Implementing RSS (Really Simple Syndication) can be aided by an understanding of the terms relating to RSS. Learn the ABCs of RSS....

A - AutoDiscovery

Auto Discovery is code that is inserted into the header of an HTML web page, which then indicates to readers that an RSS feed is available for the content.

B - Blogs

Blogs are web logs that are updated regularly, usually on a daily basis. Blogs generally contain information related to a specific topic.

ABCs of RSS Feeds

I have heard many a blogger say that blogging fills a need. While blogging provides a humanizing effect on news and journaling, it also opens a window into personal lives. The details shared in blogs were once only available to a select group of friends, and while blogging has become common place, it has risks that should not be ignored.

Cyberstalking is a new phenomenon that allows anonymous online stalkers to prowl for victims. Online bloggers traditionally provide personal details about their lives. As a result, many women that blog are becoming victims. Most people are concerned about children on the Internet and set up rigorous posting guidelines for children, adolescents, and teenagers, but few adults heed the warnings and often do not consider that they too can be targeted.

The Dangers of Blogging

Website design can be elusive to even creative individuals. Sadly some webmasters do not realize their incompetence and they post websites that have grainy graphics and turgid colors. If you are one of these webmasters and have seen the error of your ways, consider this. Your website is a sales tool. A professional layout and design can significantly increase sales and conversion rates, gaining you customers. Businesses can greatly benefit from a professional and unforgettable logo that sets them apart from their competition. Logos are not just fancy graphics that adorn websites or letterhead, logos are a representation of a businesses' philosophy. Logos are a critical component of brand development.

Building an Image with a Logo

Sound effects are artificially created or enhanced sounds that are used in artistic works to emphasize or express an action, mood, or feeling. Sound effects were initially used in radio dramas, but can be observed more often today in podcasts, theater, films, and television shows. They are often synchronized with certain actions, such as a door's slamming being accompanied by the appropriate noise. Sound effects may also be used in the background of a scene to create anticipation or other emotions.

Production and Use of Sound Effects

Academia has embraced RSS as a means to educate, but scrutinizing how educational institutions are using RSS feeds in their daily routines show RSS is utilized can vary across different industries.


1. Share Resources
Academics are using social bookmarking websites to share quality websites that relate to their area of expertise with colleagues and students.

Academia Adds RSS Feeds to Their Teaching Tool Kit

The use of technology can define the success or failure of a business. This is no more evident than in the real estate industry. Realtors who flocked to the latest technologies, adopted them, and applied them in order to enhance and sell property, are still prospering.

Using the latest technology, realtors can show a home's finest attributes via Video Podcasting. Video Podcasting is a compelling distribution channel that allows realtors to reach a large audience while showcasing a property's best features.

Tips for Real Estate Video Feeds

Sound effects are an important part of entertainment, often comprising an integral part of vidoes, games, podcasts, movies, and animations. However, the costs and conditions associated with acquiring and using sound effects may be prohibitive for many rising creators of media. Thankfully, royalty free tracks offer an alternative to media producers on a budget.

Royalty free sound effect tracks can be used by anyone. Not only are they legal to use, but in most cases they may be edited, looped, or manipulated by overlaying additional tracks to create another sound.

Royalty Free Tracks

You have an RSS feed and you have worked hard to get the word out. According to your logs you have subscribers! Now the hard part: how to retain the subscribers to your RSS feed. Follow these simple steps to insure that your subscriber base will grow.


13 Tips to Maintaining an RSS Feed Subscriber Base

More and more companies are using RSS as a means to communicate, so having an RSS feed that is professional and well polished will help differentiate your company from your competition. What makes an RSS feed professional? Follow these simple steps to polish your RSS feed and take it to the next level...

Create Professional RSS Feeds

It has been said that in October of 2004 a Google search returned less than 6,000 results for the term podcasting. Today, a similar search yields more than 857,000 results. Like the blogging phenomenon, podcasting has come out of nowhere and attracted an enthusiastic following.

While some traditional radio talk shows have begun providing podcasts of their regularly-scheduled broadcasts, the bulk of the podcasts that have cropped up tend to be independent broadcasters who have a fascination with technology. As a result, some podcasts are a little rough around the edges. Nonetheless, it is clear that the technology provides a significant opportunity and potential. Even nay-sayers believe that podcasting is more than a passing fad.

How Podcasting Works

Podcast Promotion
Podcasting is a great new medium, but creating a podcast is only half of the work. Promoting a podcast is equally critical to it's success.

