I was recently asked at a seminar about creating and consuming RSS feeds for a site with very limited content management facilities. The person had access to edit areas of the HTML but no more than that. I didn’t want to overwhelm him with too many links, just a selection of ones which I either already knew or looked like they were worth trying.

Creating syndication feeds

If you are interested in creating syndication feeds for your own site, there are plenty of tools available; these will attempt to generate a feed automatically by reading the pages on your site:

• http://feedity.com/
• http://www.dapper.net/
• http://www.rsspect.com/
• http://runstream.com/

If this doesn’t work (or doesn’t do everything that you want) then you could manually create a feed using one of the following:

• http://webrss.com/
• http://www.rapidfeeds.com/
• http://www.feedforall.com – this is a desktop application which can upload the updated rss file to your website

Once you’ve created a feed, I would recommend using http://www.feedburner.com to re-syndicate it, you get good analytics to monitor the usage of your feed and feedburner provides plenty of tools for optimising and publicising the feed (including the ability for people to subscribe by email).

Importing feed content into your own site

The most common way to do this is using what’s generally referred to as a widget – a piece of code which dynamically generates a section of content on your page. Here are some of the best widget creation tools:

• http://sproutbuilder.com/
• http://www.clearspring.com/
• http://www.springwidgets.com/
• also, specifically for displaying a feed, you could try: http://www.feedroll.com/

I may post a more comprehensive list at some point soon so if anybody has any suggestions or recommendations then please let me know in the comments.