How to Create an RSS Feed for a Static Web Site

Submitting your RSS feed to the online feed aggregators is a great way to get more traffic to your site. But, suppose you have a static website - one that does not have the ability to automatically create your RSS feed like Wordpress does.

Static sites were often used before the advent of blogging and RSS but many are still very functional and helpful. They are also often used for sales pages and opt-in sites.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Basic FTP Skills

1. 1

   Go to http://sitemapdoc.com/ and enter your website URL in the field marked URL to Map.

2. 2

   Click on the Create Map button.

3. 3

   Click on the red RSS button on the right side of the page that displays.

4. 4

   Edit the popup screen that displays with any changes you desire.

5. 5

   Click on the red RSS button at the bottom of the popup screen.

6. 6

   On the page that displays you will see the XML code displayed. This is the code that creates your RSS feed.

7. 7

   Click anywhere in the code to select (highlight) all of it.

8. 8

   Copy it to the clipboard. You won't see anything happen when you do this part.

9. 9

   Open up Notepad or any text editing program (Start -> Programs -> Accessories -> Notepad).

10. 10

    Click in the blank portion of the editing screen and paste the contents of the clipboard inside and save the file. Remember where you save it.

11. 11

    Go to Windows explore and rename the file to "feed.xml." It must have the .xml extension in order to work.

12. 12

    FTP the file to the root directory of your website.

13. 13

    Publish it to the feed aggregators .

Tips & Warnings

• Ctrl+C = Copy. You can also select Copy from the Edit menu.
• Ctrl+V = Paste. You can also select Paste from the Edit menu.
• You can rename your file any way you wish but Notepad won't allow you to save it with another file extension.

Resources

• Tweak Your Blog
• RSS and Sitemap Generator

on 11/4/2009 Thanks, this was very helpful!

on 2/15/2009 Very useful!! Thanks for explaining this! I have recomn'd you