1. Educate the Public.
It is important to remember that podcasting is a relatively new technology and not everyone understands or knows what podcasting is. It is particularly important to educate users if your audience is not technical. Not only is it important to explain what a podcast is, but it is equally important to explain how your podcast will help listeners. Instruction on how users can listen to podcasts should also be included.

Tips to Promoting Podcasts

Nothing really polishes a podcast more than background music or theme music. In the music world, these music segments are referred to as intros and extros. While many enjoy streaming Internet Audio and recording songs they like over the Internet, these songs cannot legally be used in a podcast.

How and Where to Locate Podsafe Music

Security Implications Related to RSS.

As RSS gains momentum security fears loom large. As publishers are quickly finding innovative uses for RSS feeds, hackers are taking notice. The power and extendibility of RSS in its simplest form is also its achilles heel.

RSS Feed Security

Question: Are there any size limitations to podcasts?

Answer: There are no maximums or minimums when it comes to podcast size. Obviously, the larger files might intimidate listeners with a slow connection. Podcasts can be successful at any size, generally wise podcasters balance the file size and the quality of their show.

Podcasting Quiz

You should not have to look far to find content or new ideas for your podcast show. Look to your daily sources to find fodder and ideas for new podcasting segments.
1. News
Both online and offline sources, from the Associated Press to CNN, contain a deluge of news item each day. Scan headlines on a regular basis to see what catches your eye. In addition, explore your niche market to find any industry-specific news portals that may warrant monitoring.

Where Do You Find Content for Your Podcast?

As the Internet matures, users and governments are struggling to manage controversial issues. Lets face it, the Internet did not exist when the US copyright laws were written;let us not forget, while many countries respect copyright laws, the Internet is global without a governing body. There are not only different laws, rules and regulations, but also jurisdiction issues.

What is Fair Use?

Sound effects are an important part of entertainment, often comprising an integral part of vidoes, games, podcasts, movies, and animations. However, the costs and conditions associated with acquiring and using sound effects may be prohibitive for many rising creators of media. Thankfully, royalty free tracks offer an alternative to media producers on a budget.

Royalty free sound effect tracks can be used by anyone. Not only are they legal to use, but in most cases they may be edited, looped, or manipulated by overlaying additional tracks to create another sound.

Royalty Free Tracks

Cyberstalking is a new phenomenon that allows anonymous online stalkers to prowl for victims. Online bloggers traditionally provide personal details about their lives. As a result, many women that blog are becoming victims. Most people are concerned about children on the Internet and set up rigorous posting guidelines for children, adolescents, and teenagers, but few adults heed the warnings and often do not consider that they too can be targeted.

Females, in particular, should be cautious when circumnavigating the blogosphere. If you are a blogger or contemplating an online journal, consider these tips to protecting your identity:

The Dangers in Blogging

Publicize your RSS feed.
There is little argument from webmasters and publishers that RSS brings in traffic. So once you've made the leap and created a feed, how do you tell your visitors about the feed?

1. Submit Your RSS Feed to RSS Directories.
This will not only increase the number of sites linking to your website and increasing your link popularity, it will also increase the RSS feeds profile. A number of RSS search engines and RSS directories exist that allow you to freely submit RSS feeds.

Publicize Your RSS Feed

In addition to making your RSS feed available to your visitors for use with their RSS Feed Reader, as a webmaster you may also want to make the same feed available on your website for viewing with a regular web browser.

There are several ways to do this, some have advantages or disadvantages compared to others. The best solution is one where the webpage is automatically updated on-the-fly, is easily spidered by search engine robots, and easy to implement.

Free RSS to HTML Tool

Before we begin, there are a few things you'll need to verify with whoever your web hosting provider is. First, does your web server support PHP?


Second, what is your FTP server?


Third, what are your login credentials for your FTP server?

Configure RSS2HTML Script

Learn the intricacies of RSS feeds and podasting in the RSS Learning Center.

RSS Educational Articles

Great collection of Audio Recording Video Tutorials

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.


RSS Feed Tips to Help Search Engine Optimization

The first step is to run the program, so find your shortcut for FeedForAll and double click on it.
When you first run the program, you'll see this splash screen.

If you would like to purchase the software, left click on the Buy Now button.

If you've already purchased, please watch our FeedForAll registration tutorial.

