THE FREE & EASY RSS NEWS FEED PUBLISHER

What is Enfeedia?

What's an RSS news feed?

What's a news reader?

What's a news item?

How do I start up a news feed?

How many news feed can I have?

How do I add news items to my feed?

How do I put my photos online to include them in my items?

What if I don't have a website?

What's a "NewsPage"?

Is it necessary to insert code onto my website? What if I don't want to?

What is NewsOnSite?

Do I need to know anything about website design, coding, HTML, PHP, or file uploading?

How do I control the appearance of my news feed display on my site or on my NewsPage?

What is "BlogBlender"?

What does it mean to "subscribe" to a news feed?

How does one subscribe to a news feed?

Enfeedia is an RSS Online Publishing System , a web-based application for publishing, promoting, and reading RSS feeds. Now you can publish feeds with ease using plain English and simple-to-use "feature tools" to project yourself as an authority and a professional communicator. Enfeedia's RSS system is to feeds what Microsoft's Excel is to spreadsheets, or what Adobe's PhotoShop is to photos ... only a lot easier than either of those applications! By simply filling out a few forms, you can create a feed and publish articles in minutes, and include links, images, google search tools, and more. You don't need to know anything about programming or coding. Enfeedia hides all those ugly arcane details from you. Read all about the features of Enfeedia by clicking the "Features" link in the menu bar above.

— What's an RSS news feed?

A news feed is a convenient and simple way to provide information to others over the internet without pushing the information to them with email. In fact, no email addresses are used to publish a news feed. A news feed file contains information (title, description) about your news items, and one or more news items (title, description, link). RSS stands for "Really Simple Syndication" and is just a name given to news feeds that comply with an industry-standard specific file format. You don't need to know anything about file format; we take care of those ugly details for you. The file format is very specific so that "news readers" know how to interpret them and convert the code to human-readable form. And because of the special nature of the news feed, news readers can keep track of your feed and know when you've posted another news item to your feed—and that's a very key feature of news feeds and why they are so popular. Top of Page.

— What's a news reader?

A news reader, or more spefically, an RSS news reader, is an application that understands news feed file formats, converts the content of that file to human-readable form, and displays the converted news feed. You can compare this with the familiar browsers: Browsers are applications that understand "HTML" and certain other file formats, interpret them, and display the familair web pages. Similarly, RSS news readers understand "XML" and other file formats, interpret them, and display the news feed. Just as a website address ("URL") locates a webpage, a news feed address (also a URL) locates the news feed file on the internet. The good news is, you don't have to know anything about these details. Besides being a news feed publishing tool, Enfeedia is also a news reader for its feeds -- the NewsPage is the presentation of that read feed. (By the way, sometimes news readers are called aggregators). Top of Page.

— What's a news item?

A news item can be any message you wish to publish. It need not be "news" in the conventional sense. It has a title, a body (description) and a link to online content for further reading. Typically the link is to the website related to the news item. A news item could be, for example, a time-critical announcement, investment advice, a recipe of the week, a featured property for sale, or an informative item meant to tease the reader to visit a website; let your imagination roam. Top of Page.

— How do I start up a news feed?

First go to Get a Free Account. You will be asked to provide an account name, a password, your name and email address, and whether you want the feed to be listed or inlisted. Once you have an account, you can create news feeds by going to Set Up Feeds, and you can publish news items onto your feeds at Publish Items. Top of Page.

— How many news feeds can I have?

The limit us a function of your membership level, with the free Communicator membership having the fewest, and the Enterprise premium membership having the most. Top of Page.

— How do I add news items to my feed?

Two ways are offered. You can enter information into forms provided by Enfeedia (see Publish Items), or send your news item information to your Enfeedia account by email (in development). We provide you an email address that corresponds to your feed. Your email title becomes your news item title, your email body becomes your news item description. The news item "read more..." link is the link you provide when you set up your feed. You can embed links in your description and Enfeedia will make them hot links. Top of Page.

— How do I put my photos online to include them in my items?

With the many great alternatives available for storing your photo images online, we see no reason for Enfeedia to offer yet another photo-sharing service. Among the most popular are flickr, shutterfly, facebook, picasa, myspace, photobucket, and snapfish. Just be sure to get the URL for your image in JPG or GIF format. Some services provide that directly, whereas with others, you have to mavigate to your photo to get the address fro the browser address bar. Once you have the URL for your photo, you simply insert it in the Enfeedia form where you are entering other element of your news item. Top of Page.

— What if I don't have a website?

You do not need a website to use Enfeedia and take advantage of news feeds. In fact, you might have even more motivation to use a news feed if you don't currently have presence on the web. Enfeedia generates and hosts your own mini-website (a "NewsPage") that presents your news items, all derived from your news feed you publish using Enfeedia. Many people find that don't can't justify a website for the endeavor given the technical issues and cost of developing and maintaining a website; but they can publish one or more news feeds uding Enfeedia to give them on-line presence, at no cost, and requiring no technical skills.Unlike a news feed, the NewsPage does not require a "news reader". The NewsPage is displayed by any browser just like any other webpage. Top of Page.

