Add RSS Feeds to Your Site the Easy Way
Posted by: Tim Ambler | October 10, 2006
RSS feeds are an invaluable tool for the webmaster. RSS makes it possible for you to take advantage of the nearly-limitless amount of information that others have made freely available on the web, thus keeping your web site fresh with up-to-date content. And to top it all off, this is all possible with a very minimal amount of effort on your part. In the following paragraphs, I'll show you how.
First, you'll want to download this PHP script.
Step One:
Open "lastRSS.php" with your favorite text editor. Update the very first variable in the file so that it points to your favorite RSS feed. You will find that it is currently set to the following feed:
http://www.bizjournals.com/rss/feed/daily/nashville
This RSS feed displays business news relevant to those near the Nashville, Tennessee area. Millions more are freely available. To find more, simply search Google for the phrase "RSS feeds," or point your web browser to the following address:
Step Two:
Create a directory titled "cache" with write permissions.
Step Three:
The entire purpose of this tutorial is to show you how to include an RSS feed within your own web site. So, the final step in this process is to include the "lastRSS.php" file within your own web site. You can do this by adding the following PHP code to your site:
include("./lastRSS.php");
Open your web site, and you should now see a well-formatted, bulleted-list that displays the information contained within your chosen RSS feed.
Tim Ambler serves as the Director of Client Development for MediaJolt, a Nashville web site design and search engine marketing company based in Brentwood, Tennessee. Tim can be contacted directly at tim@mediajolt.com
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