I have been running some queries, and pulling dead RSS feeds from the daily polling of new content. I’ve also been browsing through user accounts to see if there’s any obvious abuse going on. Would love to keep the RSS feed service available for those that are using it, as long as the service doesn’t get abused. If that becomes the case again, I may just pull the plug on the current site, and relaunch something entirely different.

So don’t expect anything too extraordinary taking place over the next month, but hopefully the regular cleaning activity is going to get me motivated to reestablish the site as an active member of the RSS feed community.

Cheers!

Many good things for you in 2009!

Some things I’ve learned and was reminded of in the past few days…

Generally, people love birthdays, and rightfully so. There are few things better than being able to give well wishes to someone you appreciate, love, admire, share friendship with, or whatever. Ever notice in restaurants that when someone has a birthday, even strangers at neighboring tables want to participate? Think about it, it’s really very cool that we direct positive energy to apparently total strangers in celebrating their date of birth.

Earlier this week I had an opportunity to wish an influential individual in my life, Danny Sullivan, a happy birthday. I had been thinking about his birthday for a couple of weeks simply because I recently discovered we were born about a month apart (I bet Danny watched Gilligan’s Island too). After exploring several ideas, last week I created this birthday card, which included avatar images of many people that know Danny, and participate in a community, I’ve greatly been benefiting from being a part of.

Party of ONE Was this a marketing effort? Was this some method I came up with to get a popular post on Sphinn? No, can’t say I had any brilliant strategy planned. When I first arrived at Sphinn, I had my “ME” hat on, and nobody appeared to care. Turns out that was a good thing.

Glue can be damn sticky: Stubborn as I am, I hung around and began reading posts submitted by community members such as Lee Odden, Andy Beard, and Tamar Weinberg (there were many others). Well, as the saying goes, stick your hand in a pot of glue, and the glue tends to stick. Stick your head in a website featuring content from some of the worlds top SEOs, and the ideas stick.

Wanna Party? As the weeks went on I became more active in the community and found myself commenting on posts, submitting posts, authoring Sphinn related posts, linking to authors, commenting on other blogs, and having a significantly enjoyable time. Others noticed this and as a result began commenting back, visiting my websites, emailing, messaging, and linking to topics I authored on various websites. Imagine that?!

Friends make parties fun! I submitted the birthday card on a Sunday (Dannys birthday was later that week) in hopes that it may make the homepage by Monday. Sphinn had recently upped the trigger on getting posts popular and I honestly didn’t think it would go far. The Sphinn community took over from there and taught me a thing or two (thank you).

Lesson 1: Community is a powerful thing, the web is more fun when shared with friends

Lesson 2: Breath, stop trying so hard, participate with your head & heart

Lesson 3: The answers are often already there…

Holy Moly, I’ve been wishing people happy birthday (in my brick & morter world) nearly everyday for the past decade. Turns out the same principles apply online.

The practice of birthday boards and birthday cards have been successful in small businesses for decades, but can any of these ideas apply to the world of blogging?

Maybe not in the same way but I did get some ideas that can be useful if you are an SEO and want to contribute positively in your community. Now, some people want to keep info private, so if there are no public profiles of birthday information, it may not be a good idea to out them on your blog. I mean, I’m not going to seek out FaceBook info on Lisa Barone and risk her writing a pudding like article about me.

That being said, I noticed some other influential people in my web life had birthdays in September. How difficult would it be for me to use my blog and say Happy Birthday to Vanessa Fox sometime this month? Vanessa has the best “About Page” I’ve seen in a blog and she’s taught me a few things about improving my sites. To that I say thank you and… Happy Birthday Vanessa!

The day before I joined Sphinn I authored an article about Yellow Page Directories and I mentioned that a company called Marchex was doing an incredible job in the area of SEO. Only today I discovered that Matt McGee was the SEO Manager at Marchex (what a coincidence).

Matt has been incredibly helpful to me in the Sphinn community and guess what else? Matt’s birthday is in September! Does not take much effort for me to say thank you and… Happy Birthday Matt!

