| Excerpt from: Think Outside the Feed |
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| February 27, 2005 | | Here are 7 things that will improve the quality of your RSS feeds and may lead to greater use and wider visibility. | Tip #1 Always validate your feeds from time-to-time. Even though your feeds are probably auto-generated, it's a good idea to test them because you never know what that last copy-and-paste did in your authoring environment. Tip #2 Make sure the channel tag includes a URL back to the source of the RSS content. Linking to your home page is not a good idea unless the feed emanates from the content of the home page. Tip #3 Include both a copyright comment and copyright tag in the channel element. The comment should contain your contact information and any terms of use (see example). Tip #4 Include an image element in your feed and make sure it includes an image that meets RSS specifications. Tip #5 Check the links in your RSS feed from time-to-time, especially when providing full-text content in the feed. Tip #6 Do not use HTML in the title tags. This is a big problem because by design, XML documents are intended to be used in many ways. Tip #7 Include a detailed description of your RSS feed in the channel description element. | | |
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