How to display RSS feeds on your website.
How to display RSS feeds on your website.
This article is intended as a guide for webmasters who
want to display automatically updated content on their website
in the form of RSS feeds. In this article I will cover the
easiest method to implement using javascript for displaying RSS
on websites to create additional dynamic content. This will
allow you to display headlines from syndicated content around
the web on your website.
RSS to Javascript.
By far the easiest method is to use client side javascript to
parse and display the headlines on your site. To achieve this
all you need to do is cut and paste some HTML or javascript code
into the web page where you want the RSS feed headlines to
display.
To achieve this there are several sites that offer a free
service that will allow you to select a few options to choose
your feed source and display formatting parameters. You will
then be presented with some javascript code that you can cut and
paste into your website.
Now before I give you the address of the sites that offer this
service freely there are a few points I need to clarify with
you. Although you will achieve your goal of displaying dynamic
content on your site in a few short minutes there are some
downsides to this method.
Javascript is not search engine friendly.
As you may or may not already know, javascript is not visible to
search engine spiders. They will not see the RSS feed you have
parsed into your site and so this will not benefit you if you
are doing this to better your search engine rankings.
You are using a third party service.
The second potential downside is that although the javascript is
on your site you are actually calling a script on another
server. This could lead to a couple of potential problems. If
the server is busy it will mean the news feed will take longer
to display on your site. The other point is if the third party
server fails or disappears altogether then your feed will not be
displayed at all.
In summary there are a few downsides, but if you do not code and
want some feeds on your site quickly then this is the way to go.
Ok, so now you understand what is involved here are the links to
the sites that provide the free RSS to javascript service. All
you need to do is follow the on site instructions.
- Feed2JS
- RSS2HTML
- RSS-to-Javascript
- FeedSweep
- RSS Xpress Lite