Many Thanks: I have a number of people to say thank you to for helping in various ways. I’ll be finding an avenue to show my appreciation but thanks for being a part of this all.

Some people I had wanted to give props to include:

Rhea Drysdale: who gave me the willies when I saw her “over the cliff photo.”
Chris Winfield: a helpful search marketer in New York.
Bill Hartzer: Bill just updated his blog, looks great!
David Wallace: over at SearchRank Blog.
Shana Albert: who manages a number of websites related to Home Preschool.
Jill Whalen: Jill is the CEO of HighRankings.com.
Mark Laymon: I’ve been closely following Marks advice to Become a Power User of Sphinn in 5 Steps.
Andy Beard: Gotta get some WordPress SEO going as this blog is long overdue for an update.

Monday, September 24, 2007
Happy 42nd Birthday Danny Sullivan!

Many of the gang from Sphinn are here to celebrate your 42nd birthday. We are all wishing you the very best on this day. Check out all the familiar faces and avatars on the card below. Some of us have been stalking you!

Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday dear Danny, happy birthday to you!

I tried to get everyone I could on the card, apologies for those I may have missed.

If you went to bed early Friday night, the night of September 21, you missed out on what was likely the first Sphinn-To-Sphinn, Head-To-Head, Post-To-Post event of the year.

I know you’re probably bummed out because you either went out partying with friends, went to bed, spent time with family, or did some other non-Sphinn related activity. Not to worry, because I’ve got your back with play-by-play action of what had to have been the biggest Sphinn event of the evening!

The Playing Field: The Submit Section on the Sphinn web site.

The Players: AndyBeard & dsemmler

From the .EU, the Big A, Sphinns one and only Andy Beard. The Niche Marketing master holds a strong position with a current Topics Submitted score of: 24. Not only that, AndyBeard is a Top 10 ranked SphinnMaster who commands an early adopter Joined Date of: 2007-07-19.

From somewhere in the U. S., the proud daddy, the newcomer underdog, Derek Semmler, Sphinn aka dsemmler, with a Joined Date of: 2007-09-04. The newcomer had a Topics Submitted score of: 1, making him truly the unfavored contender.

The Target: a post authored by Marty Weintraub on his aimClear Blog titled: The Enduring Power of Good Manners

Both players were visiting Marty’s blog the evening of September 21. In what was likely the scenario, both Andy and Derek had virtual light bulbs go off in their heads, thinking this was Sphinn Worthy content. The race was on!

They both hit the Sphinn submit page at approximately the same time, even though they were each physically on different continents. Each were unaware of the other’s actions, making the event even more exciting.

AndyBeard, the seasoned veteran went straight for the submit button, and made no deviations from Marty’s original headlines. His description was typed out with lightning speed, and it read… It seems like Marty is a gentleman

No need for spellcheck, Andy went straight for the submit button, SPHUNN! Andy was on the “What’s New” board with a score of one. As fate would have it, I was on that very page in search of something fresh, and there was Andy’s post. The familiar “A” had me instantly, I was certain this would be a topic worthy of a vote. My index finger poised, I moved in to read the post.

But wait, who is that man in the dark sunglasses? It was a post appearing just above Andy’s with a “Jump to” on the same story URL. I just had to check it out. Turns out it was the same post, by the same author, Marty! The newcomer wanted to make a splash with his first submission to Sphinn. In doing so, he got creative and summarized the entire post in a single sentence, which became his title. He followed that with a few descriptive sentences and double checked to make sure “Marty Weintraub” was spelled properly. Imagine making your first post, and dissing a top 50 Sphinner? Had he misspelled it, the result could have been disastrous (the thrill of victory – the agony of defeat).

Semmler carefully checked his title and description in the spellchecker, and when he was fully confident, clicked on the submit button. SPHUNN! Like AndyBeard, Semmler now had a score of one. You were likely asleep, but it was a Sphinntastic moment! In Los Angeles, it was nearly 2 minutes to midnight (rain was pouring down for the first time in months), there were 2 Sphinners, 2 Submissions, and the posts hit the “What’s New” page only 2 Minutes Apart!

