As cool as that orange RSS icon looks, it won’t necessarily fit-in with your blog’s design. It’s orange! Sure, you could just use a different color, but why not get a little creative? You don’t have to use the same style as everyone else. You can make it a different shape, use different gradient styles, or something completely different.

If you do decide to customize your icon a bit, be sure to keep the same symbol on it. The “antenna” depicted on the “standard” icon means “this is an RSS icon!” If you leave it out, people won’t necessarily notice that the button is for an RSS feed.

Here’s a little inspiration: (more…)

LastRSS. MagpieRSS. Neither have been updated in over a year. What’s the best way to parse RSS feeds and output them with PHP? Simple, use SimplePie.

What is SimplePie? It’s a file you include in your PHP scripts, allowing you instant access to RSS-parsing capabilities. You can display RSS headlines/items on your website, combine several feeds into one, and anything else that you can think of. If you know a little PHP, the possibilities are endless.

You see this PHP code:

require('simplepie.inc');
$feed = new SimplePie("http://feeds.feedburner.com/Webmaster-source");
$feed->handle_content_type();
echo "<h1>".$feed->get_title()."</h1>";
foreach ($feed->get_items() as $item) {
echo '<h2><a href="'.$item->get_permalink().'">';
echo $item->get_title().'</a></h2>';
echo '<p>'.$item->get_description().'</p>';
}

That’s all you need to display a feed’s headlines and descriptions. Of course, that was only a simple example. It’s unbelievable what you can do with SimplePie.

Over at NTugo, SimplePie is used extensively. The MyNT RSS reader is powered by SimplePie. The “Recent blog posts” and “Recent posts from the NTugo Network” boxes on the home page are built with SimplePie. The RSS feed aggregated from all of the NTugo blogs? SimplePie again! It’s amazing what you can do with SimplePie.

If you know PHP, you’ll definitely want to take a look at SimplePie.

Are you a beginning podcaster on a budget? If you need a place to host your large audio files, give Switchpod a try. What do they have to offer? They have a free plan with 450MB of storage, a $5/month plan with 500MB, a $10/month plan with 1GB, and a $30/month plan with 2GB of storage. For more experienced podcasters, LibSyn is probably a better deal, but for beginners, you can’t beat Switchpod.

Though they offer to create a website for your podcast, I prefer to do that myself with good-old WordPress.

RSS is one of the greatest web technologies invented in the last ten years. It enables us to keep up with our favorite sites, listen to podcasts, and get niche news easily. Forget annoying old newsletters! Who needs them when you can just open your RSS reader and skim through headlines, looking for things of interest?

Ah, the RSS reader. Like with web browsers and email clients, everyone has a different preference. Some like desktop programs, while others like web-based apps. There’s no shortage of choices. You have Feedreader, Netvibes, Bloglines, etc. I don’t like any of the choices. I’m a big fan of RSS, but I’ve never really liked any RSS reader other than Firefox’s Live Bookmarks feature. Recently I’ve had two problems. Number one, my feed collection outgrew Live Bookmarks. Number two, I’ve often wanted to read my RSS feeds on other computers.

What did I do? I threw together my own web-based RSS reader. I call it MyNT (say “Mint”), which is short for My NTugo. It’s a little innovative, as I added a few…different features to it.

My favorite feature: You can read your RSS feeds without logging in at all (just go to http://my.ntugo.com/yourusername.html). Just bookmark that URL and you can check your feeds with a single click (let’s see Bloglines do that).

Take a look at MyNT, you may like it. I can’t guarantee everyone will like MyNT. After all, I made it mainly for myself (and anyone who thinks that most feed readers are too bloated). I wanted to capture the simplicity of Live Bookmarks in a different form, and I think I did a pretty good job at it.

Well, MyNT’s URL is http://my.ntugo.com, and you can read the official press-release-sort-of-thing here.

Back in the early days of RSS, webmasters used to link to their feeds using little rectangular orange buttons labeled “RSS” or “XML”. Then along came Mozilla Firefox, the web browser that re-started the Browser Wars. Since Firefox had RSS support built-in, the developers created a cool new icon to use in the browser: An orange rounded-square with an odd symbol on it. The symbol depicted an antenna. Since then, the Firefox feed icon has become the standard one used throughout the web. There’s no confusing it with anything else.

Grab a copy of the “Standardized Feed Icon” at FeedIcons.com They offer a .ZIP archive with different sized and colored variations of the image. Several formats are available in the package. There’s PSD, AI, EPS, SVG, PDF, PNG, JPG, and GIF. Get the standardized feed icon for your site.

Feedburner, recently acquired by Google, is the single, most-useful RSS tool on the planet. Feedburner re-broadcasts your feed, taking strain off your servers, and offers awesome statistics as well. If you have a website/blog with an RSS feed, you should definitely give feedburner a try. There’s a reason nearly every blog on the web utilizes it. Yeah, it’s that good.

RSSXPress isn’t quite as good as some of the other RSS-to-HTML converters. It has less options and has a plain, grey look until you use CSS on it. Little documentation is provided.

RSS-Info has a great service going. With RssInclude, you enter the feed’s URL, set the width, adjust colors, copy, paste. It has options for Javascript, PHP, and IFRAME. Use PHP if you can, Javascript otherwise. If the feed’s really important and your visitors are using javascript-impared browsers, use IFRAME. This is my favorite RSS-to-HTML converting service.

Just fill out a form, cut and paste the code, and you’re done! The result takes on your site’s stylesheet and blends in nicely. RSS-to-JavaScript does a great job at displaying RSS content on websites.

Similar to RSS-to-Javascript, Feed2JS uses JavaScript to convert RSS to HTML on the fly, displaying it on your site.