The Simple Way to Add RSS Feeds to a Web Page
What is an RSS Feed?
RSS which stands for Really Simple Syndication is a web based format for a web content author to quickly publish web content such as blogs, news items, multimedia content and just about anything that can be termed as online content onto syndicated channels thereby allowing the content to appear on several websites and web services. You can check out the History of RSS here.
The feed comes in the form of standard formatted XML documents that can be displayed by a RSS feed reader which is capable of translating the XML and formatting the RSS feed into a user friendly format. A web browser like Firefox has a built in RSS feed reader and opening any RSS link from any website will be properly formatted in Firefox.
Why put RSS on Your Website?
You may want to have a steady stream of fresh content published on your website and RSS provides such capabilities. You may also want to share content from your favorite sources with your website. There could be endless reasons, it is just a matter of preference to you the website author.
How to add RSS Feeds to Your Website
There is of course the hard way and the easy way to add RSS feeds to our website. The hard way is try and develop your own RSS feed reader using either client side JavaScript or server side languages such as PHP or ASP.NET among others. Here is how to parse RSS feeds using PHP cURL.
There are also several scripts that you can download from several sources over the Internet and integrate them into your website. A quick search on Google will direct you to where you can find existing scripts. These scripts may not be simple to use as expected and there is no guarantee that they internal working will not change.
For this reason we have provided one of the most simple ways to add RSS feeds to a website and that is by using Google Ajax Feed API. You can have a RSS feed on your website by going to the Google Ajax Feed API web page and simply entering the keyword for the RSS feed you want to have on your website.
The API will then generate the piece of code which you can then copy and paste into the web pages that you want the RSS feed to appear. There is just one problem with using this service. If you do not know the title of the RSS Feed you want to add but you only know the URL of the feed you are not going to be able to add the RSS feed using the interface provided.
There is a way around this problem however. Simply pick any keyword and type it in the field provided and generate the code for that particular keyword. Once you have copied the code you can simply edit the generated code and replace the section with the generated link with the one you want to add. That is the simplest way to add RSS feeds to a web page.
References
Image and screen shot provided by the author
references Google AJAX Search and Feed Wizard https://code.google.com/apis/ajaxsearch/wizards.html