Wow, was anyone else aware of this? This was truly a Sphinn Live event. In WWE smackdown fashion, I decided to comment and call the newcomer out. Andy had sphunn the Sphinn button first! The sunglass wearing dsemmler wielded his mouse and was quick to respond in a truly gentleman fashion, claiming he was checking to ensure Marty’s name was spelled correctly, hence the two minute gap.

I thought it might end there, but in from Texas came flyingrose, the goddess of PPC, taking a referee stance, and showing interest on the event continuing. And continue it did! Throughout the night and all across the globe, at least two dozen fellow sphinners came on the scenes and got clicking. Morning came, and I awoke to a Sphinn homepage on my screen. I quickly hit the F5 key on my keyboard. It was Sphinnalicious! Both submissions had gone hot and Marty was getting double barrel Sphinn juice!

Three Hidden Treasures of Social Media – Thank You, Please and Congratulations
Went Hot: September 22, 2007 – 5:44 am
Posted By: dsemmler 12 hours ago
Topic Type: News Story
Category: Networking

The Enduring Power of Good Manners
Went Hot: September 22, 2007 – 4:57 am
Posted By: AndyBeard 12 hours ago
Topic Type: News Story
Category: Other Social Media

While its winding down, the race is still on, and there is no winner yet. The moral of the story here is that some topics are not only Sphinn worthy, they are double barrel, double bandwidth, Sphinn worthy!

Early this morning I was commenting on a post appearing on Sphinn related to local business searches and yellow page advertising. Moments after I finished my comment I received a phone call I’d like to believe came as a result of optimized local SEO. In hopes of us all learning from it, I thought I’d share that information with you today.

Case Study on Local Search for September 17, 2007

Health-Care Office: A phone call was received from a female in her late 20s or early 30s. She had been doing some online research and was seeking a specific health care practitioner in the local area. She was calling on behalf of her husband, who works in the tech industry.

The couple recently moved to the area from out-of-state. The caller reported having a good experience with this particular approach to her husband’s health care, but since they were new to the area, they did not have a direct referral.

During the call, the following information was gathered (as relates to our study). The city the individual was calling from, her name, her husband’s name, and a phone number where she could be reached for follow-up. Appointment for her husband was scheduled and she was thanked for choosing the office. She was assured her husband would be well cared for.

In this particular kind of situation (for this type of local business), the goal is to schedule the individual for an appointment. I’d chalk that up as a successful effort. Lets break down what went on and see what we can learn from it.

Analysis

• Phone call from female
• Typically in mid-20s to early 30s
• Calling on behalf of her spouse
• Couple recently moved to area from another state
• Husband works in tech industry
• Husband was at work during the time of the call

Observations
This pattern in local search is common. Female of the household is doing research. She is likely to be somewhat tech savvy, well-educated, and knows what to look for. She uses several online services and methods for search, such as Google, Yahoo Local, and web sites offering reviews on local businesses. If available, she will check the business web site as well.

In this case, the phone call came from the homepage of the local business web site. We know that because the office uses tracked phone numbers, which provides specific data on where the lead was generated.

Why no Yellow Pages?
Think about it, the couple recently moved to the area. They have likely not yet ordered local phone service (they may never do so) and it’s doubtful there is a phone book in the residence. In this case, the number given was a cell phone number for the city and state the couple moved from, further evidence there is not likely to be a phone book nearby. This is common for local businesses receiving calls from perspective new clients who have searched online.

The individual calling was already familiar with the industry and knew what to look for, so once her questions were answered properly, the situation was satisfied.

SEO Tips
Focus on geographic areas that meet the above model. A number of communities across the United States are growing, with young couples being the largest groups moving into the area. Many either work in the tech industry or are at least more likely to use online methods in gathering new local business information. Newly built communities are some of the easiest to optimize for. Many even have multiple rich keyword related domains available. Pay attention to real estate trends and newly created communities. Seek opportunities to provide similar SEO services for a number of different businesses in the same community.

It’s truly amazing how much information you can gather from a single phone call as long as you’re prepared to ask questions. Perhaps, I’ll do a follow up on what methods were used by the caller during her search for a local business. If so, I’ll post that information here.

