Chowing Down at Feedroll.com

More and more these days, people turn to the Web for the latest news. It sure beats waiting for the 11 o’clock news on TV to get caught up on the day’s events. Unless you want your visitors surfing other sites to get their news, you need to add it to your Web site. But you don’t need to connect with a bunch of reporters or spend all your time collating tons of reports from distant parts of the world to provide your visitors with the latest news. Just plug in a ready-to-use news service that uses RSS.

RSS is short for Really Simple Syndication, and it’s just as good as it sounds. You just hook your Web page up to a feed that automatically updates the material on your site for you — 24 hours a day, 7 days a week — freeing you up to go do whatever else you need to do instead.

All RSS files are required to be XML compliant. The good news is that you don’t have to be an XML wizard to get the job done. In fact, you don’t even have to know what that means to add an RSS feed, and an XML feed can be seamlessly added to your site using just plain old HTML.

There’s an ever-increasing number of RSS news sources available to you, ranging from personal blogs (see Chapter 11) to the heavy hitters of journalism. Table 12-1 gives some examples.

Table 12-1. RSS Content and Info
Web Site NameWeb Address
Ask Dave Taylorwww.askdavetaylor.com/how_can_i_add_the_ask_dave_taylor_rss_feed_on_my_web_site.html
BusinessWeekwww.businessweek.com/rss
Feed Digestwww.feeddigest.com
Fortune ...

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