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Our Markup Tags

Many websites have content, but no simple way to create an RSS feed - and worse, companies want money for database-enabled hosting, or for a third-party RSS application. Enter MySite.

RSSPECT's MySite feeds let you create an RSS feed from your existing website, with no programing on your part. All you have to do is indicate which parts of your website should be included in the feed, and we'll take care of the rest. It's so automated that you may never have to come back to our site again. Pretty sweet! And if you don't want to add any tags, you can always use an AnySite feed instead.

In order to create a MySite feed, all you have to do is add some markup to your existing site. We'll check your website frequently, and when we notice something new that you've marked for us to notice, we'll add it to the feed.

The tags

There are five tags that you can include on your site. They are the content tag, the title tag, the link tag, the id tag, and the new item tag. Each begins in the same words: <span class=. Then comes a word which says what the command is: this can either be rss-content, rss-title, rss-link, rss-id, or rss-newpost. Then you put your content, and finish by closing the tag with . None of these tags have any visual effect on your pages: you won't see the words "span" anywhere when you view your site in a web browser.

Below, we examine each of these items in turn, showing how they can be used on your website. Sometimes it's easier to see a full example, so if you like, you can simply view an example webpage using the tags, and take it from there.

Required: The rss-content Tag

The first tag, rss-content, is the most common. This tag is used to denote content - anything after the tag, and before the closing tag will be included in your RSS feed. Say, for example, you have a webpage with the phrase "Today is a good day I think for PARTYING DOWN.", and you want to include that on your feed. That's easy! Just enclose the text in the rss-content tag, and you're done:

Today is a good day I think for PARTYING DOWN.

That's just the simplest example of plain text. You can go further and include any HTML markup you'd like: images, fonts, etc. As long as they're fully-qualified addresses, they'll show up in the feed! (A fully-qualified address includes "http://" and a domain name. So "http://www.qwantz.com/images/hello.jpg" is a fully-qualified address, while "/images/hello.jpg" is not.)

Let's try adding something more complicated: a picture and some bold text. Our website has a bit that looks like this:

- Today is a good day I think for PARTYING DOWN.

The HTML for this snippit looks like this:

<img src="http://www.truthandbeautybombs.com/bb/images/smiles/trex-omg.gif"> - Today is a good day I think for PARTYING DOWN.

Again, to get this to show up in our RSS feed, all we have to do is add our tags around the HTML, as follows:

<img src="http://www.truthandbeautybombs.com/bb/images/smiles/trex-omg.gif"> - Today is a good day I think for PARTYING DOWN.

And that's all there is too it! The one advanced thing we can do is make it invisible by using HTML comments. This way, we can have text on our RSS feed that doesn't appear on the website! To do this, simply encase the code in  characters:

The above will make the happy green dinosaur and his text show up only on the RSS feed - it won't be visible when your readers visit your website.

One use of this tag is all you need to add to get your site working, but you can exercise more control over your feed if you add some of the following recommended tags.

Recommended: The rss-title Tag

Our next tag lets us set a title for the item in our RSS feed. Each RSS feed contains one or many "stories", each of which can have a title. It's optional, but it's nice to have. Let's say we want the title of this post to be "News from T-Rex". You can probably guess what the HTML looks like:

News from T-Rex

The one catch is that we might not want the words "News from T-Rex" to show up on our website. So, again, we can add comment tags, for the final result of:

If this tag isn't included on your page, we default to the page's HTML title (that's what shows up in the brower's title bar when you load the page).

Recommended: The rss-link Tag

This tag, like the rss-title tag, is optional too. This tag lets us specify a link for the RSS story, so that people who want to read more can click. If it's not included, we'll default to the address of the page we got the content from. But if you'd like to hard-code something special, it's pretty straightforward! Let's say we want to link to http://www.qwantz.com/index.pl?comic=443. We're going to include comment tags, because we don't want this to show up on the website. The result is probably pretty predictable by now!

Recommended: The rss-id Tag

This tag is also optional. It's used for assigning a unique identifier to your RSS posts. When we find new content on your website, we first compare it with the existing entries in your RSS feed. If we find a post that is very similar to the new content, we assume that this is merely an update of an old item, and not a new post.

There are some situations (comic RSS feeds, for example, where all that may change is the filename of the latest comic), where all posts are very similar. In these cases you can include an ID to be associated with each post, which allows us to know for certain if something is new, or if it's an update of an existing post. This ID can be anything you want, but it should be unique for each post! An easy way to do this, if new content has a specific URL associated with it, is to simply use this URL as an ID:

We recommend that if you include the rss-link tag, you also include the rss-id tag: you can put the exact same content in each, and it makes updates easier.

Optional: The rss-newpost Tag

This last tag isn't used as often. It lets you specify that what follows on the page is to be considered a separate post in your RSS feed. Normally, we look for whatever content we can find on your page, and treat it all as a single post - which works if your site has a single page that gets updated with new content, and an archive that stores the old stuff. But some websites add their new content to the top of the page, leaving the old content at the bottom. This tag lets you tell us "hey, what's coming up is something different."

We will only add a maximum of 15 new posts per page, since your RSS feed only displays your 15 most recent updates anyway. So if you've got a lot of posts on one page, just make sure that the most recent ones are at the top of the page, and you'll be fine.

You don't need to use it before your first content tag (as soon as we start seeing content, we assume it's for a new post), but you do need to use it if you want to have two or more posts on a single page. An example might help. Let's say you've got a page that looks like this:

- Today is a good day I think for PARTYING DOWN.
- I disagree!

and you want there to be two RSS posts taken from it: one with our green T-Rex head talking about parties, and a second one with the Utahraptor disagreeing. First, you put in the code for the first post with the T-Rex (this is exactly the same code as from the rss-content example):

<img src="http://www.truthandbeautybombs.com/bb/images/smiles/trex-omg.gif"> - Today is a good day I think for PARTYING DOWN.

Then, add in the code to indicate a new post:

(This tag is the only one without any content inside.) Finally, you add in the code for the second "disagree" post, and you're done! The final result looks like this:

<img src="http://www.truthandbeautybombs.com/bb/images/smiles/trex-omg.gif"> - Today is a good day I think for PARTYING DOWN.

<img src="http://www.truthandbeautybombs.com/bb/images/smiles/utahchat.gif"> - I disagree!

and that's it!

As soon as these tags are added to your site, we'll be able to automatically create your feed. The nice thing about them is that if you're editing your HTML by hand, or if you're using a program to generate it, all you have to do is add the tags once. After that you can just change what appears between the tags. If you'd like to see an example of the tags being used on a full webpage, we've set up an example webpage here.

To start, all you have to do is sign up, then create a new RSS feed for your site. Then, although we'll also do it automatically, you can also get us to refresh your feeds -- to parse it and look for these tags -- on demand. It makes ensuring that your website is set up properly for RSSPECT easy.