Article: Show Headlines on Your Site!
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in the heyday of freebies, there were several free cut and paste
newsfeed services that were available to webmasters. Then most of them
either disappeared or went paid, leaving amateur webmasters in the lurch.
If you're one of them, don't despair. In this article you'll learn how
you can still display syndicated content on your site.
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Moreover is now paid. Isyndicate disappeared. Many amateur webmasters like myself whimpered. We had reason to. Newsfeeds and syndicated content were and still are a wonderful way of adding spice and variety to your site.
Although many of those popular cut and paste newsfeed services are no longer available to the public, you can still display newsfeeds on your site. However, this time doing this is going to take a little bit more legwork on your part.
RSS AND SYNDICATION
The answer lies in something called "RSS," a protocol of XML. You may have noticed that a lot of sites (especially blogs and news and news sites) will have a little square icon that has the letters "XML" on it. This icon is a link to a newsfeed source that you can then display on your site. You do this by right clicking, then choosing "save target as" so that you can get a copy of the newsfeed's URL."Is that all?" you are probably thinking. Great! Guess
it's just a matter of now adding this URL to the html of your web site,
right?
Adding Headlines: A Slight Problem
Uh... not so fast. First of all, if you just plunked the newsfeed URL on your page, it would just place a link to the raw code that makes it.Secondly, if you decided to just place that raw code on your web site, anyway, it still wouldn't work. It would just place what looks like gibberish on your site. But why?
That's because the stuff that feeds are made of are written in a different code from HTML. As a result, you can't just paste this code on any web site and expect it to display normally. It has to be translated in a way that will make it viewable on web pages. In other words, RSS feeds have to be parsed in order to properly display on your web site.
Before you start wringing your hands, luckily the process is not as
difficult as you think. Let's start with an easy way to do this and the
not so easy way.