Recently I've been delving into the murky world of RSS feeds.  Most people know that it's quite an easy way to get updating content onto a website, using RSS widgets like CARP.  In simple terms, that is showing someone elses content on your website…

I've had the chance to take a look at RSS from the other angle.  Produce a RSS feed which other people can use on their websites in order to give your own site a lot of backlinks.  In other words, website owners are syndicating your content.

I also found out that their are a number of Search Engines (Yahoo included) which accept RSS feeds as site submission.  I have no results on this as yet, as I only submitted some sites a few days ago…there is also some sutomated programs (eg RSS Submit) which you can use to "announce" your RSS feeds to the world.

I had to look into RSS as part of my SmArticle project - I wanted the ability to auto-create a RSS feed, which would auto-update as pages were removed or added to each site.  I thought that this was going to be quite difficult, but decided to go forward and code up a PHP script specifically for the purpose.  In the end, that PHP script came to about 30 lines of code, which I was quite pleased with.  Considering the portability of the script, that's quite an acheivement (at least it is for me).

What this means is that from Version 3 of SmArticle onwards, the user can elect to produce a RSS feed file - 1 click, and the job's a good'un.

If you have not yet looked into creating an RSS feed for your site, now's the time.  What I've learned over the past week or two is quite eye-opening.