Author: Allan Burns
This article is intended as a guide for webmasters who want to display automatically updated content on their website in the form of RSS feeds. In this article I will cover the easiest method to implement using javascript for displaying RSS on websites to create additional dynamic content. This will allow you to display headlines from syndicated content around the web on your website.
RSS to Javascript.
By far the easiest method is to use client side javascript to parse and display the headlines on your site. To achieve this all you need to do is cut and paste some HTML or javascript code into the web page where you want the RSS feed headlines to display.
To achieve this there are several sites that offer a free service that will allow you to select a few options to choose your feed source and display formatting parameters. You will then be presented with some javascript code that you can cut and paste into your website.
Now before I give you the address of the sites that offer this service freely there are a few points I need to clarify with you. Although you will achieve your goal of displaying dynamic content on your site in a few short minutes there are some downsides to this method.
Javascript is not search engine friendly.
As you may or may not already know, javascript is not visible to search engine spiders. They will not see the RSS feed you have parsed into your site and so this will not benefit you if you are doing this to better your search engine rankings.
You are using a third party service.
The second potential downside is that although the javascript is on your site you are actually calling a script on another server. This could lead to a couple of potential problems. If the server is busy it will mean the news feed will take longer to display on your site. The other point is if the third party server fails or disappears altogether then your feed will not be displayed at all.
In summary there are a few downsides, but if you do not code and want some feeds on your site quickly then this is the way to go. Ok, so now you understand what is involved here are the links to the sites that provide the free RSS to javascript service. All you need to do is follow the on site instructions.
About the author: Allan is the webmaster at http://www.newsniche.com a directory for webmasters to learn about RSS. RSS can be used to attract and retain visitors to your website.
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2 comments ↓
There’s also RSS Digest http://www.bigbold.com/rssdigest/
Any ideas as to the relative merits of all these different services, or is it a simple enough function that it doesn’t really matter?
Peter from RSS Digest. Yeah, where are we? Hehe. Thanks, Marshall! Just wanted to chime in. RSS Digest is the only service that lets you entirely tailor the output to your own needs (you can specify custom HTML throughout), and we don’t force any ‘powered by’ or clickthrough ads on users.
FeedSweep is also good, however, and may be more suitable in certain situations!
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