Easy Ways to Publish Your Own RSS Feeds

There's little doubt that RSS — or Really Simple Syndication — is a great technology for staying on top of news and announcements that are important to your organization and its mission.

But did you know that, just as you can leverage other sites' RSS feeds, your nonprofit can also create its own feeds in order to deliver new and important information to your constituents and supporters?

Syndicating your organization's content in an RSS feed that you make available on your Web site is different from using someone else's RSS feed and reprinting their syndicated content on your site. Think of the former as publishing an outgoing RSS feed and the latter as making use of an incoming feed. (For more information on how to repurpose someone else's content, see TechSoup's RSS Feed Launch Page.)

There are a handful of options for creating outgoing RSS feeds that don't require a major technical effort. For instance, your organization's blog software may already have a feature that automatically transforms your posts into RSS feeds your audience can subscribe to. The same is true of many content management systems. Alternatively, there are a number of inexpensive Web-based feed-creation services that can generate an RSS feed of almost any page on your Web site.

No matter which method you choose, giving your supporters a convenient way to access your content without having to regularly check your organization's Web site can help make it easier for them to stay active and involved in your cause.

Blog-Driven News Feeds

In addition to content-publishing tools, the majority of popular blogging services include features that will serve up your posts as a news feed. If you need to add multiple feeds to your site, check to see if your blogging platform supports this functionality, since some free, popular blogging platforms — such as Blogger — only provide one feed per blog.

While many blogging services allow you to create an RSS feed, others instead support Atom, a type of syndicated XML feed that is very similar to RSS. (For a look at the technical differences between RSS and Atom, consult Intertwingly's Atom Wiki post.) Most of the newer feed-reading applications and services support both syndication formats, but keep in mind that older versions of news-reading software might only be compatible with RSS. In any case, no matter which of the two formats you choose, the feeds will look about the same once they reach your subscribers' aggregators.

If your nonprofit is seeking a Web-based blogging service that supports both Atom and RSS feeds, consider LiveJournal or TypePad. By contrast, Blogger only creates feeds in the Atom format, while WordPress.com only offers support for RSS.

RSS from Your CMS

Many organizations that regularly publish their own articles and news stories — or repurpose them through a Creative Commons license — have chosen to implement a content management system (CMS), an application specifically designed to organize, store, and publish content. In addition to their main features, some CMSs also include tools for adding RSS feeds to your site.

For instance, Drupal and Plone — two free, open-source CMSs — both allow you to add feeds natively to individual items or entire sections of your Web site. By contrast, some other CMSs require extensions to enable this functionality or don't support it at all. And while it's highly unlikely that you'd ever spend the time to implement a CMS just because you wanted to add news feeds to your site, you may want consider RSS support (or lack thereof) if you are already considering installing content-management software.

Online Services for Building Feeds

If creating an RSS feed using a CMS or a blogging platform isn't a feasible or ideal solution, try experimenting with a few of the many Web-based tools that allow anyone with an Internet connection to build a feed. Many of these services are free, though some will feature ads on free feeds and will charge you a monthly fee if you wish to create more than one RSS feed or need technical support. It's also important to consider how much time your organization's staff members can spend maintaining the feed, as some online services will require you to manually add the new headlines, links, and descriptive text you want delivered to your subscribers

Smaller organizations that seek a low-maintenance RSS-creation option might investigate FeedYes or Ponyfish. Though these services are primarily intended to allow Web surfers to receive updates from sites that lack their own RSS feeds, your nonprofit can also use them to serve up your own headlines and content.

Both of these services work by "scraping" the links and text off a given page on your Web site and saving the links and text into an XML document. (An RSS feed is basically an XML document that is formatted so that an aggregator can read it.) Both FeedYes and PonyFish are similar to configure and simple to use. First, enter the URL of the page you want to create a feed for. Then, when you're shown all the links on that page, choose the ones you want to include in the feed (since some are navigation links that you don't want in the feed). Finally, select the button to generate the XML document. You can then add a link to that document from your Web page. And there you go — that's your RSS feed, available for anyone to access.