If you’re a player in any space, you missed an opportunity this week, as the Britney story has been getting all sorts of attention.

You don’t need me to rehash the Britney drama, there’s thousands of others doing that. However, the ever-changing story is nowhere near dead, and I’m betting Britney will continue being a great source for linkbait for some time to come. As Michael said, “the girl is a never ending fountain of material” so get prepared to ride the next wave.

The point of Gray’s post was to “be diligent and monitor trends and current events.” Michael suggested linkbaiters look for creative ways to bridge those gaps between the real world, pop culture, and your site.

By the time I checked Michaels post there were several comments, and I found the conversation interesting. While the concept is a great idea, a reader reported that interest in pop culture events like this one spike and disappear too fast for most people. They go on to suggest that what Michael Gray describes seems impossible to plan for. Others making comments appeared to feel the same way.

Make the impossible possible by following these tips…

Load up Your Linkbait Tackle Box
In order for this to work on a regular basis, you’ve got to be organized and well prepared. If you want to hit topics while the iron is hot, you’ve got to have the basics taken care of in advance. Regardless if your story is going to be about a celebrity, a sports figure, a holiday, or current event, the goal is to drive traffic to your preselected locations. While there we’ll be variables, the foundation of your content can be prefabricated.

Links
Get your links in order so they are ready to be cut and pasted into your post at a moments notice.

Bio
Have a few sentences ready about you (or your client) along with predetermined links. Have them ready to be cut and pasted into your posts.

Images
Build a collection of images and store them in a place you can get to easily (preferably on your webserver). This step alone could separate you from the crowd as you may be one of the few providing image content in a sea of virtual fisher persons.

How I’ve developed my approach over the years is I’ve kept a bundle of images on my web server, so I can access them from anywhere. I’ll keep a text file copy of all the things I mentioned above on my laptop, with everything already formatted in proper HTML tags. Using this approach, if you were sitting in an airport waiting for your flight, and a fresh topic broke, you’d have your entire tackle box available, and you could potentially get a story posted before take off.

Scan
Keep a close eye on as many social media and news sites that you can. Watch for patterns emerging in posted topics. With practice, you’ll be able to better spot the big ones or the ones that best fit your goals.

Know Tomorrow, Today
You’d think this would be the toughest part, but it’s actually the easiest. It’s September 2007 and the NFL season has started, NASCAR is going, a World Series is upon us, the fall network TV season has begun, kids are back in school, Halloween is around the bend. Catch my drift?

Get Smart
The VMA awards happen every year, so do the Grammys, so do the Oscars. Let’s not forget the Clio awards, Screen Actors Guild Awards, and others. They are all held the same times of year, and there’s always a story to be told. This same line of thinking applies to the Tour de France, NBA playoffs, Masters Cup, Kentucky Derby, X-Games, and I could go on. Drill into your niche markets and you’ve got annual conferences, marathons, fundraisers, food drives, and juicy, ready to be hooked, topics.

If you are interested in examples, take a look at 5 completely unrelated topics (from this summer) that all tied into one websites mission. All produced new inbound links.

Google Introducing 10 Second Advertising
Web Tool Outs Wikipedia Manipulators
2007 Tour de France
X Games 13
Beyonce falls

Grab your best bait, and get ready to party!

About the author: Michael Dorausch lives in Venice Beach, CA.

Let’s get some RSS feed buttons on those presidential web sites so people can subscribe to your feeds and keep up-to-date with what you’re talking about.

OK, here are some feeds for the 2008 presidential candidates.

Barack Obama has two RSS feeds available for subscription directly from the homepage of his campaign web site. Obama 08 Blog and Obama 08 News. Both feeds are handled by FeedBurner.

John Edwards had one RSS feed that I could locate. Hillary Clinton has an RSS feed on her blog. I almost left the web site of Mitt Romney since I couldn’t find any RSS feed subscription buttons. I believe I found the RSS feed while looking around the site map.

RSS feeds for Senator John McCain were difficult to find as well. The John Mccain RSS feed that I could locate includes a horrendous URL and string of numerical characters.