Podcast Setup Video Tutorial

Complete database about RSS Feeds - RSS Knowledgebase

Merge multiple RSS feeds into a single feed - RSSMesh

Frequently Asked Questions and Answers about RSS - RSS FAQs

You have an RSS feed and you have worked hard to get the word out. According to your logs you have subscribers! Now the hard part: how to retain the subscribers to your RSS feed. Follow these simple steps to insure that your subscriber base will grow.

1. Original Content
A consistent stream of original content will do well to earn subscribers loyalty. The best RSS feeds provide content that is compelling and unique. Do not rehash existing content, look for a unique angle or spin if you wish to cover something that is hot in the blogosphere.

13 Tips to Maintaining an RSS Feed Subscriber Base

For those of you who already know what XML namespaces are, and just want to know how FeedForAll supports them, pleases skip ahead to the Extensions in FeedForAll Section.

For the rest, this section is for you. First of all, what are RSS Extensions? Well, technically they are called XML Namespaces, but we will call them RSS Extensions,, or just Extensions, in most of this document, mainly because we will be talking about how namespaces specifically apply to RSS feeds, and extends their capabilities.


RSS Namespaces

Simple Steps to Create Auto Discovery Code:

1. Enter the title of the RSS feed.
2. Enter the URL of the actual RSS feed.
3. Paste the generated code into the head tag of the HTML web page.

RSS Autodiscovery

Step by Step ... How to include a PowerPoint in a Podcast Using FeedForAll

PowerPoint Podcasting Tutorial

The sql2rss.php script allows you to easily create rss feeds from SQL databases. The script currently supports the conversion of MySQL databases to RSS feeds.


SQL2RSS

The RSS specification allows you to create and use your own custom elements (tags) in any RSS feed, by declaring your own namespace. Doing this is 100% in line with the RSS specification and the feed will validate. However, you should have a specific and well-planned reason to do so. No RSS readers, or other RSS processing applications will be able to use your custom info for any purpose.

Adding elements (tags) would typically only be used in an in-house solution where the writing application and the reading application have prior knowledge of the new tags.

Personal Namespace Extension

RSS Feeds
RSS also known as rich site summary or real simply syndication, arrived on the scene a number of years ago, but was only recently embraced by webmasters as a means to effectively syndicate content. RSS Feeds provide webmasters and content providers an avenue to provide concise summaries to prospective readers. Thousands of commercial web sites and blogs now publish content summaries in an RSS feed. Each item in the feed typically contains a headline; article summary and link back to the online article.

Benefit to the Webmaster
As the web has become more crowded webmasters have been striving to provide fresh and up to date content for their website visitors. Many webmasters have discovered they can easily utilize the information in RSS feeds to provide fresh web content.

Understanding RSS Feeds

Podcasting content comes in a wide variety of shapes and sizes. Businesses are finding many different and creative ways of incorporating podcasts into their business strategies and marketing plans.

Here are just some of the various types of content that businesses are turning into podcasts...

1. Audio Books

Books that are "read" aloud are no longer embraced only by the visually impaired. For example, commuters who want to make the most of their travel time have long embraced books-on-tape. The podcast medium is far more compact and portable, so audio books and similar content are now being made available as podcasts.

2. Audio Tours

Interested in a guided tour of a historic site, or a detailed explanation of a museum display? Audio tour podcasts with detailed explanations are becoming quite common.

Podcasting Content

Tips for Helping Your RSS Feed Perform!
In some ways RSS is very similar to HTML, the language commonly used to create websites. Just as with HTML, webmasters using traditional search engine optimization tactics when creating an RSS feed will find that their RSS feed receives additional exposure and interest.

Search Engine Optimization for RSS

The core use for RSS is generally considered news headlines and blog syndication, but innovative businesses are learning to use RSS in different ways. Consider RSS as a communication channel that can provide current, targeted information as it appears within a very targeted audience.

Monitoring Newsgroups/Usenet
Google Groups is a free online community and discussion group service that offers the Web's most comprehensive archive of Usenet postings. Google Groups can be monitored using RSS feeds. In order to monitor a specific newsgroup simply add "/feed/msgs.xml" to the end of the Google Group URL. Add the new URL to a newsgroup reader and receive updates each time a new post is added to the newsgroup.

RSS More than Just News Headlines

There are a variety of things you can do to promote your podcast and increase its popularity...
1. Auto-Discovery

Include auto-discovery tags in the HTML header of the web page. Some podcasting and RSS readers will automatically detect that an RSS feed or podcast is available if such auto-discovery tags are included in the web page header tags.

