents contained in the feed. If included at all, the blog, brand, or company name should be at the end not the beginning of the RSS feed channel title.

Channel Description
The channel description field provides an opportunity to expand on the broad theme of the RSS feed. The channel description should contain related keywords and phrases, but it should be written to capture the interest of readers not search engine spiders. HTML can be used to decorate and emphasize specific text in the description field. In summation the channel description should provide a compelling overview of the RSS feed’s contents.

RSS Feed Item Titles
The item titles should be 50-75 characters with spaces. In order to increase readability and compatibility with news readers, the RSS feed item titles should not be encoded with any HTML. Think of an RSS feed item title in the same way that you would a webpage title. The RSS feed item title is your opportunity to capture the interest of your reader. Really an RSS feed item title is nothing more than a headline. The most effective item titles are calls to action that grab the readers attention. Include pertinent keywords or keyword phrases in the items title and this will help any individuals doing deep feed searches for specific content.

Optimize RSS
Optimize all aspects of the web feed. While the feed should be optimized for search engines, using the same techniques a webmaster uses on a website, the optimization should not be at the readers expense. The content in an RSS feed is often what leads readers to click or not click through. Readers will judge RSS feeds on the quality of the content. This means that grammar and punctuation do matter. Consistent grammatical errors will reduce the writers credibility and the number of subscribers.

Anchor Text
Using RSS feeds, publishers have the unique opportunity to determine the anchor text that will be used to link to internal website pages. RSS feeds are often syndicated, and even more often compelling feed items will often be re posted by other publishers. With that in mind, when including links back to a website in the item description field, use anchor text that is a relevant keyword or phrase. Anchor text is one factor that search engines use in determining a website’s ranking for specific keywords and phrases.

Number of Feed Items
Routinely prune the old items in an RSS feeds and archive the content contained in the feed to ensure that feeds load quickly in RSS readers. If you are using a third party service to host your feeds, keep in mind that FeedBurner will truncate or not display RSS feeds that it finds to be too large.

Heading Tags
If you are displaying an RSS feed as an HTML web page it makes sense to use H1 or H2 tags to display the RSS feed’s item titles. If the RSS feed is optimized, the website will benefit from the keyword emphasis by using the header tags.

RSS Feed URLs
As with HTML web pages, the URLs contained in an RSS feed should contain keywords if possible. Use hyphens not underscores, to separate the keywords in the RSS feed’s URL.

Add an Image
Consider adding an image to your RSS feed to enhance its appearance in an RSS reader. The image should be no large 144×400 and it is recommended that the image be 88×31. Most RSS readers will display the feed image above the feed contents, this is a great way to reinforce brand and establish brand recognition. Additionally you can add images to the RSS feed’s description field. In all cases, it is important that the full URL to the image be referenced, because if the feed is syndicated it will report a broken image if its attempting to retrieve it locally.

Some of the RSS feed directories use the feed’s website favorite icons to flag the RSS feed. The RSS feeds containing a favorite icon stand out from others in the directories so be sure to include a favicon in the domain’s root directory. RSS feeds are a great marketing tool, but like web pages, they must be optimized so that you can reap the full marketing benefits. Taking the time to implement some basic optimization tips will steadily increase your RSS feeds exposure.

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RSS feeds should be segmented into categories and information sources. For example you might have an RSS feed for a forum, a blog, a newsletter, if you sell various products you might have different feeds for each product or product line. Additionally you might have support feeds or a FAQ feed for each product or product family.

Webmasters might also group feed discounts or coupon deals, offers, press releases, or job postings. Bottom line be createive use RSS feeds for all aspects of communication, but match the theme of each feed so that all the content in a feed is related.

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Many companies now struggle with RSS feed promotion. Use these tips to improve the consumption of your RSS feeds.

1. Make it easy to subscribe.
2. Submit feeds to popular RSS search engines using tools like RSS Submit.
3. Optimize the feed using standard SEO techniques.
4. Promote in newsletters, email signatures, and forums.
5. Include a badge on the website.
6. Use autodiscovery.

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History of RSS
RSS was first invented by Netscape. They wanted to use an XML format to distribute news, stories and information. Netscape refined the version of rss and then dropped it. Userland Software to control of the specficiation and continued to develop it releasing a newer version. A non-commercial group picked up RSS at the same time and based on their interpretation of the Netscape’s original concept of RSS they too released a new version. UserLand was not happy with the non-commercial version and continued development of their own version of RSS (Really Simple Syndication), eventually UserLand released RSS v2.

Another View of the History of RSS
What is the history of RSS?
The history of RSS can be traced back to 1997, and the creation of Resource Description Framework. Resource Description Framework is also known as RDF. RDF was created by a man named, Ramanathan V. Guha. RDF is similar to RSS.

The mark up language RDF, was used to store metadata. Metadata is basically information about information, for example if there is an article or a news report, the metadata would be the author, the language, the copyright and all of the information related to the article or news report. In 1999 Netscape created a standard named RSS version 0.90. This was the beginning of RSS as we know it today. Dan Libby, an employee of Netscape improved version 0.90 and released RSS version 0.91. Dave Winer, an employee at Userland also created a new version of RSS. He too named it, RSS version 0.91, creating confusion, because the two versions of RSS were named the same but the specifications were slightly different. Unfortunately this was the beginning of a trend.

