Good news everyone! Since Blogsolid launched in August, the number of RSS subscribers has steadily been growing. October has seen the subscribership pass the 200 mark. This is a humble achievement, but as we all know, growing your subscriber-base is important for any blog. Subscriber figures are an indication of how many (or few) loyal readers you have. An interesting observation is that as the subscriber count for Blogsolid has been growing, visits to the site have been on the decline. During the past week, visitor numbers have been lower than subscriber numbers every day – on some quieter days up to 50% less! So what has caused this shift? I believe that the answer lies in the fact that Blogsolid offers full feeds. Blogs usually offer RSS feeds in one of three different ways: Full feeds vs. partial feeds has long been a popular discussion among bloggers. A recent poll by ProBlogger reveals that the overwhelming majority of participating bloggers support full feeds, yet in reading comments it is interesting to note that some people claim to prefer partial feeds. Let’s take a quick look at some pros and cons of full feeds: Good The debate over full versus partial feeds rages on but my own findings having made the switch to full feeds here at ProBlogger is that my subscriber numbers went up significantly in the weeks after giving my readers my full posts. Bad As a designer, I have come to the conclusion that full feeds are the devil! Although content is king, I believe the design of a site is very important because it creates a visual context adding value to content. Content is robbed of the website’s context when read in a sterile black-on-white feedreader and so, runs the risk of losing value and impact. So, where to from here? Two possibilities come to mind: switch to partial feeds and regain site visitors or keep the full feeds and grow the subscriber base…
Each article appears in its entirety.
Only post titles appear. Sometimes these are accompanied by a short excerpt from the article.
Offer both and let your readers decide which feed they prefer.
Showing posts with label rss. Show all posts
Showing posts with label rss. Show all posts
Are Full Feeds Evil?
Pulling Your Flickr Feed with jQuery
Feeds are the easiest way to view updated content, whether it's through a feed reader or outputted onto a web site. There are many different types of feeds, such as RSS or Atom, and many different ways display them on your site, such as using MagpieRSS to parse an RSS feed in PHP. However, you can also display feeds on your site using JavaScript, so in this post I'm going to be talking about a feed format called JSON and how you can use JavaScript to parse it out and display it.
JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a data format that is easy to read and language-independent, meaning you can parse it using any programming language. Both Yahoo! and Google have been offering data from their sites in JSON format for the past couple years. A good example of this is Flickr. Anyone with a Flickr account can access a JSON feed of their photos.
#images { height: 185px; width: 240px; padding:0; margin:0; overflow: hidden;}
#images img { border:none;}
Then we'll add in the cycle plugin code inside our initial function that creates the images out of the JSON feed:
Notice that I put some options in the cycle method for previous and next id's. As you can probably guess, these links will allow the user to navigate through the list of images.
Notice that we have to call items based on where they are located in the JSON feed. For example, "item.link" will link to the image but "data.link" will link to the overall photo pool. You can look at the actual JSON feed and see how its organized. Next add the HTML so jQuery has something to update:
Now you've got yourself a nice feed of Flickr images and can all the CSS you want to make it look more stylish:
READ MORE - Pulling Your Flickr Feed with jQuery
JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a data format that is easy to read and language-independent, meaning you can parse it using any programming language. Both Yahoo! and Google have been offering data from their sites in JSON format for the past couple years. A good example of this is Flickr. Anyone with a Flickr account can access a JSON feed of their photos.
Finding Your Feed
If we go to the Viget Inspire collection on Flickr, we can click on the feed (orange button, bottom of the page) and bring up a RSS 2.0 feed of all the images in our pool. Flickr's API has many other feed formats, so I suggest going to their site to read up on it because there are a lot of things you can do. If you want the JSON version of the feed, change "format=rss_200" at the end of the query string to "format=json" so that your URL looks like this:http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/groups_pool.gne? id=675729@N22&lang=en-us&format=json
Bringing It Into jQuery
So now that you have your JSON feed, lets put it to good use. My co-workers and I are big fans of the JavaScript framework jQuery. With version 1.2, jQuery added support for transferring JSON data across multiple domains (this is referred to as JSONP), so in this example we'll be using it to do all the JavaScript work for us. First off, make sure you've downloaded the latest version of jQuery and added it to your page. Next, add "jsoncallback=?" to the end of your query string (this is the callback name) and put the code inside <script> tags to get things running:$.getJSON("http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/groups_pool .gne?id=675729@N22&lang=en-us&format=json&jsoncallback=?", function(data){
$.each(data.items, function(i,item){
$("<img/>").attr("src", item.media.m).appendTo("#images")
.wrap("<a href='" + item.link + "'></a>");
});
});
<div id="images"></div>
<div class="flickrNav">
<a id="prev" href="#">Prev</a><a id="next" href="#">Next</a>
</div>
#images { height: 185px; width: 240px; padding:0; margin:0; overflow: hidden;}
#images img { border:none;}
Then we'll add in the cycle plugin code inside our initial function that creates the images out of the JSON feed:
$.getJSON("http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/groups_pool .gne?id=675729@N22&lang=en-us&format=json&jsoncallback=?", function(data){
$.each(data.items, function(i,item){
$("<img/>").attr("src", item.media.m).appendTo("#images")
.wrap("<a href='" + item.link + "'></a>");
});
$('#images').cycle({
fx: 'fade',
speed: 'fast',
timeout: 0,
next: '#next',
prev: '#prev'
});
});
Notice that I put some options in the cycle method for previous and next id's. As you can probably guess, these links will allow the user to navigate through the list of images.