Sadly, I could not locate any RSS feeds for Rudy Giuliani or Ron Paul. Someone had seriously be working on those web sites, and get them up to speed.

There is also a user list of 2008-Election-Feeds on the KickRSS web site.

Here’s a list of RSS feeds from very popular people in the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) world. The first is from Glen Allsopp of viperchill, an expert in the field of social media marketing.

The second is from Long Island resident and notorious SEO expert, Michael Gray, also known as Wolf-Howl.

The third is from that Texan SEO guy, Bill Hartzer.

Number four is from niche exploring SEO, Andy Beard. Andy’s blog focuses on Blog Search Engine Performance, WordPress, Niche Marketing, and Affiliate Marketing Tips.

No great list of SEO resource would be complete without Lee Odden, TopRank’s internet marketing blog about the intersection of social media, search marketing and online public relations.

Next we go to an RSS feed for Lyndon Antcliff and his CornwallSeoblog feed.

For those that want some of the best PPC information out there, be sure to subscribe to the RSS feed of Rose Sylvia, a blog to help you optimize your Pay Per Click Online advertising results at Google AdWords.

That’s the big 7 for today. If you’ve got any great SEO RSS feeds you think we should know about, post a comment.

Was searching for RSS and real estate. One WordPress blog based real estate site RSS Realtor had a nice WordPress theme, but not much content. I was even surprised by the lack of advertising appearing when performing Google searches using combined keywords of real estate and RSS. Among top results for natural searches were the usual expected big media web sites such as the New York Times, The Real Estate Journal (owned by the Wall Street Journal), and the Washington Post.

I would’ve surely expected to see someone aggregating either residential listings or commercial listings into RSS feeds that could be displayed all from one web site. I checked out some major web sites like Yahoo’s real estate pages and MSN’s real estate pages, but no options to subscribe to any RSS feeds.

It doesn’t seem like a big jump to me to convert listings related to real estate into RSS feeds. RSS is working spectacularly well in niche areas that are utilizing feed technology for classified ads. A niche market example is chiropractic classifieds (offers free classifieds for the entire profession) and a broad example is Craigslist.org (classifieds for nearly every city in the United States, and other metro areas throughout the world).

Appears to me that there’s an early adopter advantage in the real estate space.

For those involved in this kind of work here are some links…
XSLT Functions
Sablotron

Some examples of user pages with xslt ad supported output…
SexyPhotos
San-Diego-Local
Ozzfest
HandBags
Nylons-Photo-Feed
WordCamp2007
WordPress
online-coupon-codes

Thanks to Sergey and Tommy for getting these features back up and running smoothly.

There is some work to do in regards to how were going to organize topics but we’ll likely begin posting information and then organize afterwards. We’ll be covering everything from news articles, to celebrities, music stars, what’s going on television, and other related topics for that particular time and day.

Should be a real interesting experiment. Hang on!

Zoodango is a new social networking site for business professionals that hopefully like meeting at Staurbucks. The concept of the site is to connect professionals through local events at places like Starbucks. What makes Zoodango unique is that it allows you to find people online and network with them face-to-face, coffee breath to coffee breath.

I setup an account and it was fairly smooth. Not enough categories yet for various businesses but they’ll hopefully be expanding on that. Some cool features include being able to blog, add photos (both professional and playtime), upload video (from youtube and google video), and post bios.

I searched the site over and could not locate any RSS information as of yet. Amazes me when new web 2.0 sites launch and there are no RSS implementations. Let’s watch this new social networking site and see where it goes.

First we had SMTP, it is the protocol that gave us email, which is a “pushed” content delivery method. Then we had HTTP and that protocol gave us www, which is a form of “static” content delivery. Now we have RSS, also used for content delivery, it uses a “pull” method.

With me so far?

I’m going to use a photographer account on KickRSS (gerbrandt) as an example to demonstrate. His name is Larry and he produces some of the greatest photos I’ve seen.

Larry takes a photo and uploads it to his website, in this case flickr. His would have been better because I would’ve given in a link from here.

