Setting Up Your Own Webfeeds, Continued

Back on Feb. 6, I wrote about the easiest ways to set up your own webfeed (RSS or Atom format). See How to Create Your Own RSS Feed.

That article only covered the simplest situations, such as a generating a feed for a basic weblog using built-in tools. Obviously, there’s more to webfeed generation than that for many organizations or individuals with complex sites or online content offerings.

Here’s some basic advice on more advanced webfeed options…

Tips from news organizations: On July 13, J.D. Lasica shared advice that he received on setting up webfeeds from several people one the web teams of various news organizations. See Setting up RSS feeds in an organization. This advice is pretty specific, but not too complicated.
How-to from Search Engine Watch: See Making An RSS Feed, by Danny Sullivan. Lasica linked to this article, but it’s worth noting separately here. It’s fairly technical, but actually pretty readable and practical. It’s not any geekier than it needs to be. That’s an important point: If you want to really learn how to create webfeeds, there’s no avoiding a certain amount of geekiness. If you can’t bear to look at XML code, you’d better stick to other endeavors.
Content Management Systems: According to Danny Ayers, most CMSs already support RSS 1.0 output, or some kind of XML that can be converted to the Resource Description Framework (RDF), which underlies the RSS standard. Therefore, if your site is supported by a CMS, you should check your specs or ask your vendor about RSS or RDF output capabilities. You might have to tweak the XML, but technically that’s not a big deal.
Webfeed Generator Tool: ListGarden: I haven’t tried this tool yet, but I’ve heard some people say good things about it. ListGarden is the brainchild of Dan Bricklin, who also created VisiCalc and Trellix. This appears to be something that might be useful to medium-sized or perhaps even large organizations. (I’d love to hear from someone who’s used this tool. Please comment below.)
MailByRSS – Service that Converts E-mail Newsletters to RSS: Again, I haven’t tried this yet, but it sounds like a good halfway step for organizations that publish e-mail newsletters but aren’t yet ready to set up their own infrastructure for webfeeds. I don’t know how well it works in practice, but it sounds interesting.
FeedBurner Webfeed Enhancement Service: Lots of people are using FeedBurner, I see that icon all over the place. Quite honestly, I haven’t yet taken the time to explore this service yet – and I really should, because it seems very popular and versatile. I’ll definitely be writing more about it later. FeedBurner doesn’t generate feeds for you, but once you have a feed it’s a way to add on some neat features, such as circulation estimates, format options, etc.