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Create Your Own RSS Feed For Your Music Site
Sharing your content couldnt be more simple. Even if you dont use a CMS you can implement an RSS feed for your website.
Creating The XML file
First you need to create an XML file, this can be done using note pad. Within the XML file you can add the following into it.
<rss version="2.0">
<channel>
<title>yoursite.com</title>
<link>http://www.yoursite.com/</link>
<description>Your Websites Description</description>
<lastBuildDate>Sun, 28 Jan 2007 07:03:59 GMT</lastBuildDate>
<docs>http://backend.userland.com/rss/</docs>
<managingEditor>noreply@yoursite.com</managingEditor>
<webMaster>noreply@yoursite.com</webMaster>
<language>en</language>
<image>
<title>yoursite.com</title>
<url>http://www.yoursite.com/logo.gif</url>
<link>http://www.yousite.com/</link>
</image>
<item>
<title>Article Title</title>
<link>http://www.yoursite.com/articlelink.html</link>
<description>Your article text</description>
<pubDate>Sat, 27 Jan 2007 09:23:50 GMT</pubDate>
<guid>http://www.yoursite.com/articlelink.html</guid>
</item>
</channel>
</rss>
Obviously, you will have to change some of the text to refer to your website, email address, URLS, times, articles and article text. Also, to add a new articles simple copy everything in the "item" tags and post above the one thats already there and edit it to include the new one.
You should save this out as something like backend.xml and upload it to your server.
The next part is all about adding your newly created feed to FeedBurner but you can use the XML file on its own. Just simply point any link for your feed to your XML file. You can also do this with the second way to advertise your feed shown below only this time you would point it to http://www.yourwebsiteaddress.com/backend.xml.
Using FeedBurner to Distribute Your Feed
Once you have finished creating your xml file you might not want people to directly link to your file as this might create a heavy load on your server if you gain a huge amount of subscribers. If this is the case then go to FeedBurner.com and open an account with them and when you set up a feed point FeedBurner to your xml file on your server. You will also be asked to create a "Feed Address". Take note of this feed address.
Getting People To Subscribe
Now you need to get people to subscribe. There are several ways to do this and you should implement both of these.
1. If you are a FeedBurner user click on the publisize >> Chicklet Chooser then scroll down to the bottom of the screen and find a box containing html code. Copy this and paste it into your pages.
2. Copy the code below and paste it into your header tags in your web pages and change the title and url of the feed in that code to your desired settings.
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Your RSS Feed Title" href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/yourfeed" />
Hopefully you will now have a working RSS Feed for everyone to share your content or partial content and start sending more hits to your wesbite.
Other Info on RSS
You may also wish to allow people to add your feeds to their website, you might want to point your visitors via a link to Feed Informer which gives people the option to do this.
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