Getting More Than Just Pretty Pictures
At this point images should be showing up, but that JSON feed has a lot of other information in it you can pull in. For any attribute you want to display you just need to write it in the format of $("div name you are targeting").html(name of JSON object you want to display). In our example, if we wanted to show the title of the photo pool, the description of the pool, and a link to the pool on Flickr we would write the following into our jQuery function:$.getJSON("http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/groups_pool .gne?id=675729@N22&lang=en-us&format=json&jsoncallback=?", function(data){
$.each(data.items, function(i,item){
$("<img/>").attr("src", item.media.m).appendTo("#images")
.wrap("<a href='" + item.link + "'></a>");
});
$("#title").html(data.title);
$("#description").html(data.description);
$("#link").html("<a href='"+data.link+"' target=\"_blank\">Visit the Viget Inspiration Pool!</a>");
//Notice that the object here is "data" because that information sits outside of "items" in the JSON feed
$('#images').cycle({
fx: 'fade',
speed: 'normal',
timeout: 0,
next: '#next',
prev: '#prev'
});
});
Notice that we have to call items based on where they are located in the JSON feed. For example, "item.link" will link to the image but "data.link" will link to the overall photo pool. You can look at the actual JSON feed and see how its organized. Next add the HTML so jQuery has something to update:
Now you've got yourself a nice feed of Flickr images and can all the CSS you want to make it look more stylish:
If you're reading this in an RSS reader, you won't be able to see the JavaScript effects I'm talking about. Click here to read.
Viget Inspiration group Pool
The design lab at Viget Labs putting together colors, sites, and anything else that visually inspires us. This group is just so the designers have something the site (www.viget.com/inspire) can pull from, so don't feel bad if you don't get added!
Link Building Tip: Sneaky RSS Deep Links
I wrote a while ago how to use RSS to get links to your blog. If you’re a blogger you’ve no doubt noticed there’s quite a few blogs that scrape your RSS feed & republish the content.
We all know that Duplicate content is a bad thing, however I’ve never seen any negative effects from Scraper blogs republishing my original content. I’d normally get about 2-3 blogs trackbacking me everyday republishing my articles.
If you use Wordpress it’s very easy to take full advantage of these sites linking to you, all you need to do is create links back to your content within your feed .
READ MORE - Link Building Tip: Sneaky RSS Deep Links
We all know that Duplicate content is a bad thing, however I’ve never seen any negative effects from Scraper blogs republishing my original content. I’d normally get about 2-3 blogs trackbacking me everyday republishing my articles.
If you use Wordpress it’s very easy to take full advantage of these sites linking to you, all you need to do is create links back to your content within your feed .
Using RSS Feeds for Incoming Links
Getting Search Engine Spiders to your most recent content is always a priority for most webmasters. Sometimes even getting the spiders to update your new content at all can take time when you have a new website. Here’s a tip for newer sites that should get the spiders going crazy & eating your content up.
There are a number of sites that aggregate your RSS feed & turn it into a static HTML page. This means you can submit your feed & the spiders will be able to find & follow those links.
Advantages include:
Because I show the 30 most recent posts in my feed I get 30 links back to Earners Blog. I’m pretty sure Feedburner redirects now but the spiders still follow.
Here’s a list of other sites that allow you to use a facility like this:
Most of these services will require a backlink to the page with the RSS feeds so they initally get indexed by Google. Usually I open up a del.icio.us account & import all the RSS feeds then ping them from there. You should notice a nice increase in backlinks & spider activity after using this technique. Enjoy.