How Do I Promote My Podcast?

Blogs are the current rage, and many webmasters have blogs but fail to use their blog to it's full potential. Blogs provide a steady stream of fresh content, and if this content is written and managed properly, blogs have the ability to increase a website's ranking in the search engines.

1. Host Your Own Blog
In order to prosper from a blog, be sure to host it on your own domain. Hosting the blog on your own server will maximize the links to your website. Link popularity is one of the factors search engines use to rank websites. Resist the urge to use free hosting services, do not give away your link popularity!

Blog Tips for SEO

What defines a good podcast? Make no mistake -- there is a difference between a good podcast and a not-so-good podcast. A high-caliber podcast is much more than just decent content. The sound quality, and the way a podcast is recorded, will impact the value of the podcast as well. Podcast structure and pre-planning are also important; do not skimp on the production, as it too can make or break a podcast.

Podcast production takes effort, but anything worth doing is worth doing right. Use these tips to help produce a quality podcast that will be distinguished above other related podcasts...

10 Podcast Tips To A Great Sound

Create Podcast Sermons
The Internet has made spreading faith significantly easier. In the past, community residents were limited to the churches, temples and houses of worships that were available within driving distances. Coordinating schedules with sermons could be challenging for busy families.

The Internet has opened the doors to a diverse congregation that exists beyond the traditional borders that communities have become accustom to. Using technology as a communication medium has not been lost on spiritual leaders and many have embraced the Internet as a medium to spread their faith. It is rare to find a house of worship that does not have a website or Internet presense. Expanding upon this theme, parishes looked to podcasting to further expanded the reach of their spiritual counselors and ministers. Many preachers record homilies, hymns, services, sermons or gospel teachings, for parishioners and interested listeners.

Podcasting Sermons

Tips for creating a blog.
There are no hard and fast rules on how to blog. Having said that, bloggers will likely increase their exposure by following some simple blog guidelines.

1.) Stay on topic.
Opinions are generally accepted but the content of the items in the blog should all relate to a general theme. Unless you have an uncanny knack for wit, humor or cynicism, the majority of your readers will be interested in the content that relates to a specific defined theme or loosely defined area of interest. Most readers won't care that you eat Cheerios for breakfast. They may, however, be interested in the fact that vinegar takes out stains and that toilet paper rolls make great wreaths. Define a topic and stick to it. This will ensure that you create a loyal following of interested readers.

Tips for Blogs

Podcasting is RSS that is used to syndicate and distribute audio files. Podcasting contains an audio file in the RSS feed's enclosure tag. An enclosure tag is used in RSS feeds to include certain types of files. The file contained in an enclosure tag can be: an image, a data file, a video file, or an audio file. Podcasting specifically refers to RSS feeds that contain audio files in their enclosure tag. The RSS version that currently supports enclosure tags is RSS version 2.0. All podcasts are currently created using this specification.

How Podcasting Works

RecordForAll makes it simple to record audio files, layer audio files and edit audio files for podcasting. Podcasters can record voices, or music files or other sounds.

RecordForAll Audio Recording Software

Many webmasters have realized the benefit of using RSS to dynamically update websites. This means that the website content automatically changes when the RSS feed is updated. This allows for webmasters to serve dynamic content or a mixture of static and dynamic content on their website.

Syndication
Often, publishers, interested in expanding their base, will allow other webmasters to republish the contents of an RSS feed. Content providers that allow for syndication, receive additional exposure, and the webmasters serving the content, will generally see web traffic increase as a result of the new content. RSS feeds can be syndicated or displayed using a variety of different methods. Depending on the web host, server configuration, and the intent of the publishers, a variety of different syndication tools exist.

In most cases, providers convert RSS feeds to HTML in order to display the feeds contents. The following are some of the more popular methods to convert RSS feeds as web based content.

Converting RSS to HTML

Do I Need an RSS Feed?
RSS has been around for more than 10 years but has only recently become popular. RSS provides headlines and summaries of information in a concise and standardized way.

Do I Really Need an RSS Feed?

The RSS2SQL script is used to create MySQL databases from RSS feeds.

How to Record Audio

Reaping The Podcasting Rewards
Getting started with podcasting is a relatively inexpensive venture. The equipment and software required for podcasting is inexpensive for a business contemplating podcasting as a new marketing and communication adventure.

The Rewards of Podcasting