— What's a "NewsPage"?

A NewsPage is simply a web page hosted by Enfeedia dedicated to YOU for displaying YOUR news feed. So even if you do not have a website of your own, you can have presence on the web. Tell others your NewsPage address and they can view your news there. And include it in your email signature! Once they arrive on your NewsPage, they can choose to subscribe to your news feed in several ways. This symbo indicates availability of a NewsPage...     Top of Page.

— Is it necessary to insert code onto my website? What if I don't want to?

You have choices. By inserting code onto your website that Enfeedia generates for you, you can display an icon or "button" that your site visitor can click to read your news. And subscribe to your news if they wish. Furthermore, depending on your server support, you can actually display your news items right on your website, using what we call NewsOnSite (see next item). Code addition is a one-time event; once inserted there, the news on your website will be automatically updated every time you publish a new item. But if you are unable to add code to your site or don't wish to, you can still use Enfeedia and enjoy the benefits of news feeds, in the same way as if you did not have a website (see previous question). Top of Page.

NewsOnSite is an Enfeedia feature wherein you can display all or a portion of your news feed on your own website. One-time placement of an Enfeedia-supplied code "snippet" onto your website is all that you do. From then on, whenever you publish a new news item, your website will be automatically updated to show the most current news—without writing any code, without uploading any files, without calling your too-busy-to-help web designer. Your hosting service must support "PHP". Most servers support PHP. Go to "Stylize & Promote Feeds" to learn more, get your code snippet, and download a copy of shootOnSite if you wish. Top of Page.

shootOnSite is an Enfeedia provided news reader script that implements the NewsOnSite feature (see above). When it executes, the script reads the cryptic XML feed file and translates it into human readable form such that the feed is displayed on the site at the location that the code "snippet" was placed.You can download our shootOnSite script and upload it to your server such that your webserver need not support "php external includes" to access the shootOnSite script on our server. This means the script is executed on your server whenever your webpage is loaded. You place an Enfeedia-supplied code snippet on your webpage to cause that script to be executed resulting in the display of your news feed. Go to "Stylize & Promote Feeds" to learn more, get your code snippet, and download a copy of shootOnSite if you wish.Top of Page.

— Do I need to know anything about website design, coding, HTML, PHP, or file uploading?

No. Enfeedia hides all that ugly stuff from you. You just write your news feed the same way you write an email or fill in a form, and Enfeedia takes care of all the rest. Top of Page.

— How do I control the appearance of my news feed display on my site or on my NewsPage?

You control the appearance (color, font sizes, number of items to display, length of items to display, and more) by setting certain parameters. See Stylize & Promote Feeds to see how this is done. Top of Page.

— What is "BlogBlender"?

BlogBlender is Enfeedia's feature wherein you can beautifully blend in your Enfeedia-host feed-driven blog into you home page (or any page) such that it inherits the look-and-feel of your website design. Why bury your blog in a subordinate page, or worse, send them off to some blog hosting site? Instead, immerse your site visitors into your story and captivate them when they land on your home page. Your home Page based blog will also help your SEO efforts because of search engines appeal for RSS feeds and fresh content. Our BlogBlender feature integrates blog hosting into your webpage. (Our little secret is that BlogBlender is actually based on code that syndicates your feed, but with pre-defined parameters that provide the best blending of the feed onto your webpage.) See Stylize & Promote Feeds to get your BlogBlender code snippet and the corresponding shootOnSite Feed Reader script. Top of Page.

— What does it mean to "subscribe" to a news feed?

When one subscribes to a news feed, one gains the ability to receive updates to the news feed when they are posted. One doesn't have to subscribe to a news feed to read it, but does need to subscribe to take advantage of one of many methods for being notified about updates to the feed. The method by which one is notified depends on the features of the news reader (or aggregator) that is selected for subscribing to the feed. For example, with MyYahoo, one can ask that an "alert" email be sent whenever a new item is posted or updated. Top of Page.

— How does one subscribe to a news feed?

Websites that offer news feeds typically include one or more buttons you can click to subscribe to their feed using the service connected to that button. For Enfeedia, you will find those buttons at the top of every page, and clicking on of those will guide you through a remarkably easy process for subscribing to our news feed using one of those services. You can read more about subscribing to a news feed by visiting How to Subscribe to a News Feed. Check it out! Top of Page.

— Do Enfeedia-generated feeds comply with RSS standards?

Absolutely! We validate our feed-generation algorithms at http://feedvalidator.org/. Enfeedia offers features that exceed the capabilitites of RSS feeds, but nevertheless our feed files comply with RSS specifications. You can be sure that any news reader that implements the RSS specifications will read Enfeedia-generated feeds. Enfeedia maintains information for those additional features in our internal database, private to your account, and draws upon that information to implement those additional features. Top of Page.