READ MORE - Using RSS Feeds for Incoming Links
There are a number of sites that aggregate your RSS feed & turn it into a static HTML page. This means you can submit your feed & the spiders will be able to find & follow those links.
Advantages include:
- The link has the anchor text of your title
- You can have upwards of 10 links on some pages
- Title of the page can be chosen, or can be the title of your blog
Because I show the 30 most recent posts in my feed I get 30 links back to Earners Blog. I’m pretty sure Feedburner redirects now but the spiders still follow.
Here’s a list of other sites that allow you to use a facility like this:
Most of these services will require a backlink to the page with the RSS feeds so they initally get indexed by Google. Usually I open up a del.icio.us account & import all the RSS feeds then ping them from there. You should notice a nice increase in backlinks & spider activity after using this technique. Enjoy.
Create a simple ajax rss widget with jquery
A medium to advanced user's tutorial for using Jquery to display a set of RSS headlines as links in a widget on your page. There are code samples on this page, however if you want to follow along easier, here is the complete final file (it's all in one HTML file for ease of use - obviously you'll want to separate your JS and CSS out into external files..)
So, suppose you want to embed the headlines from an RSS feed into your site. Assuming you're not so fussed about SEO, but rather are looking for a useful piece of content for your users, you can use Jquery and Yahoo Pipes to easily embed the headlines (and summaries if you like) into your page.
Step 1: Create a Yahoo Pipe for the RSS feed (or feeds) that you want to include.
You need a Yahoo account to use pipes, so if you don't have one, you'll need to get one. Once you have it, just log into the pipes site here: http://pipes.yahoo.com
You want to choose, Sources > Fetch Feed - this will add a Fetch Feed box into your pipe editor, now link this with the Pipe Output. That's it (Pipes are extremely powerful, however this i all we need for this particular example). Here's how the final pipe looks:
Save the Pipe. Go "Back to My Pipes" and get the URL for the new pipe as JSON.
Mine pipe URL is: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=b5c348713f1c84193acf3723d4d148a9&am...
Now that you have the JSON url, we can use jquery to render these results into a useful widget on our page.
Firstly, we need to make sure that Jquery is being included on our page. I do this using the google hosted solution, so basically it is loaded from google's servers (and cached). So, in the head of your page (if jquery isn't already there) we add this:
Now we create the necessary markup to hold our results. Where you want the widget to appear, we append this:
Basic CSS styles:
Now, we need to make our progressively enhanced Jquery:
So, in english, we add a ready function to the #rssdata div, it holds the JSON url from our pipe above, with &_callback=? added on the end (this allows cross domain JSONP requests).
And then the ready function simply using jquery's getJSON method to load the results of our pipe and turn them into HTML elements that we then append into our UL.
Once the loaded data has all been appended, we use fadeOut to hide our Loading message and then slideDown to make our UL slide into view nicely.
If you need more help, here's a single HTML page that has all the code in the tutorial in it, for easy use (you can also use this to preview the effect).
READ MORE - Create a simple ajax rss widget with jquery
So, suppose you want to embed the headlines from an RSS feed into your site. Assuming you're not so fussed about SEO, but rather are looking for a useful piece of content for your users, you can use Jquery and Yahoo Pipes to easily embed the headlines (and summaries if you like) into your page.
Step 1: Create a Yahoo Pipe for the RSS feed (or feeds) that you want to include.
You need a Yahoo account to use pipes, so if you don't have one, you'll need to get one. Once you have it, just log into the pipes site here: http://pipes.yahoo.com
You want to choose, Sources > Fetch Feed - this will add a Fetch Feed box into your pipe editor, now link this with the Pipe Output. That's it (Pipes are extremely powerful, however this i all we need for this particular example). Here's how the final pipe looks:
Mine pipe URL is: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=b5c348713f1c84193acf3723d4d148a9&am...
Now that you have the JSON url, we can use jquery to render these results into a useful widget on our page.
