RSS Feed Display - The Input Side of RSS Feeds

Copyright 2006 Richard Keir

The ongoing buzz about RSS feeds seems to still be almost matched by ongoing confusion. After a couple years of working with both sides of the RSS equation, site feeds and RSS feed display, I've come to think of the differences in a fairly simple way that may get rid of some of the confusion.

Try thinking about RSS in terms of Input and Output. Visualize your site as the center point. On the one hand you have what comes to your site and does something there. This is the Input to your site. On the other hand, you have what leaves your site, and that's your site Output.

Here's two quick examples. Your incoming links from other sites are Input for your site. The links you have on your site that go to other sites are Output. Your visitors are Input. Hopefully the visitor Output involves something good for you like going to an order processor.

RSS Feeds Display is the input side of RSS from the point of view of your site. Essentially you are bringing in RSS feeds and displaying items from those as content on your site. That's the RSS feed as content Input.

An on-site RSS feed, containing items from your site intended to be used off-site would be the RSS Output side. That, however, will have to wait for a later article.

Since everybody has their pet interpretation of what RSS means, I'm going to ignore that. But to see more clearly what a feed is and how it works, let's take a brief look at just what's in one.

Just so you know, a variety of feed formats and coding structures exist, but let's skip that too. Just like a web page has the underlying html (or an equivalent code type) that tells the browser what to do and how to display the page, the code used in RSS feeds defines the different pieces of content and tells a feed reader or another program what each thing is and therefore how or where it can be used in an output display (or ignored).

Every RSS feed has a header section that provides information about the feed. Some have a lot, others fairly little, but normally at least the name of the feed (the feed title), a link to the site providing the feed, a description of the overall feed content, the language used, a copyright statement, and a date time stamp of the last time the feed was built are included.

Then the individual feed items begin. The minimal content is the item title, the link to the item, a description and the date published. Other items such as a guid (an identifier which can allow feed readers to ignore previously read items), category entries (which are similar to and used like technorati tags to categorize the feed item) and a variety of other elements depending on the feed source and purpose can be included. In almost all cases, for display, all we'd be interested in are the title, link and description.

The descriptions in the items can be short segments of text or the full content of a page, article, news item, blog entry, etc. Pictures can be included and some descriptions are even loaded with html code to control how the item is displayed (this seems to be more common with descriptions containing images). And, of course, some feeds contain ads of various kinds. However, ads are not usually embedded in the item description so this is not normally a concern for displaying on your site (but, remember to always check the items displaying on your page to make sure you want to keep displaying items from any particular feed).

Each item in the feed has the same structure. The uniformity is what allows feed readers and scripts to consistently handle RSS feed displays.

There are several ways to display feeds, usually php or other server side scripts or javascripts. RSS feed items displayed via javascript are generally not a good choice if you want the search engine bots to be able to read the content. Other scripts will output the content as part of the page (usually updating each time the page is reloaded) or create static html pages. These latter kinds of feed item displays can be as easily read by bots as any html content.

You can find a variety of free and paid options for displaying RSS feeds. If you are a tech type and enjoy working with scripts some of the free options may be a great choice. While they can do an excellent job, they tend to be slightly to seriously complex and, in my view, somewhat feature deficient. Of course, the more complex they are, the more features they tend to have. Paid options also vary significantly and I'd encourage you to check out them thoroughly. Be clear about what you want to do and make sure any paid script solution will do what you want in a way that works for you.

Using RSS for content (the Input side of RSS feeds) can be a valuable addition to your site from an SEO perspective and provide your visitors with useful information - particularly if you choose feeds tightly related to your site theme and mix the feed content to provide your own unique combination of related news. However, note that word "addition". These days using a feed or feeds for a significant part (or all) of your site content is unlikely to gain you much favor with the search engines and may get you dropped from the index faster than you got added.

The point is that smart, moderate use of feeds still gives you the twin advantages of regularly updating content for bots on otherwise static pages and more themed information for your visitors. And that's what the RSS Feeds display deal is all about.