RSS Feeds Discussion - Beginner to Advanced

[ColsCreations]

@1WhoConquers  

Copying part of your comment from this thread in the Tech forum to start a discussion here as I have lots of questions and am probably not the only one who could benefit from understanding more about RSS feeds and their potential as a promotional tool. I am appealing to the teacher in you to approach this from the angle that I (and other readers)  know NOTHING yet about RSS feeds so need to start with the very basics before going into advance uses.

Don’t know RSS? Oh, now you’ve opened a can of worms! I really need to write this up for the tricks and tips board, but I’m a teacher at heart, so here we go…

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a tool used to conglomerate various sources of information and “push” them. As a person, you would use an RSS reader app, tell it all the websites you want to read regularly, and have it just pull all the new info regularly so you don’t have to remember to go back to all those spots manually. Handy for news websites and blogs. And Zazzle has been kind enough to give us RSS versions of all our stores’ URLS. Not only that, you can add an affiliate id to the RSS URL and it will automatically get translated into affiliate commissions.

I have a basic understanding (which is likely wrong)  of what an RSS feed is and I know we can make them for our Zazzle stuff.  I think of an RSS feed as something you embed on a website in a little box so visitors can scroll the box for all the latest whatever from the site the feed is for. So like maybe it would be for weather or breaking news or all the latest articles regarding a certain topic of interest to your visitors. So in my mind an RSS feed is something you add to your website/blog (maybe we’d call it a widget now?) for the benefit/interest of visitors. But it seems like from reading it’s the reverse, that RSS feeds are made by viewers so they can “pull in” stuff from a website without actually going to the website. This very first concept is where my brain starts going into convulsions. Is the webmaster making & displaying RSS feeds for visitors to their site, or are visitors setting up their own RSS feeds to monitor the website?

The last time I gave any thought to RSS feeds was several years ago. What I realized then was that to see an RSS feed you need a feed reader app, otherwise you just see a string of behind-the-scenes coding gibberish like this when I click your link in the other thread to your sample RSS feed.

I use Firefox as my everyday default browser and it does not have a feed-reader built-in. I recall searching for a feed-reader add-on and the choices were too numerous & complicated for a beginner who just wants to see what an RSS feed is supposed to look like these days.

So keeping all this in mind, my first questions as a total beginner are:

1. Can you recommend a simple RSS feed reader add-on that will let me see feeds as intended?
2. If you add a feed “widget” to your site/blog, what does it look like to people who do not have a feed-reader add-on?
   I have tried Googling up examples of sites with embedded RSS feeds and get nowhere, just get results that tell me how to add a site’s content to my own reader app. Sigh.
3. If ones main purpose in using RSS feeds is to promote, how does that work? The viewer would have to have a RSS reader in their browser to see your feed as intended?

So that’s my first round of questions. Are RSS feeds primarily something a site adds as helpful content for viewers, or are they something viewers create themselves for the site for their own convenience?

[1WhoConquers]

First, in terms of “add-ons” there’s nothing I can recommend as I don’t have any recent experience with browser plug-ins. All my devices are Android phones and tablets. MOST web browsers for Android don’t support plug-ins at all, Firefox being the exception, though the selection is very limited. The simple one that I do use regularly, mainly for testing my Zazzle store and WordPress blog RSS feeds, is this one…

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nononsenseapps.feeder.play 

It has the benefit of (1) no ads and (2) no sign-up required. Just start plugging in your URL’s and away you go. Here’s what the root RSS for my Zazzle store looks like…

https://feed.zazzle.com/biblebasics411/rss?at=238934623323789224

(All that part after the ? isn’t technically necessary for it to work, that’s my Zazzle affiliate ID, which gets attached to all the links in the RSS feed so when people interact with it and go back to the store…)

What those Zazzle (or other) RSS feeds look like on the BLOG side can vary a lot. If we’re talking freebie WordPress.com blog which can’t have any extra widgets/plug-ins, then we’re talking pretty plain vanilla stuff. Text with links, no images. Here are some screenshots of the WordPress RSS widget in action, again, linked to my store, with various settings…

What that looks like to blog readers is pretty seamless… it’s just a sidebar or insert (WordPress “blocks” can be “widgets” in a sidebar or footer, or directly in an article)… text that when the visitor clicks on them, just goes straight to the appropriate product on Zazzle. Here’s a sample on my home page…

I’ll go head and leave that block there for now, it’s “live” so you can see it in action. The screenshot has a link to the site.

