I had a lot of calls of my last blog about RSS so I thought I would follow at one up with these comments...

Many webmasters have realized the benefit of using RSS to dynamically update websites. This means that the website content automatically changes when the RSS feed is updated. This allows for webmasters to serve dynamic content or a mixture of static and dynamic content on their website.

Syndication

Often, publishers, interested in expanding their base, will allow other webmasters to republish the contents of an RSS feed. Content providers that allow for syndication, receive additional exposure, and the webmasters serving the content, will generally see web traffic increase as a result of the new content. RSS feeds can be syndicated or displayed using a variety of different methods. Depending on the web host, server configuration, and the intent of the publishers, a variety of different syndication tools exist.

In most cases, providers convert RSS feeds to HTML in order to display the feeds contents. The following are some of the more popular methods to convert RSS feeds as web based content.

The easiest solution, a third party host displays the contents of the feed. The downside to using a hosted service is that you are relying on a third party. If the third party's website has problems, your content will not be displayed. Additionally, webmasters often cannot customize the way the contents are displayed on hosted servers and there is no real search engine benefit to third party hosting.

Using scripts to display RSS feeds on a website is probably the most effective solution. In addition, the webmaster using ASP or PHP scripts to convert their feeds, maintain the control of the "look and feel" of the content displayed. Webmasters also realize the benefit of hosting the feed on a domain that is within the webmasters control.

Using ASP or PHP will allow search engines to spider the actual contents of the RSS feed as if it is part of the actual HTML. Pay particular attention to solutions that cache the RSS feed. If your RSS feed is popular this will save significant bandwidth.

PHP is a popular scripting language that is often used to dynamically update web pages. PHP support is available on most web servers that run on a Unix Operating System. I hate to code that crap though...

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