Setting Up RSS Feed

[Mister Wizard]

After futzing around forever trying to figure out how to get an RSS feed working for my webcomic, Bad Shape (http://badshape.net), I stumbled upon rapidFeeds.com (http://www.rapidfeeds.com) .

It's a free online service that is just slick. I like to think I'm pretty web savy, but XML had my head spinning. Rapid Feed is easy to learn and allows you to create and manage your feeds from a browser interface. The only editing on my page that I had to do was adding a RSS link to my site's main menu and adding a line within my header for auto-detection (nice for readers who use FireFox and other browsers with built in feed aggregators). I'm sure there are similar online resources like this, but this is one of the smoothest I've come across.

Had my feed (http://rss.rapidfeeds.com/?fid=4623) up in less then half an hour. Hope this helps anyone else who's been struggling with RSS. :)

[Shishio]

There's also RSSpect (http://www.rsspect.com).

[Mister Wizard]

There's also RSSpect (http://www.rsspect.com).
Brought this up over at one of the LJ communities I subscribed to and someone said the same thing. I think RSSpect is very cool. I actually played with both tools before settling on Rapid Feeds. Here's a cut-paste from the other conversation on why:



Essentially, I went with Rapid Feed for two reasons:

Unless I was doing something wrong, RSSpect (the free version) doesn't keep stats on your feeds. Rapid Feed does.

And another big plus was that if your readers aren't using a browser with feed auto-detection (like FireFox has), then they need to click a link to subscribe to your feed. I've noticed that when you click on the link created by other RSS apps, if you don't have an aggregator installed, it dumps the reader into a jumble of XML. I had no idea what that was all about when I started and I assume a lot of other people might not understand the problem either. Rapid Feed alleviates that by allowing those who click the link to go to a page that walks them through the process of subcribing to a feed and even suggests a couple of feed aggregators that they could install.

But, if those items aren't important to you, RSSpect is another great tool. Thanks for bringing it up!

[Shishio]

I see. I may have to use Rapid Feeds myself, then.