How to curate content with RSS feeds

What is an RSS feed?

Techssocial |  RSS or Really Simple Syndication is an old but still useful technology used to share updates from blogs and websites.

RSS essentially acts like a notifier which pulls the latest content from a website and allows users to get a special URL to subscribe to.

With this URL and RSS reading software, users are able to subscribe and get updates whenever the source publishes something new making it very handy to keep up-to-date with news or content from multiple places without having to manually visit each website.

While RSS readers are nowhere near as popular now as they once were largely due to the rise of social media sites like Facebook and Twitter the technology is still very much alive and well and can be used in a number of ways.

This article will take a look at some interesting things you can do with RSS feeds to help curate content from around the web and improve your user experience.

Finding an RSS feed

Finding an RSS feed for a website is very simple as most websites have one installed by default. Many blogs will have a link alongside their social profiles with the RSS symbol that links to their feed.

Otherwise, you can usually find the RSS feed by typing /feed after the website e.g.

exampleblog.com/feed/

Other common feed URL’s may include the following:

1. /feed.xml
2. /rss
3. /rss.xml

The feed URL will vary depending on how the website was built and how the publisher has configured their feed if they have one enabled.

Option 1: Embedding RSS feeds into your web-pages

If you want to take thematically related content from different websites and display them on your own website or on a single page then you can get different HTML widgets such as this one: agrtech.com.au

Widgets like this one allow you to insert a feed URL, choose the number of posts to show, and then get a snippet of code you can easily add to your page.

The good thing about these types of widgets is that they can work with virtually any type of website management systems such as WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, and Shopify.

Syndicating RSS feeds to social profiles

Another way of utilizing RSS feeds is to automatically post content from your favorite websites to your social media profiles or pages.

This is good to add complementary content or industry news alongside your profile and content you normally share.

In order to make this work there are a number of routes you can take such as specialized plugins for popular website builders like WordPress or Joomla or cloud-based services you can sign-up for.

This article will take a look at a platform called IFTTT which connects different services together and can work with RSS technology.

IFTTT

A free website called IFTTT (If This Then That) allows you to connect different web services together and allow them to interact together.

For example, you can connect an RSS feed with a Pinterest profile and have it post new content from the feed to your Pinterest profile.

Here is an example of such integration:

This image above is a user-generated integration which are among the thousands offered and can include other services like Blogger, Twitter, Facebook, Medium, and more.

Importing RSS feeds directly into a blog

Last on this list another option of working with RSS feeds is to take the content from the feed and repost it onto a website or blog.

This however should be done with the permission of the website owner as they will likely hold copyrights over their work and may not be happy for you to make copies of their content.

When done correctly however you can take snippets of the content such as a blurb and the title and provide links to credit the source appropriately and add useful content for your visitors at the same time.

In order to achieve this, there are several plugins for popular CMS (Content Management Systems) such as WordPress.

This article will focus on some popular WordPress plugins as this is by far one of the most widely used systems for building websites and blogs.

Plugin 1: WPeMatico RSS Feed Fetcher

This first plugin has been around for quite some time and has a number of useful features you would expect such as:

1. Automatically publish content from RSS and Atom feeds into a WordPress post
2. Organize multiple feeds into categories
3. Allows embedding or uploading of video and audio from the feed if they are present
4. Options to throttle imports and set limits to not use too many hosting resources

Plugin 2: WP RSS Aggregator

This next plugin has also been a popular choice and in existence for some time and like the plugin above has a number of useful features such as:

1. Import unlimited feed entries with no limits on the number of sites or blogs
2. Ability to auto-discover content from news feeds
3. Pull in YouTube videos and embed them into posts
4. Options to create shortcodes for feeds that are also compatible with Gutenberg blocks

Conclusion

We hope you found this article to be useful and provide some new ideas that you can use to level up your blog and add more value to your readers going forward.

editor

Hemant is Digital Marketer and he has 6 + years of experience in SEO, Content marketing, Infographic etc.

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