Firstly, we need to make sure that Jquery is being included on our page. I do this using the google hosted solution, so basically it is loaded from google's servers (and cached). So, in the head of your page (if jquery isn't already there) we add this:
Step 2: Set up our markup and CSS<script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3.2/jquery.min.js"></script>
Now we create the necessary markup to hold our results. Where you want the widget to appear, we append this:
Obviously you can use whatever ids and classes you like, just remember to change the javascript and CSS that follows so Jquery can find the right elements.<div id="rssdata"> <ul class="rss-items"></ul> <div class="loading">Loading RSS items...</div></div>
Basic CSS styles:
Step 3: Building the Widget using Jquery..#rssdata ul.rss-items{ display: none; margin: 0; padding: 0;}#rssdata ul.rss-items li{ display: block; margin: 0; padding: 0;}#rssdata ul.rss-items a{ margin: 0; padding: 0; display: block; padding: 2px 6px; background: #ccc; color: #333; text-decoration: none; border-bottom: 1px solid #eee;}#rssdata ul.rss-items a:hover{ background: #666; color: #fff; text-decoration: none;}
Now, we need to make our progressively enhanced Jquery:
$('#rssdata').ready(function(){ var pipe_url = 'http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=b5c348713f1c84193acf3723d4d148a9&_render=json&_callback=?'; $.getJSON(pipe_url,function(data) { $(data.value.items).each(function(index,item) { var item_html = '<li>'+item.title+'</li>'; $('#rssdata ul.rss-items').append(item_html); }); $('#rssdata div.loading').fadeOut(); $('#rssdata ul.rss-items').slideDown(); });});
So, in english, we add a ready function to the #rssdata div, it holds the JSON url from our pipe above, with &_callback=? added on the end (this allows cross domain JSONP requests).
And then the ready function simply using jquery's getJSON method to load the results of our pipe and turn them into HTML elements that we then append into our UL.
Once the loaded data has all been appended, we use fadeOut to hide our Loading message and then slideDown to make our UL slide into view nicely.
If you need more help, here's a single HTML page that has all the code in the tutorial in it, for easy use (you can also use this to preview the effect).
RSS Gadgets
RSS Gadgets V3.0
RSS Gadgets is an easy to deploy RSS Feed Aggregator that places affiliate products on your web pages from Amazon, Clickbank and Ebay! You choose what types of ads to display based on keywords you're targeting within your own niche market. You can use the feeds individually, altogether or in any combination.
Additionally, we provide feeds that are also keyword driven - YouTube, Twitter and GoArticles! These feeds add fresh, new content to your site that changes automatically so that spiders see continual change. All outbound links automatically use the "NoFollow" tag to avoid PR leakage as well! If you're getting traffic to your sites you need to convert them to sales - why not avoid the hassle and automatically offer up related products, news and links to keep their interest and make a few bucks as well? (Demo at end of page)
RSS Gadgets Features 
- Amazon AWS Feed (HOT)
- ClickBank Marketplace Feed
- Ebay Partner Network Feed (HOT)
- Google News Feed (NEW)
- GoArticles Content Feed (NEW)
- Twitter Content Feed (NEW)
- YouTube Video Feed (HOT)
- Powerful Aggregation Engine (NEW)
- Fully Automated - Set and Forget
- Simple Configuration in Notepad
- Use on ALL of Your Websites!
- Use on a WordPress Blog!
How RSS Gadgets Works For You
Each feed can be displayed individually or collectively in any combination on any given web page and will automatically use your own web site's CSS to blend into your layout and theme seamlessly.The script itself produces XHTML 1.0 Strict output and when integrated into a compliant website, will re-validate successfully.
NOTE: All outbound links created with RSS Gadgets utilize the NoFollow tag to prevent PR Leakage.
This script can actually be used to build WEB 2.0 style pages based on keywords you're targeting with minimal effort on your part. By using a template, plugging in a few lines of code and uploading your site, you can literally deploy a simplistic web site within minutes.
RSS Gadgets Benefits
Automatic. Passive. No Selling. A No Brainer!The beauty of RSS Gadgets is that it requires no further action from you once you've plugged it into your web pages! Because every ad is laser targeted, your visitors will already be interested in what's being offered.
You will ABSOLUTELY Love how easy it is for you to take a web page, plug in RSS Gadgets and then let the products sell themselves!
RSS Gadgets Upgrade Policy
This product come with free upgrades for minor versions (we define these as bug fixes, tweaks, performance improvements and so on). Minor upgrades are always numbered 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, etc.Major upgrades, which consist of significant improvements and additions to the product, are available at a discount to customers who own the prior version. Major upgrades are numbered 2.0, 3.0, 4.0, etc.
Technical Support For RSS Gadgets
Technical Support (direct from programmers) is available Monday through Friday from 8:00 AM through 5:00 PM, GMT +2, excluding holidays that fall on a weekday.Technical Support is provided on a first-come, first-basis at no charge to the customer. The contact information for support is included in the help files within the product itself.
RSS Gadgets System Requirements
RSS Gadgets is a server-side script developed in PHP 4.4 - you will require Zend Optimizer 2.6 or higher on your server (your host will provide this at no charge, if they have not already).
Simplex News Aggregator Blogger Templates
Description this is amazing template with a simple design, top navigation bar, search box, 4 footer columns..
Author allblogtools
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