I have a number of web sites that I produce as a public service and they all use CaRP - RSS to HTML Converter for displaying RSS news feeds. CARP displays the content of news feeds using html rather than Java, so search engines will see the static content of the feeds. CARP also gives you complete control over formatting the feed on your web site, to make it part of the site instead of just an extra plug-in. If you are interested in learning about how CARP will increase your search engine placement, they have more information about that on the CARP Website.

I have quite a bit of experience with installing and formatting CARP installations. If you would like help with getting all the different parts to work on your site, let me know.

Below is some free advice to get you started.

First of all, putting a unique news feed on your site involves 4 steps.

Feed For All OR Yahoo Pipes

Feed Burner

CARP

Your Web Site

If you are creating the feed yourself, from your own content, you need to use a product such as Feed For All to create the feed and publish it to your web server. Feed For All is a very simple tool and I use it on Ultralight Living (see below). You install the program on your PC and use it to enter your items that you want in the RSS feed. Click on publish and then you can see the feed on the Internet by going the the url you specified.

If you are creating a "mash-up" feed by pulling news from a variety of sources, you need to use Yahoo Pipes instead. Yahoo Pipes offers a great way to combine multiple sources of RSS news. Yahoo Pipes allow you to filter the feeds to include or exclude based on words in the feed or feed title. Yahoo Pipes also lets you remove duplicates, sort by date and even search/replace words within the feeds. With Pipes, you first find the feeds you are interested in (or you can even create your own feeds by searching Yahoo news and click on the RSS link to convert your search to a feed). Yahoo pipes will output a url with your new feed and you use this url in the next step. If you are using RSS feeds from other web sites, you need to get permission first. Most are happy to see you use their feeds because it drives traffic to their web sites.

Take your url from Feed for All or Yahoo Pipes and burn a feed from that feed on Feed Burner. Technically, Feed Burner is an optional step, but there is a good reason for including this step. Feed Burner will remove your feed source url. Feed Burner also may be more reliable than Yahoo Pipes, which is sometimes slow or not available. Feed Burner also allows you to standardize your feed so it is more readable by all kinds of feed readers. This is especially important if you want to allow your visitors to subscribe to your feed. Feed Burner will also keep track of how many subscriptions you have to your feed and allow you to offer email subscriptions.

Next, take your Feed Burner url and use that as the source for your CARP feed on your web site. CARP will allow you to format the feed exactly as you want it to appear on your individual pages. CARP will refresh the feed at any interval you choose. Once the interval has passed, the next visitor to load the page will have to wait for the feed to be refreshed. To avoid this occasional slow down, you can set up a CRON job on your web server to automatically refresh the content. This is really needed if you are displaying more than one or two feeds on a single page.

As you can see, this is all a bit complex. Some day, someone will start a service that does all of this in one step, but for now, this is what I have found to be the best combination of available technology.

Examples

Below are some of the sites where I have installed CARP with various RSS news feeds. Each one is different, so take a look at the range of possibilities with CARP:

Ultralight Living

Ultralight Living makes extensive use of CARP displayed RSS news feeds. The home page alone has three different installations. Starting on the left column, the "Editors Pick" is simply an RSS feed of my personal Google Reader "shared" items. I am able to pick an choose which news item I want displayed there from my Google Reader page. The column called "Featured Stories" uses a feed I created from my own articles which are then added through Feed for All. This column shows how CARP can be used to display images. Notice how all are the same width, another formatting option in CARP. The third column called "Today's Headline" comes from a Yahoo Pipe combination of all of my feeds on the site. If you click on a category, such as "Backpacking" you will see another use of CARP and news feeds. These are feeds I created using Yahoo Pipes and they combine many different sources including yahoo news searches and RSS feeds from other sites that have allowed me to display their stories. As you can see, Ultralight Living shows a complex combination of feeds and they make up most of the content of the site.

Sustainability Store

This site uses CARP for a news feed on the left column of most pages. Scroll down until you see "Sustainability Store Headlines" on the left. This is a very simple installation designed to fit the color scheme of the site. The feed comes from a Yahoo Pipe that draws from many sources of news related to sustainability.

Earth Care Paper

This site uses CARP for a news feed on the left column of the home page. Scroll down until you see "Earth Care Paper News Headlines" on the left. This is a very simple installation designed to fit the color scheme of the site. The feed comes from a Yahoo Pipe that draws from many sources of news related to recycling.

Wool Revolution

This site uses CARP for a news feed on the right column of the home page called "Today's Wool Headlines." This is a very simple installation designed to fit the color scheme of the site. The feed comes from a Yahoo Pipe that draws from many sources of news related to wool.

Need More Help?

If you would like help with installing and formatting CARP installations and with getting all the different parts to work together on your site, let me know. I enjoy problem solving and will be happy to take a look at your needs.

John Aebi-Magee