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SYNDICATING YOUR BLOG |
Bloggers are always looking for new ways to bring in more traffic. Knowing that people are reading your work is encouraging and prompts you to continue blogging. If you're looking for an even wider audience for your blog, you should consider syndicating your blog.
Syndication means that your posts have a second life after being published on your blog. When you syndicate, your blog posts become available to people via news aggregators (software that periodically reads a set of sources and displays the new content on a single page), email, or even other peoples' blogs, depending on how you choose to do it.
You can syndicate your blog a couple of different ways. One method employs some lightweight XML. Another method involves using JavaScript's document.write method and offering up a snippet of code to your fellow bloggers. Either way, the idea behind syndicating your blog posts is to spread the word about your blog. You'll get your posts or the titles of your posts showing up all over the web. In essence, you're creating many doors to your blog—and many doors means higher traffic. RSS, also known as Real Simple Syndication, Rich Site Summary, or RDF Site Syntax is a lightweight XML format designed specifically for syndicating web content. Building your own RSS files requires some fairly heavy experience, but thankfully this process also can be automated by some blog providers.
Originally developed by Netscape, RSS has become a popular way to share content between web sites as well as blogs. RSS is a great syndication tool because not only can the big destination sites like BBC, CNET, CNN, Disney, Forbes, Motley Fool, Wired, Red Herring, Salon, Slashdot, and ZDNet use it for their content distribution services, but the blogging community also can make use of it to promote their work.
With RSS, your posts can be pulled from your blog and displayed on other web sites and information aggregation tools. After you've created an RSS file and posted it, you then can give the URL to sites and aggregation services as well as link to it from your blog.
RSS defines a set of tags for sharing content. An individual RSS text file contains both static information about your blog and dynamic information about your latest posts—all surrounded by start and end tags. Each post is defined by an <item> tag, which has a headline title, URL, and description. If you are using a major blog provider such as Radio or Blogger Pro, you don't need to worry about building your own RSS file because the RSS generation is done automatically. If you are using Blogger Pro, for example, all you need to do is set RSS up in the Settings section of your account. Check with your blogging provider to see whether the company offers automatic RSS generation. Figure 14.2 shows you how easy this can be.
If you select Publish RSS in your settings, each time you publish your blog, Blogger Pro will generate another file on your Web server that is a version of your blog in RSS format. You then can give the URL of this file to sites and aggregation services and promote it on your blog. Many bloggers use an orange XML or blue RSS button to indicate the presence of an RSS feed.You can determine what shows up in the optional description element of the RSS file. On the RSS settings page of your Blogger account, select None for descriptions if you want to show only the title and link for each post. Short descriptions will limit the description to the first paragraph of a post or approximately 255 characters, whichever is shorter. This description also will be stripped of HTML markup. Full descriptions include the entire content of your posts (with HTML, but properly escaped for XML) in the description field.