Web Cash

Part of developing a successful blog and your identity as a blogger is creating a web of blogs that you read and participate in. Imagine the blogosphere as a giant web. You want to connect your website to a bunch of others - you don’t want to just be a random thread connected to nothing.

Google Reader provides you with a nifty tool to help you do this. With the “Share” feature of Google Reader, you can easily syndicate a list of articles that you recently read and found interesting.
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Last month, I wrote on article on creating an RSS feed for your site. Some people have reported problems with the process - but these all come from malformed XML, not the PHP code supplied in the article.

There are a few things you need to keep in mind while writing an XML document, or else the RSS reader will not be able to understand it. It’s better to think of writing XML as writing code than text, because there are some strict syntax rules you need to adhere to.
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RSS feeds are a must-have for modern websites. It’s easy enough to make an RSS feed of recent articles in PHP. But did you know an RSS feed can simply be information - not links to articles?

This article will look at how to build a basic feed of data - for our purposes, we’ll consider random quotes. It will also illustrate how to use SimpleXML to build the feed for us.
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Most blogging platforms come with built-in support for RSS feeds. Why? It’s a great way for users to keep up to date on your new content. Instead of loading up a dozen favorite sites, they can look at one feed reader and then decide what to pursue further.

So what if you don’t use a blogging platform or CMS that creates a feed for you? You can create one yourself in PHP. It’s pretty simple.
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I just added an RSS feed widget to my site (see the lower right corner - the DZone links). I frequent dZone a decent amount, and I find a lot of the articles interesting.

However, after some thought I became concerned that ten sitewide external links might be a bit of a drain on my pagerank. If only I could add “rel=nofollow” to all those links. But there’s no option in the RSS Widget to do that.
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Practically every site today has an RSS feed. Now, you could be like everyone else and simply use this as a way to read information as it’s published.

Or, you could use RSS for what’s intended for - content syndication. With Simple XML, it’s a piece of cake to use an RSS feed to add a list of links to relevant articles on your page.
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