Something I have learned over the last couple of weeks, and especially with the release of Afrigator and Amatomu is syndication. RSS feeds are an essential attribute to a website, and should always be available to readers. I am not going to explain what RSS is at this point, as I feel that most people will already know what it is, but more to the point, I have a little plugin and information about using RSS in an interesting and useful way to increase our traffic and reader experience.

If you look towards the top of my sidebar on the right, you will see.. “RECENT PIXEL GRABS ON BLOGVERTISE”. Now, basically what is happening here is syndication. Over at Blogvertise, there is an RSS feed, which sends out a message each time pixels are taken by bloggers. Each time one of these feeds is sent out, the plugin I use captures the feed, and displays the title of it. Nifty? I think so!

If you scroll down the page a little bit, you will notice two things.. “Latest from iMod” and “Latest from IT Carreer”, these are, again, two live feeds from other websites. One being a feed from my personal website, and one being a feed from a good friends blog.

How will this increase your traffic? Well, firstly, if you have more than website, you can display the topics from site B on site A, and display the topics from site A on site B. Basically bouncing readers between the two websites, thus merging your websites and handling a larger reader base, as you have now spread your two sites over one! I hope you are thinking to yourself, “Wow, that’s a good point”.

Secondly, and perhaps not as effective as my former point: you can display live feeds from other websites, which cover similar topics to your site. Now, of course this might mean a reader clicking to a similar site, and enjoying the other site more than yours, this is a risk you will need to take. Chances are, the reader will enjoy the fact that you shared useful knowledge and thus return to your website again. If the reader has taken the time to look through all the links on your sidebar/navigation area, chances are he/she enjoyed the content on your website, and therefore is taking the time to completely look around your site. Personally, I think they would come back. What you could do, is make friends with someone who authors a site similar to yours, and both put up live feeds to eachothers website, kind of like a backlink, but with a bit more too it?!

Right, how do you do this? Well, it’s actually extremely easy, all you need is one file, and a statement of code. I have uploaded the files onto my iMod server, simply click here, to download.

You will find two files in the zip file. One which has a .php extension and a readme file. Upload the .php file to your plugins directory on your wordpress install. Once you have done this, login to wp-admin, move your navigation to plugins, and activate the plugin. Now, the readme file is really easy to follow, but to make it even easier to you, here is the code to display the live feeds on your blog..

<?php RSSImport(1,”http://feeds.feedburner.com/Webtrepreneurcoza“,false,true); ?>

That’s it! Simply include that code whereever you would like the feed to be displayed, and it will be displayed. Looking at the code above, there are 4 properties to this method. The first property (here a ‘1′), is the number of recent topics to display. The second property is the link to the RSS feed from the website you would like to display feeds from. The first third property, a boolean property (true or false) is for whether you would like only headlines to be displayed, and finally, the forth property, another boolean property is for whether you would like to truncate the headline - meaning that if you set the property to true, it will only show the first 30 characters of the headline, which is very useful if your design has a certain width.

What happens if 30 isn’t going to work for you? Perhaps your design is very narrow, and you want to only display 20 characters? Well, here is a solution for you:

53  if(strlen($item[’title’])>30)
54  {
55  $item[’title’]=substr($item[’title’],0,30).” … “;

These are lines copied out of the .php file. The 53, 54 and 55 represent the line numbers in the file. If you would like to only display 20 characters, yes you guessed it, replace the 30’s with 30’s in the file. Save the file, and upload it as you did before.

That’s it for today, a nice long post, I hope you make use of these useful syndication techniques! Let me know if you come up with other unique ideas based on these concepts.

The Webtrepreneur