How to Add a Single RSS Content Page to Your Site

icon1 Posted by Rochelle in How To..., Site Building Strategies on 02 14th, 2008 | 54 responses

Fresh content is an important aspect of any store but even more so for niche stores. New content helps give visitors a reason to come back. It also helps search engines know that your site isn’t stagnant and this means they will come back often to index your site. The more pages are indexed the more pages will show up in results for search engines.

BANS member Mark wrote a mod to automatically add RSS feeds to a content page within a niche store. For the life of me I can’t find the page where he gives instructions on how to do this or I would post it here but I did write my own instructions for this. Mark – if you see this and remember what page this comes from please let me know and I’ll add the link here.

 

My instructions to add a single RSS content page to your site:

Step One
 Find the URL for the RSS feed you want to use. If you don’t know how to find an RSS feed then type ‘RSS feed directory‘ into your favorite search engine and search through the directories for a feed.
  
 

NOTE: Make sure you click the RSS subscription button. This may be found after a URL or there may be a RSS link somewhere, such as at Google News:

Image of what an RSS button looks like

After you click the RSS button you should see a page that looks similar to the image below. There will be an option to subscribe to the feed (don’t do this) and results for the feed showing below. It is this URL that you will use for this mod:

Image of what an RSS subscription page looks like

Step Two
 Download rss-files.zip files, save them to your computer, and unzip them.
Step Three
 Use an FTP to upload the unzipped files, ex-rss.php, parser.php, pear.php, and rss.php, to your site’s root directory (where your site’s index.php is located). (Click here to read about my favorite FTP.)
Step Four
 Edit ex-rss.php (click here if you don’t know how to do this) with the following changes:
 
  • Change $feedurlstart = ‘http://rss.nascar.com/rss/drivers_dearnhardtjr.rss‘; to the URL for the RSS feed you are using (from step one).
  • Change $keyword= ‘earnhardt‘; to whatever keyword(s) are relevant to your results.
  • Change $searchresults = ‘20‘; to however many results you want to show. According to Mark it is best to have less than twenty results for best performance so you can either leave this as is or change it to a smaller number.
  
 Save changes.
Step Five
 Log in to your site’s Admin and click on the ‘Content Pages‘ tab and ‘Create New Page‘ link.
  
 Create a new content page and name it something like, “Niche Items in the News,” but change Niche Items to whatever your RSS feed results will be about.
  
 Save page.
Step Six
 Note: Skip this step if you did the Permalink or Mark’s Sitemap mods. This is a duplication of code used in these mods and adding it again will cause a fatal error on your site.
  
 Click the ‘Template‘ tab and ‘header.php‘ link for the template you are using. Copy the contents of rss01.txt and paste it ABOVE the </head> tag. Save changes and view your site for errors.
Step Seven
 Decide if you want any text added to your RSS content page (added via the Page Content section) to be displayed above the RSS feed results or below them.
 
  • For text ABOVE results add the code in step eight to footer.php from the template you are using
  • For text BELOW results add the code in step eight to header.php from the template you are using
Step Eight
 Copy the contents of rss02.txt and paste it to one of the following:
 
  • header.php (any text you add will be below the results) – paste contents BELOW all other code in header.php.
  • footer.php (any text you add will be above the results) – paste contents ABOVE all other code in footer.php
  
 Change the following bits of code before you save your changes:
 
  • Change “http://www.MyNicheURL.com/MyNiche-News-Page” to the URL of the content page you created in step five
Step Nine
 Save changes and view site for errors.
done

That’s it!

Your site now has freshly updating content that search engines love to see.

If you decide you want to add additional RSS content pages then read my instructions on how to do that here.

Rochelle

54 Responses to “How to Add a Single RSS Content Page to Your Site”

  1. Exploring The Internet says:
    January 10, 2009 at 10:47 pm

    Thanks for your reply. Rochelle.

    My second part of the question is when I create a new page, on the right upper corner, it shows
    3. Page Info; below it:
    Page Location
    Link Name
    Page URL

    My question is what should I input in the text field of Page URL. I tried to type in ex-rss.php and it works; but if I tried to give the same info as Link Name (News), then it did not work. Am I missing something here.

  2. Online says:
    March 4, 2009 at 9:35 am

    Sweet I’ll give this a try!

  3. Lobster says:
    May 24, 2009 at 6:32 pm

    How do you modify the rss01.txt code to get this to work?

  4. bud glass vase says:
    May 17, 2010 at 3:18 am

    Towards individuals above who’re talking about executing an all-nighter assignment, you ought to be ashamed of yourselves! As opposed to browsing to the globe huge world-wide-web and reading by means of info, will need to be studying.

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