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RSS Syndication
I've recently become very interested in syndicating my thoughts and information using RSS. Depending upon who you ask, RSS stands for different things, but I like Dave Winer's definition: Really Simple Syndication. I manage this site using Radio UserLand, one of the popular tools for managing weblogs, syndication, websites, and more.
I'll be adding pointers and thoughts concerning weblogs and syndication here, as I run across them.
Blog Feed Syndication Errors Corrected
Posted by johndilbeck on Thursday, December 29 2005 at 10:27 PM
Category: rss_syndication
I just realized, while in the process of completely overhauling my blogging and blog feed syndication infrastructure, that the blog feeds in my Syndicated News section were not being shown.
Instead, all you could see were errors. Apparently this had been going on since December 8, 2005, or thereabouts. I was unaware of it until earlier today.
The problem has been corrected, and most of the newsfeeds are being syndicated as expected. There are two or three that have additional errors and I'll work to correct them as soon as I can.
Blog readership jumped 58% in 2004
Posted by johndilbeck on Wednesday, January 5 2005 at 4:33 AM
Category: rss_syndication
It looks like I picked the right year to focus on adding more blogs and more RSS (also known as XML) feeds to my sites!
From the Pew Internet & American Life Project site:
By the end of 2004 blogs had established themselves as a key part of online culture. Two surveys by the Pew Internet & American Life Project in November established new contours for the blogosphere: 8 million American adults say they have created blogs; blog readership jumped 58% in 2004 and now stands at 27% of internet users; 5% of internet users say they use RSS aggregators or XML readers to get the news and other information delivered from blogs and content-rich Web sites as it is posted online; and 12% of internet users have posted comments or other material on blogs. Still, 62% of internet users do not know what a blog is.
If you're one of the 62% who don't know what a blog is or what RSS is all about, let me recommend the following sites to start learning about them.
RSS was co-developed by Dave Winer and you should read about Radio Userland, the product I use to manage this blog and nearly 5,000 pages on several websites. Also, be sure to read All about RSS.
Another good resource, and one that keeps getting better, is written by Ken Evoy. One of Ken's claims to fame is presiding over the company that developed Site Build It!, which I think is the best web design, hosting, and promotion service on the planet. I am one very happy customer. The product just keeps getting better. Visit the Site Build It! link first so you can see where he's coming from. Then, go read the information he wrote about RSS: Really Simple Syndication for his Site Build It! customers.
I spent several months in late 2004 developing my blogging infrastructure and staking my claim on several blogs at blogger.com. Now that the development work is mostly done, I can pass along newsworthy information to a wider audience faster and more efficiently than ever before.
Also, from the other side of the story, I use Radio Userland to read others' RSS feeds using the news aggregator that is built in. I subscribe to a little over 50 feeds and read them on a more-or-less daily basis. It's a lot easier to read the RSS feed and then click on a link that interests me than it is to remember to go to all 50 of those sites and try to find the new information.
I'm to the point now that I'd rather get newsletters and site updates in an RSS feed than in an email message or newsletter.
I have commented on quite a few blogs and I always meet an interesting person on the other end when he or she responds to my comments.
One of the most interesting recent developments -- for me at least -- has been the addition of RSS feeds to the Site Build It! customer forums. Now, instead of having to go to the forum every day, I added the RSS feed and I can easily read down the list of posts to see which ones I want to read and perhaps respond to. This is a very busy forum, and the addition of the RSS feed has shaved a couple of hours off my forum reading time every day.
I think we'll be seeing much more about blogs (also known as weblogs or journals), RSS, XML, and similar topics this year.
If you have a business with information that changes on a regular basis, you should look into blogs and RSS syndication.
Enabling RSS Syndication on most of my sites
Posted by johndilbeck on Wednesday, December 29 2004 at 9:32 AM
Category: rss_syndication
For months, I've been building sites that make posting news easy. It has actually taken away from posting news, but that's how it is when I am in development mode.
I'm using Coranto to build this news page and it is capable of creating RSS feeds. The feed has been turned on for months, but I'm just now getting around to showing you how to subscribe to it.