Though FeedYes will allow you to create as many RSS feeds as you'd like, you'll have to pay a small yearly subscription fee to remove the ads. Ponyfish also lets users create an unlimited number of feeds, though if you want the service to refresh the feeds every hour (instead of every four hours) for a minimal fee.

If your nonprofit wants to create a feed that consists of articles and links from a number of different pages, you can do so by creating a free account at sites like LinkRSS, Publi.sh, HitRSS, and FeedPublish.com. Services such as these do not update feeds automatically and will require someone at your organization to manually enter URLs and headlines each time you want to add a new item to your feed. On the plus side, users who subscribe to the feed won't have to take any additional steps to receive the latest articles and news.

For a more thorough list of feed-creation services, check out RSS Compendium's directory of RSS editors.

Feed-Creation Software

While building a feed using a free online site is cost-effective and simple, this approach does have a couple of potential downsides. First of all, a free Web-based service may not offer any kind of tech support should you have problems building the feed or your subscribers stop receiving updates. Also, since these types of sites typically host your organization's feed on their own servers, you could run into trouble in the event that they have technical problems or simply cease to exist.

If you want to ensure that your news feed is always up and running properly, you may want to host it on your own servers. Unless you have access to technically skilled volunteers or staffers who can build the news feeds themselves, you might try a specialized piece of software to make the feed-creation process easier.

Nonprofits that lack experience working with feed-creation software might prefer a program that's geared toward novices. Applications such as Alnera FeedWorkshop, ExtraLabs Feed Editor, FeedForAll, and Jitbit RSS Feed Creator all offer wizards, step-by-step, interactive guides that walk users through the process of building an unlimited number of feeds. (At publication time, all of the programs listed above ran for less than $50.)

In addition to their user-friendly interfaces, these programs all offer features that attach images to feeds; generate XML code; and upload completed feeds to your Web server via FTP. The aforementioned feed-creation applications all offer some sort of trial period, so you can test and compare them before you buy.

RSS Compendium's directory of RSS editors also lists a large number of feed-creation software packages, so you may want to research additional utilities there.

Now, Get That Feed on Your Site

If you created a feed using a blog or a hosted Web service, getting it to appear on your nonprofit's site is merely a matter of adding a link to its URL in your page's HTML file. On the other hand, if you built the news feed using a software package, you'll need to upload the file to your server before you link out to it. Either way, visitors to your nonprofit's site can then subscribe to your feed by simply copying and pasting its URL into their news readers. If you suspect that your supporters don't fully understand what RSS feeds are and how they work, you should include some explanatory text; feel free to modify and republish TechSoup's RSS Feed Launch Page to help clarify this technology to your audience.

Besides a link to your feed, you may also want to add a graphical icon that says "RSS" or "XML". Both acronyms are often used interchangeably, though the term "RSS" might be a bit more familiar to non-technical visitors. (Organizations that lack graphic-design resources can quickly build a custom button using this free online tool.) It's also worth noting that many sites are moving toward a standard icon to denote the presence of news feeds.

Many site owners also make their news feeds available through Mozilla Firefox's Live Bookmarks feature, which acts as the browser's built-in feed-reading tool. To ensure that your visitors will be able to subscribe to your RSS or Atom feed from directly within Firefox's address bar, follow the instructions found in this HTMLfixIT.com tutorial. If you do everything correctly, you should see a feed icon to the far right side of Firefox's address bar when you launch your organization's Web site.

Though adding an RSS or Atom feed to your Web site might call for a bit of creativity, it won't require a large budget or extensive technology skills. Best of all, equipping your site with a feed brings your organization one step closer to making sure that your supporters never miss another fundraising event, rally, or meeting — and that's something that all nonprofits can benefit from.