SMTP: Larry can email all his friends about his new photo and either attach it or send everyone to his website for viewing.
HTTP: People can go to the website using an http browser and view it there.
RSS: Currently using an RSS reader, either desktop, email, web based, or mobile, we can view Larrys photo (or at least know it exists)

Larry decides he wants to change some colors on the image so he does.

SMTP: Larry can either email everyone again with edited image attached or suggest they go to website.
HTTP: Larry replaces image but people have to visit the page to see changes.
RSS: Larrys image is Everyones image. We all experience the same image (unless we saved it as something else)

Now, let’s move forward…
Larry RSS enables a photo directory on his computer which has internet connectivity. I “subscribe” to the directory RSS and place the feed on a plasma TV in my home or office. Larry delivers beautiful photos to all who enter, always fresh, always updating.

Imagine now it’s a piece of music, video, or other form of content. Just as SMTP (email) could not display images until we had MIME and HTTP (web) could not show video until we had flash and others), RSS is quietly growing as a content delivery medium that will continue to improve so don’t pooh pooh it just yet.

Mix in some $$$ and you’ve got what I’d consider the “next killer app.”

Most web users are currently usng RSS for news and blog articles but there is more opportunity available. Some big winners in RSS to date include technorati (rss backend) and feedburner (sold to Google for one hundred million).

Here are some very simple examples of RSS in use for “other content”…

Larrys Latest Photos… http://www.kickrss.com/gerbrandt

Classified Ads (insert your niche for ideas)
Taking RSS and applying it to old HTTP a website took a small niche area like classifieds for chiropractors and created an impressive service that dominates an industry. Using a web-based interface, users post one ad to one location. The ad updates and displays on any website, browser, email app, or mobile phone subscribed to the feed. If the user changes price or deletes the ad changes are noted everywhere.

So now others can display the content of the classified ads on different web sites. This creates content for webmasters, which is great for search engines. It also distributes the content of the advertisements across many channels, good for both the seller and the company providing the ads. Their service is free and it’s a great example of ways this technology can be used in small niche markets.

As an example this page displays RSS output with source ads coming from the primary website. http://www.chiropractordirectory.org/classifieds/

That’s what’s going on in the world of RSS today!

Here’s what I’m talking about. People are typing common terms such as “health RSS feeds” in hopes of locating web sites that have RSS on health related topics. It makes sense that the trend will continue and more people will be performing similar searches. For example, the web site healthRSSfeeds.com is already an active blog distributing several RSS feeds in the field of chiropractic health care.

Health certainly isn’t the only keyword people are searching. I’m seeing an increased number of searches for celebrity names as well as 2008 presidential candidates. So for example terms like “Britney Spears RSS feeds” or even “Hillary Clinton RSS feeds” are growing in popularity. I’m not sure if the majority of the searches are being done by folks wanting to add RSS feeds to their web sites as a way of building traffic or if they are users actually searching for topics they want to add to their RSS readers.

As of today’s posting, there are a heck of a lot of domains available that include the term RSS feeds in the domain. Someone is going to make a boatload of money with all the increases in RSS traffic as a result of the growing awareness of this technology.

You may want to pick up a domain in your niche area. The most popular combination reads like the health web site above… [keyword]RSSfeeds.com is the way to go about it. Get your domains today, while the getting is good.

If you buy one of these domains why don’t you send me a link!

Makes me wonder if people really understand what RSS stands for and what the benefits are when using really simple syndication for one’s web content. There was a video posted online this weekend that talked a bit about Google’s purchase of FeedBurner and what that means to the RSS community. You can watch the video here…

Note: Working on our video embed features, this page will be modified soon.

I’ve been seeing more and more use of RSS each and every day and it’s my personal opinion that Google’s RSS company purchase is going to have a great effect on the use of RSS feeds across the Internet. Advertisers using RSS are going to seek better ways to deliver their messages to their intended audience. End-users will be able to view advertising inside of RSS readers and when viewing RSS content using Web browsers that support the XML extension (such as Windows Internet Explorer 7.0 for Firefox 2.0).

