RSS Feed
July 23, 2005 Posted by KP
If you visit this Blog with FireFox, you can see an orange box in the right bottom corner, that means this site support RSS feed, you can subscribe a live bookmark by clicking on it. This is a built-in feature of Movabletype.
I don’t know since when RSS feed was popular, I just see it everywhere. I didn’t pay any attention to it until Google released Google Sitemaps (Beta). It’s a new way of Google to crawl websites, Google will index web pages according to the sitemap files submitted by webmasters. Google defined their own format for sitemap file - a XML file, basically a URL list, which is very similar to RSS feed but doesn’t comply with any RSS standards. I wrote a PHP script for generating the sitemap file, and submit to Google daily with a cron job. Though I didn’t find the pages get indexed faster, maybe because it’s still in beta.
For the same purpose I checked out My Yahoo, actually it’s for My Yahoo users, but it can make Yahoo include a new website faster. It’s easy to write a PHP script to generate the RSS feed, then notify My Yahoo with a cron job on a regular basis. Yahoo has an excellent RSS guide, plus RSS 2.0 Specification, these should be enough for most tasks.
My thought after played with Google Sitemaps and My Yahoo:
RSS feeds are not only for Blogs. General websites, especially those database-driven and updated frequently, should support RSS feeds too, make Google Sitemaps and My Yahoo submission automate. It’s not only convenient to the visitors, but also preferred by the mighty Search Engines.
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Filed Under: Misc