Everyone tells me that the only way to stay informed and keep your visitors informed and avoid spam filters killing emails is to provide and subscribe to RSS feeds. As I now have a total of 10 websites with 3 different webhosts and thousands of visitors I needed a way of bringing the daily updates to my regular visitors easily and quickly. RSS seemed to be the answer - I would put one of those little orange buttons on my site then everytime I updated it the feed would be published to subscribers RSS/news readers. However being more of a Career Coach than a Webmaster, I didn't understand what RSS feeds really meant and found myself getting totally muddled. By the way, on my ebook download website, I actually sell a complete Blog and RSS kit for 49.00. This contains all the detailed instructions (see http://www.ebookdownloads.biz/blog-kit.html ) which tell you how to set up a blog, create your RSS feeds and generate back-links to your blog. Only trouble was I'm ashamed to admit that I COULDN'T UNDERSTAND IT!!! What I needed was some REAL help so I hit Google looking for tools, software or something to help me understand what to do. There are masses of software programmes which seem to do everything you might need and more but they are either too expensive or too complicated. However with a bit of help from a script by Benruth Software Consultancy I have now succeeded in writing RSS feeds for all of my sites which proudly display those lovely little orange buttons. You can find the script at http://www.benruth.com/instantfeedwriter/instantfeed.php if you are interested. It is freeware but the developer does ask for a donation, which is reasonable. With this script I have been able to get those little orange RSS / XML buttons on every one of my sites and link them to the actual feed; plus you can add the feed to your Yahoo, MSN or Google pages at the click of a mouse. What you do is complete the boxes in the form that the script offers you then copy the code into a text editor (i.e. Notepad), NOT MS Word and save the text file to your pc as a .xml file. You can then upload this to your webhost server via whichever FTP client you use. Grab the image files off my site if you want and upload these to your webserver as well. All you need to do is look at the source code on any of my sites, find the code in a table that contains files like this: "myleaderrss.xml" and "xml-rss.gif" then all you need to do is rename these URLs to your URLs within the code in the .xml file and away you go. Now I've got my RSS feeds sorted out I've decided to give away the Total Blog Kit to anyone that can use it. Just send an email to totalblog@ebookdownloads.biz - and the autoresponder will do the rest. You are free to do whatever you want with it so long as you read the copyright notices. If you would like to see a list of the RSS feeds go to my personal blog page at blogger.com http://career-designblog.blogspot.com |