Very exciting times for anyone involved in the creation of RSS related web sites, feed readers, modifications to RSS feeds, those developing style sheets and wraparounds for XML content, etc.

Google apparently purchased the Chicago-based FeedBurner to improve on ways to include Adwords advertising into RSS content.

This is great news for RSS and the RSS Feed Community as the awareness of Really Simple Syndication is going to grow exponentially over the next year, thanks to the Google purchase.

RSS is being used for news, blogs, classifieds, podcasts, finding lost dogs, and much more. Its use will certainly continue to grow, even expanding in popularity onto other platforms such as mobile and handheld PDAs. Tomorrow RSS will become to article and blog content what mp3 is to music today.

KickRSS.com is only one of many RSS aggregation websites and it is indexing through an estimated 2 million pieces of content daily, with over 186,000 news feeds, and some 1400 active user accounts. We are one of the “small” guys.

Congratulations to FeedBurner and Google on what I believe is a magnificent move.

I recently worked on a project involving a web site that has a classified ad portal running on CGI Perl scripts. The scripts were built in the 1990s, and while they have had some modifications since that time, there was no implementation of RSS being used on the website.

I took a look at some of the data files being used for this classified ad site and they were your typical pipe delimited “|” flat file database text files. First thing I had to do was go through the information that was in a typical entry for a classified ad posting and determine which parts would be important to be included into the RSS feed. Taking a look at the database file there was a numerical entry that identifies the ad post, definitely wanted to include that. There was a lot of stuff that looked like it could be important but after thinking it over and relating the ad to the context of an RSS feed, most of it could be removed. I was not interested in things like the category the ad was placed in, the city or state of the user, the web site of the user, phone number of the user, and whether they wanted to subscribe to the classified ad newsletter. The city and state of the user to come in handy in the future but I just wanted to get this thing to work.

What I did include was the numerical code that represented the ad, that became the <link>. I was also interested in the headline of the ad, which became the <title>. Following that was interested in the content or subject body of the advertisement which is in the <description> tag of the RSS feed. For <author> I used a standard entry that represented the web site the ads were posted to. The <pubDate> is auto generated and displays the date and time the ad is inserted into the RSS feed. So essentially, that’s all I needed to have information from the classified ads show up in RSS.

Here is an example…

<item>beginning of the item
<title>title of the ad
<link>link to the original ad on the website
<description>advertisement content
<author>standard information
<pubDate>auto generated
</item>end of the item

As a result this web site can now distribute their classified advertising RSS feeds via syndication, a huge plus for users of the web site as they could potentially bring in many more eyeballs to view advertisements placed by users.

In making this happen I used a tool called feedcreator (see my last post) and created a PHP file that gets updated via Cron at regular intervals. PHP file writes to the XML file, which becomes the RSS feed. If your browser supports the XML extension you can view the output of the classified ads using this link… http://www.planetc1.com/rss/cs.xml

For those of you looking to convert flat file databases into active RSS feeds I’d recommend getting the feedcreator library which will make your work a lot easier. I’ll get into the PHP file that was created to convert the flat file information we wanted into the XML feed in another post. I’m already late for work.

FeedCreator.class.php is licensed under the Lesser General Public License (LGPL) and it can be downloaded from this location: http://www.bitfolge.de/download/feedcreator_172

Among some of its great features, it creates valid feeds according to RSS 0.91, 1.0 or 2.0 as well as PIE 0.1 (deprecated), OPML 1.0, Unix mbox, ATOM 0.3, or customizable HTML or Javascript format. It offers configurable feed caching and it is easy to use.

A PHP script is checking hourly to make sure the contents of the XML file are up to date. You can view an example of the XML RSS feed output for the above-mentioned chiropractic sites news here: http://www.planetc1.com/rss/chiropractic_news.xml

What’s very cool about this script is that it’s creating an up to date RSS feed from a flat file database that’s getting written to by an old CGI news script. I have a feeling with this tool I’ll be able to turn some other flat file databases (such as one I know of in a classified ad script) into up-to-date RSS feeds.

I’ll post that information after I get the project completed and maybe I’ll show a step-by-step on converting some older formatted stuff to be read by RSS readers.