Hi, James I'm glad the FeedBurner tip helped. To be fair to Syndic8, I've had a couple of very useful tips from members of this group, It seems to have been started by enthusiasts long before slick companies like FeedBurner moved in on the scene. The trouble with enthusiasts is that speak their own language. It's a bit like the old ZX80 days when enthusiasts were building their own computers and burning their own EPROMS. It was gobbledegook to the rest of us, but they knew what they were talking about. META tags are important, because they tell web crawlers what your website is about and what to do on it, like "Come back next month" or "Just look at my home page". Web crawlers are automated robot scouts that explore your site to add stuff to their search engines. If you tell them to get lost with your META tags, it's goodnight nurse! Don't panic! There's lots of help out their. Here's a link: http://freewebsubmission.com Freewebsubmission.com does two jobs. First it gives you a form to fill in for your META tags. Take your time, because it's important. It asks you questions about your website. Once you've filled in your form, its META tag generator transforms all your answers into META tags, which you can copy and paste into the HEAD of your HTML code. When you've done that, return to Freewebsubmission.com for its second job: submitting your site to 50 of the top search engines. (Be prepared for lots of e-mails; most of them want to sell you advertising space!) This isn't the only firm that helps in this way. There are websites that check your site for broken links, that check your code, that even check the popularity of your KEYWORDS! For masses of useful information, clearly presented, visit http://www.htmlclinic.com To Blog or not to Blog; that is the question. Soon after I started my blog as an adjunct to my website, I read a tip from someone who promotes arts websites, and he reckons that the best way to get your site known on the web is to link a Blog to your website. A Blog is something you can update quickly and easily with news items, whereas you don't want to keep rewriting your website. My Blog is art news, some of which points to my website, some of which doesn't. My website doesn't do newsworthy things all the time (I update my What's on in London page with new art exhibitions I can recommend). But it's surprising how often art pops up in the news. That gives me something for my Blog, and my hits have recently started to creep up, having been in the doldrums for yonks. The thing with news syndication is that it has to be news of some kind. If you haven't any news for your website, syndication is a waste of time. You're better off concentrating on your META tags and maybe paying for some advertising. Try my Blog to see how I've kept the art news flowing and linked it to my own website: http://coxsoft.blogspot.com/ Best of luck Ian
James Copenhaver <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: Ian, Thanks for the tip on FeedBurner. Personally, I pulled out more than a few hairs and hurled a few expletives trying to get a straight answer out of them. I think I got everything set up correctly, but don't know for sure. The biggest problem I had was they blended RSS and blog instructions together and it was REALLY confusing to me. This is one of those areas in IT where you still are dealing with people that are clueless about customer service. In my case, all I want to do is push content out to whomever wants it. I don't want a blog or need one at this point. What would be helpful to people just starting out (just like me) is a simple list of commands to embed in your web pages and a simple list of commands to embed in your rss.xml page as well. For example: Do you need items like the ones below listed between your <head> </head> tags on each of your HTML pages? <link rel="service.feed" type="application/atom+xml" title="Whatever Subject" href="http://www.whateverurl.com"/> <link rel="service.post" type="application/atom+xml" title="Whatever Subject" href="http://www.whateverurl.com"; /> <link rel="EditURI" type="application/rsd+xml" title="RSD" href="http://www.whateverurl.com"; /> I understand these are helpful if you have a blog, but will they do any good for an RSS feed? If these are beneficial, are there other things you should stick in here as well? On the RSS.XML file, I have read a number of confusing articles and books that also tend to blend information about blogs and RSS. Do feeds really want permalink information? As long as you are generating the filenames and know how to keep your articles separate, is there a format they want? What is it and why? I've seen formats like: whateversubject.htm#12345 Is there a rhyme and/or reason to those formats? As long as you have tags like title, link, description, copyright, language, category, author, and pubDate. Do you really need anything else like permalink or GPS locations? If so, which ones? If you choose not to include the other tags, are there any penalties you could have for not including them? This is the kind of information, if available, would help everyone trying to set up an RSS feed and help standardize things for everyone. Many of us do not want to spend hours each week trying to figure a lot of this stuff out. We have other things to do and want to offer RSS to people as an information option. Thanks- James Copenhaver, PMP Key Results Management, Inc. Work: (404) 437-6485 Cell: (404) 290-6246 <http://www.k-r-m.com/> www.k-r-m.com <http://www.abc-concepts.com/> <http://www.abc-concepts.com/> www.abc-concepts.com Advanced Business Continuity Concepts Five Day Introductory Workshops _____ From: Ian Cox [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, January 26, 2006 8:08 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [syndic8] RSS Feeds and fear of getting left behind Hi, James $200 sounds a lot. Try FeedBurner. It's free, fairly straightforward and it's worked well for me so far. Other sites - including Syndic8 - accept my FeedBurner feed that wouldn't accept a feed from my blogsite. Ian James Crotty <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: I too am having trouble trying to understand the complexities of RSS Feeds. It seems as if this next development of internet communication is talked about in a way that makes it appear much more complex than it really is. One resource that I've found to be somewhat helpful is Seth Godin's blog over at http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/ . On a recent post Seth recommended a program called Feedcraft for creating and managing feeds. I haven't tried it yet (it's $200). I, like most everyone else, who was pretty basic in knowledge and usage of the internet, am becoming worried that suddently I'm going to get "left behind" in this further development of the web. It also seems like the two major players in the game - Yahoo and Google - are both putting their development resources toward interactive, blog communities where communication between members and interested parties will take place primarily via "feeds." 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