If what I just did works, you should see the orange XML graphic at the top of the news page. There should also be a graphic for adding the feed to your My Yahoo! page. Below that should be an animated headline graphic with the code for adding it to your site, should you want to do so. It's a nice, low tech way to keep up with the last five headlines from this site.
For the last three days, I've been working to add XML graphics to all my blogs, and to list all my blogs so they'll cross reference each other.
Why should I want so many blogs?
That's a good question. I'm interested in so many things that it is often confusing to visitors, so I decided to create multiple blogs so that each would be more tightly focused on a particular niche. This doesn't apply to my Ramblings and Musings blogs, where I might talk about just about anything.
The other blogs will be much more tightly focused and you can subscribe to one of them with a certain amount of assurance that I'll stay on topic. At least, I'll try very hard to stay on topic.
In the next couple of weeks or so, I'm going to write an article about what I've learned about doing all of this on my sites and blogs. It was a lot of work, but I think the investment will pay off as more people become aware of RSS, XML, feed readers, adding feeds to My Yahoo!, news and headline syndication, and all the other things you can do with RSS.
Personally, I'd rather get all my news from the feeds to which I subscribe in one block of time rather than get a lot of emailed newsletters. Email doesn't have the fun factor that it did a few years ago.
So, I'm going to be evolving some of my newsletters over to RSS format.
Email isn't dead, but things evolve and I think RSS is about to come into it's own.
Setting up my weblogs is complete
Posted by johndilbeck on Sunday, January 11 2004 at 3:32 PM
Category: rss_syndication
About two weeks ago, while working on one of my websites hosted by Site Build It!, I wanted to create a weblog for maintaining current information about telecommunications. While it is possible to create a weblog, of sorts, using Site Build It, it wasn't what I'd become accustomed to using Radio Userland or News Pro.
I decided it was time to investigate the state of the art concerning RSS and syndication, and that led me to the newest version of Radio Userland and the replacement for News Pro, Coranto. Both are heavily invested in RSS and XML and it was time to do some updating and building of new infrastructure before I could make progress on my original goal.
Now, I've installed Coranto on JohnDilbeck.com and DilbeckConsulting.com. I created a new weblog at blogger.com. I've updated some of the settings at johndilbeck.editthispage.com. I downloaded, installed, tested, and purchased a license for Radio Userland version 8. Now, I'm ready.
At this point, I create my weblogs (also called blogs) using Radio Userland, which automatically uploads to John L. Dilbeck's Radio Weblog and to John Dilbeck's Ramblings.
Then, it's a fairly quick procedure to copy the entries from my original Ramblings site to it's new host at http://JohnDilbeck.com/news/ where it's powered by Coranto, and to my blogger.com blog at John Dilbeck's Ruminations. I'm running most of the entries concurrently on all of the weblogs, and I don't know if I'll continue doing that or if each will take a direction of its own in the future.
Either way, the background work is completed. I have to add a few more pages to several sites where I'll use syndication via javascript to show portions of the blogs on pages that will be automatically updated with no extra effort on my part once they're in place.
In a couple of months, I'll know how this is working and how well it suits my original desires.
Now, it's time to turn my attention back to marketing and selling.
Experimenting with RSS and syndication
Posted by johndilbeck on Friday, January 2 2004 at 3:08 AM
Category: rss_syndication
I've been working on configuring my various sites so that I can edit one weblog with multiple categories and have it update my site at http://radio.weblogs.com/0133364/ which will be reflected to http://johndilbeck.editthispage.com/ and this site will update the blog entries on the home page and publish an XML file for RSS syndication.
The result of all of this can be seen on my test page at: http://dilbeckconsulting.com/news/jd-ramblings.html which uses a relatively simple syndication script at http://JohnDilbeck.com/ to read the XML file and create a javascript output file that can be included on any page on the Internet using a couple of lines of javascript. Still working on testing this at this time.
Most of it is working as I hoped it would, but the categories I select on my local Radio Userland Weblog page are not propagating to the other site or to the RSS file. I'll continue to work on this.
Eventually, I anticipate being able to edit one single weblog and have it publish to a variety of sites in different ways.
Today was a successful test of the concept. Now it needs refining. I'll be talking more about this as it develops.
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