What We Do and How It's Done

RSS feeds can be a pain to set up and verify - one wrong character, and RSS readers will reject it. We've taken the pain to set things up so you won't have to.

What we do

We turn any online data into RSS feeds. How it's done depends on which type of feeds you decide to set up!

AnySite feeds are a new, easier type of feed that allows you to create update feeds from any website or any document online, even those that you don't control. No markup tags are required. With these feeds, we visit the URL in question, and compare it with what we've seen in the past. If it's updated, so is your feed. It really is as easy as that. Now you can keep track of all your favourite websites through RSS - even those that don't have feeds!

With MySite feeds, we act much like the web crawlers of Google and others, only in a more personalized fashion. We visit our member sites on a regular basis - usually about once an hour. The more often you update, the more often we come by! If you want, you can always manually request a refresh.

When we visit your site, we grab a complete copy of your webpage. We then compare it with what's in our database and look for things that have changed. Any new content gets added to the feed, and things that have been updated get updated in your feed as well.

We accomplish this by examining your site for content that you've marked for the feed. This is done by adding a simple, static and invisible markup to your pages! Say for example you'd like to include a news post in your feed. Let's say the post reads "Whoah dudes, I'm ready to party!"

In your HTML source, you surround the news post with our markup tags. So now the text looks like:

<span class="rss-content">

Whoah dudes, I'm ready to party!

</span>

Anything within the "span" tags will be added to your feed. You can include text, images - whatever you'd like! And you can have as many of these tags on your webpage as you want. Just be sure to include fully-qualified links, because the HTML will be viewed in RSS readers, and not on your webserver.

And that's it! Add those tags once, and from then on anything between them will be syndicated to the world via RSS. We also support some optional tags, which allow for more complex control of your feeds - tags to indicate a permanent link to the item, for example, as well as to indicate the end of one item and the beginning of another. You can read full details on each tag here.

Podcast feeds are the third type of feed we offer. Simply supply the necessary data, and your feed is generated and updated on demand. You can be podcasting in seconds, and we supply everything you need to submit your podcast to iTunes. Why pay for expensive podcasting software when you can get a feed for your podcast here, for free?

But wait, there's more

Web syndication: We can turn your RSS feed into HTML or Javascript, which means that your readers can place your latest update right on their sites! It's a powerful and ridiculously easy way to syndicate your content online.

Mailing lists: We also offer a feature called Web Alerts, which turns your RSS feed into a mailing list. Now your RSS feed can even reach readers who don't have an RSS reader installed!

Full control: You can always log in to your account to see the information we've taken from your site, and to alter it or remove it if you wish. You can even add items manually, if you want to do things entirely by hand. Control of your feed is entirely up to you!

Publicity: We also generate hand copy-and-paste HTML code for you at the touch of a button, so announcing your new RSS feed is simple.

Money in your pocket: RSSPECT doesn't cost a thing, and what's more, can actually save you money on bandwidth. Each of your readers will request your RSS feed several times throughout the day - on larger sites, this can approach 50% of the total bandwidth use! With RSSPECT hosting your feed, these costs disappear entirely. Give us a try!