dizzysoft softwareHelp! My RSS Feed Isn’t Working!
I have been suggesting you do some really unique things with an RSS feed using a lot of different programs that exist throughout the internet. Sometimes they don’t seem to work really well. This is because the internet is the great equalizer: you can’t tell if the article you are reading is from a world-wide recognized authority on the subject or a crazy old man whose son gave him a computer. The same is true with programs you find on the internet- some are created by professional programmers and others by people who hack together whatever code they can find whether they understand it or not.
What can you do (in the world of RSS) when a feed produced by one service doesn’t want to be read by another? Don’t worry, there’s hope for you.
What is the current mileage reimbursement rate?
The US government has a web page that posts the Privately Owned Vehicle (POV) Mileage Reimbursement Rates. You can check this site whenever you need to know the current reimbursement rate. This is where I get the information posted at the top of this website.
You can be automatically informed when this rate changes by subscribing to this RSS feed, which uses wotzwot.com’s RSSxl page to take that information off the GSA website. This rate changes every year or so, but potentially could change more frequently as gas prices increase rapidly (as they did with Katrina in September of 2005, as you can see from the site’s “Previous Automobile Rates”).
The Wonderful World of RSS
Recently I’ve found myself consumed by the whole concept of RSS (Really Simple Syndication). This is a conduit by which information can be conveyed. Because of its flexibility, there are numerous ways to send information to and retrieve information from an RSS feed (like those on this website).
In my awe of RSS, I am opening up a new category on this website that will highlight the many uses, means of input and output, and other items of interest about RSS- many of which can be done with existing web-based services for free without any programming.
Put someone else’s information on your website with RSS
Start by scraping information from a website into an RSS feed by using the RSS Generator. This site goes to a given web page and searches for a part of that web page using a regular expression. Using this site defeats my goal of giving examples of how to do things with existing RSS services that involve no programming because it uses the difficult concept of regular expressions- you can tell how difficult this is by the fact that this site’s own example doesn’t work. You might find sites like regular-expressions.info useful as you figure this one out. This is, of course, after you view the page in HTML in order to learn what you are searching for.
Using RSS in the church- where do I begin (part 1 of 2)
Earlier this year Church Marketing Sucks generated a list of how a church could use RSS feeds. Here are some of their suggestions.
- Announce Events
- Announce Prayer Requests
- Send Out Devotions
- Weekly News Updates
- Series Announcements
- Encouraging Messages
This is a great idea, but where do you get an RSS feed?
Using RSS in the church- getting the message (part 2 of2)
Church Marketing Sucks generated a list of how a church could use RSS feeds, including:
- Announce Events
- Announce Prayer Requests
- Send Out Devotions
- Weekly News Updates
- Series Announcements
- Encouraging Messages
In my last article I talked about how to use existing programs to create your RSS feeds. Now, how do you get the message out?
There are many ways RSS can communicate its message beyond the feed reader. Many of these ways are free using already existing programs (requiring no programing by anyone in the church).
Create a mailing list using RSS
Because mailing lists are so handy they have been around for a while now. There’s a very simple way of creating your own mailing list without purchasing any special software or programming yourself- simply using some pre-existing RSS tools.
There are a couple services that offer e-mail to RSS feed creation. The best one I’ve found is MailBucket. All you have to do to use this is set up your feed, and it will give you the e-mail address to send it to. This one is good because it includes an anti-spam feature that would otherwise make this whole process worthless because it could be overloaded with spam.
Increase interest in your blog with RSS
Blogging and RSS have had a wonderful relationship for quite a while. RSS feeds have been the primary vehicle of distributing the content of a blog and even have helped search engines index its content. The relationship does not have to end there, however. RSS is too useful just to passively communicate to people who are interested in your topics. You can use RSS to increase interest (and traffic) to your blog.
Learn Google’s Opinion of the Presidential Candidates with RSS
Some might say that Google is a know-it-all. Sure he knows a lot of facts on topics that range from the mundane to the profound. We all know people who can quote what other people say, but the really interesting people are those who can think for themselves. You might be tempted to say that about Google, but you’d be wrong. Google has opinions about lots of things. He even has an opinion about the Presidential candidates- even if he can’t vote.
Let me tell you how to get his opinion out of him.
Pick a feed, any feed
Thanks to a blog entry from Nick Bradbury, which put into words something I’ve been thinking about for a while, I have committed to one web feed format for the entire zimOrama network- RSS2. Because b2evolution (the program I have been using to generate these sites) offers many format, I’ve felt like I needed to use all the formats to entertain the maximum compatibility possible. That’s simply not true and only serves to confuse people by giving them too many possibilities.