A few things worth noting for future discussion…

1. Zazzle DOES provide IMAGES for its RSS feeds, and some blog Widgets (and scheduling programs that support them) give you the option to turn the images on or off. But I’ve found those images to be grainy and hideous (at least, they are in my scheduler).
2. WordPress ITSELF has RSS for the main blog and all the categories and tags that you might want to set up. And THOSE feeds ALSO support images. Specifically, whatever you set as the “featured image” for a blog post goes to the feed. And I’ve noticed that when I duplicate a Zazzle product as a post on my blog (that was THIS blog’s primary intended purpose, though I’m doing tutorials there now too), those WordPress feed images look awesome in the scheduling program. Go figure. Whatever works to get traffic the store. And having the products on the blog, with WordPress categories matching my product types and collections, well, that’s one more way for the search engines to find things, even if it IS a bit of extra work.

[ColsCreations]

OK. So you are saying that this sidebar content is actually an RSS feed?

Because that’s exactly how it looks to me when i visit your blog, even without a RSS feed reader app in my browser,

Then you have two other images that show what the RSS feed looks like if you open it in the reader you have installed and set up.

But then there is this view

and that’s the one that puzzles me. Is that what people see if 1) they have a feed-reader installed and 2) they click the RSS link to view it n their browser rather than in the reader app?

[1WhoConquers]

Yes, the first screenshot I provided was of the RSS reader app I had just mentioned, the one with the link to Google Play Store. 

And yes, the panel on the right on the WordPress blog, the one you’re pointing to, is the output from the standard RSS widget that ships out-of-the-box with WordPress. It’s what anyone visiting the blog would see, no RSS reader required.

[1WhoConquers]

What’s important to remember here is that RSS is “live” data.

When an RSS is first set up, it will pull some INITIAL data from the feed, from what’s already there. But the real value is that as more gets added, the feed will UPDATE. So, as I add more products to the store, the reader AND the widget on the WordPress blog and anything else (like my scheduling app, which I’ll write about coming soon, with screenshots) will update automatically. That’s the real value here.

[1WhoConquers]

I just found this, some people might find it useful. Web based, browser only, no app. And no need to sign up for anything or log in just to see what an RSS feed looks like, or test to see if it’s working…

https://rssviewer.app/

[1WhoConquers]

I just discovered on the menu for each blog post HERE that individual posts/threads in these forums all have their own RSS feeds too. Keeping tabs on the ones we want to stay on top of is FAR easier via an RSS reader, an example where a HUMAN not a blog or scheduler might want to use these things. Just for fun I plugged the initial post for THIS discussion into my RSS reader app, and now I have this…

[JimCarnicelli]

Another great techy topic to start, @ColsCreations . I use RSS feeds with SnuggleHamster.com too. Zazzle does have a bunch of them. Let me start by pointing to one of Zazzle’s published tech documents about their RSS feeds:

https://asset.zcache.com/assets/graphics/z2/mk/sell/RSSGuide_2016.pdf

So here is a very down to Earth way of thinking of what Zazzle’s RSS feeds are. They are another way to search the Zazzle site that machines use that is nearly identical to how humans search for products. Try this URL for example:

https://www.zazzle.com/rss?qs= teddy+bear

This is the main Zazzle.com URL with /rss added to the path. “qs” means “query string” and “teddy+bear” is just “teddy bear”. Here’s what that will look like in your browser:

After some header stuff there are a bunch of <item>…</item> tags that represent the search results. I’ve highlighted one here. Inside it you’ll see some XML code (it looks like HTML code) containing useful data like the product name (“Baby Boy Astronaut Teddy Bear Napkins”) store id (“dryfhout”), the price ($47.25), and so on. This is obviously not meant to be read by humans. It is well structured for software that can read XML to consume.