Netscape’s RSS team abandoned RSS development, because it was dubbed too complicated for what they were trying to accomplish. Meanwhile Rael Dornfest at O’Reily released RSS version 1.0. The new specification by O’Reily was based on the RDF standard rather than the previous versions of RSS. RSS 1.0 was incompatible with previous RSS versions. The specification caused significant marketplace confusion because though RSS 1.0 had the same purpose as the 0.90 series, the specifications were very different. In an attempt to minimize further confusion Userland named their next release RSS version 2.0. RSS 2.0 is very similar to the 0.9 series and is generally considered compatible, while RSS Version 1.0 remains very different.

Harvard Law accepted responsibility for the RSS 2.0 specification because Dave Winer of Userland, found that competitors were leary of using the standard he had a hand in creating. In order for the specification to be endorsed by all it was donated to a non-commercial third party, Harvard Law school. Harvard Law is now responsible for the future development of the RSS 2.0 specification. What is XML? XML or eXtensible Markup Language is a mark up language.

RSS History

There are a lot of folk legends about the evolution of RSS.

Here’s the scoop, the sequence of events in the life of RSS, as told by the designer of most of the formats.

• scriptingNews format, designed by DW at UserLand. 12/27/97.
• RSS 0.90, designed by Netscape, for use with my.netscape.com, which also supported scriptingNews format. The only thing about it that was RDF was the header, otherwise it was plain garden-variety XML. 3/15/99.
• scriptingNews 2.0b1, designed by DW at UserLand, enhanced to include all the features in RSS 0.90. Privately DW urged Netscape to adopt the features in this format that weren’t present in RSS 0.90. 6/15/99.
• RSS 0.91, designed by Netscape, spec written by Dan Libby, includes most features from scriptingNews 2.0b1. “We’re trying to move towards a more standard format, and to this end we have included several tags from the popular <scriptingNews> format.” The RDF header is gone. 7/10/99.
• UserLand adopts RSS 0.91, deprecates scriptingNews formats. 7/28/99.
• The RSS team at Netscape evaporates.
• UserLand’s RSS 0.91 specification. 6/4/00.
• RSS 1.0 published as a proposal, worked on in private by a group led by Rael Dornfest at O’Reilly. Based on RDF and uses namespaces. Most elements of previous formats moved into modules. Like 0.90 it has an RDF header, but otherwise is a brand-new format, not related to any previous format. 8/14/00.
• RSS 0.92, which is 0.91 with optional elements, designed by DW at UserLand. 12/25/00.
• RSS 0.93 discussed but never deployed. 4/20/01.
• MetaWeblog API merges RSS 0.92 with XML-RPC to provide a powerful blogging API. 3/14/02.
• RSS 2.0, which is 0.92 with optional elements, designed by DW, after leaving UserLand. MetaWeblog API updated for RSS 2.0. While in development, this format was called 0.94. 9/18/02.
• RSS 2.0 spec released through Harvard under a Creative Commons license. 7/15/03.

On July 15, 2003, UserLand Software transferred ownership of its RSS 2.0 specification to the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School.

serLand is a leading developer of tools that produce and consume RSS, and originator of the RSS 2.0 specification. The specification, which was previously copyrighted, is now licensed under terms that allow it to be customized, excerpted and republished, using the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike license.

The UserLand disclaimer and copyright is archived on the Harvard website; however it now no longer applies to the RSS 2.0 specification. Since UserLand specifically disclaimed ownership of the format that the specification describes, no transfer took place on the format itself.

An independent advisory board has been formed to broaden the public understanding of the uses and benefits of RSS, and to guide developers who create RSS applications. The initial members of the board are Dave Winer, Berkman fellow and author of the RSS 2.0 spec; Jon Udell, lead analyst for InfoWorld and columnist for the O’Reilly Network; and Brent Simmons of Ranchero Software, author of NetNewsWire, a leading RSS-based application.

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Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)

An Internet protocol which uses encryption and SSL secure sockets layer in order to supply data confidentially for service and data integrity amid a client and a server transaction with Internet security and privacy.

Secure sockets layer (SSL) can also, as an option, provide peer entity authentication amid the client and the server with secure SSL validation of digital certificates. SSL is layered below HTTP and above a transport protocol (TCP). S

SL is independent of the application it summarizes and any other higher level protocol can layer on top of SSL transparently.

SSL has two layers:

1. SSL’s lower layer, the SSL Record Protocol, is coated on top of the transport protocol and encapsulates higher level protocols.
2. SSL’s upper layer supplies asymmetric cryptography for server authentication, which is verifying the secure server’s digital identity to the client with digital ID signatures or certs with client authentication (the process of verifying the client’s identity to the server).

It also allows them to negotiate a symmetric encryption algorithm and secret session key, used for data confidentiality, prior to the transmission or receiving of data by the application protocol. A keyed hash offers data integrity service for data that is encapsulated.

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In Science We Trust!

We run SETI@home on our server cluster when the web site goes idle.

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All RSS feeds must conform to XML v1.0 standards so lets take a quick look at XML Basics.

Extensible Mark-up Language or XML is a specification developed by the W3C. XML is a pared-down version of SGML or Standard Generalised Mark-Up Language, designed especially for Web documents. XML uses tags that describe the contents of the field. It is very similar to html but unlike html it allows designers to create their own customised tags, enabling the definition, transmission, validation, and interpretation of data between applications and between organizations.

The design goals for XML were:

1. XML shall be straightforwardly
2. Usable over the Internet.
3. XML shall support a wide variety of applications.
4. XML shall be compatible with SGML.
5. It shall be easy to write programs which process XML documents.
6. The number of optional features in XML is to be kept to the absolute minimum.
7. XML documents should be human-legible and reasonably clear.
8. The XML design should be prepared quickly.
9. The design of XML shall be formal and concise.
10. XML documents shall be easy to create.

• The XML Specifications

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