Your own store can be used in the same way. Try taking the URL to your store and adding “/rss” to the end of it like this:

https://www.zazzle.com/store/gigigreetings/rss

It’s like your Store > Products page but meant for a machine to read and search through.

You guys have already discussed the most obvious way to use this data for marketing by getting an RSS feed widget to consume this information and add a snippet of your store or some other product list on your own site. So I’ll say that it can be used for more. In the case of SnuggleHamster.com we use it as part of our store importer. The RSS feed is very fast compared to the main search. Calling it is much gentler on Zazzle’s system and does not send mixed signals to Zazzle about user interactions. One specific value I get out of it is that I can quickly get the latest prices of products to keep my database fresh.

I know some other services use Zazzle’s RSS feeds for their own purposes. I’m fairly certain that is just about the only source of data used by Your Dream Built. Here’s an example:

https://www.yourdreambuilt.com/zazzlept/gigigreetings—1–~r-customize.html

They even say they don’t store this data on their servers. In their case they are using SEO to seek referral bonuses from Zazzle. The RSS feed is thus the heart of how they make revenue.

Zazzle’s RSS feeds are one useful way for software to search Zazzle’s site for products and a few other kinds of things. None of the data is hidden or magic. But it does make programming easier and suits Zazzle’s preferences for how we should use automation to help ourselves and help Zazzle promote their bread and butter.

[wpl]

https://www.yourdreambuilt.com/zazzlept/gigigreetings—1–~r-customize.html

this is using zsbb setup here

https://asset.zcache.com/assets/graphics/z2/mk/sell/tools/ZazzleStoreBuilder_Guide_1.0.pdf

but the problem is ,it is to old and does not work with newer version of php, if anyone can tweak it a bit to work for latest php version it would be great! Ed Caggiani made this but he has left zazzle years ago and zazzle does not provide support to it anymore

@JimCarnicelli  can you maybe check it out? I am using it for my site but again it is not working with newer version of php 

[JimCarnicelli]

I see what it is. Like with YourDreamBuilt.com, that site is just using Zazzle’s low-res RSS feed to populate very simplified search and detail pages. And it relies on Zazzle’s search engine to populate pages in real time. It looks like a decent low-code way to start making a site for yourself if you have some PHP skills.

SnuggleHamster.com is quite different. It’s not your own website, of course. You’re using ours, just like with YourDreamBuilt.com. But we import and display a lot more information about your products. Including all the gallery images. And we have our own very sophisticated search engine. We don’t use Zazzle’s.

I assume you were asking if I know how to fix Zazzle’s old PHP code sample. I have no real interest in PHP at all. It’s a bygone relic now. And of course I’ve invested well over a year in SHD’s website. I would not recommend anyone who is not a programmer or willing to pay a programmer ongoing to try to apply or maintain Zazzle’s sample code.

[wpl]

I have added my shops at snuggle hamster it is an amazing site! 

[Carla]

I came here looking for some solutions since my rss feed hasn’t updated since July 20th, while there are numerous new products posted since then.  I’m not sure if anyone knows, but is this a zazzle indexing issue? 

[AntiqueImages]

I have a wordpress website and am using Feedzy RSS to display hundreds of items from my store.  Google analytics shows that I am getting quite good referrals through from these pages.   The pro version of the Feedzy wordpress plugin costs $59 a year (there is also a free version - I can’t remember what the limitations were on the free versioin, but you could certainly start with that as a test).

Here’s an example of what a page on my looks like that is pulling all the items that are in my Victorian Kittens Category in my store. 

I have not seen any issues with the images, although I did have bad image quality with another RSS feed reader I used, so the image issue was apparently  not so much related to Zazzle as to something in the settings of that reader.

Once the plugin is installed, I simply have to insert the Zazzle RSS URL within the Feedzy code in the html / text edit part of the page.   On the page above, this coding looks like this.  I simply cut and paste and adapt the code from page to page.

The code that I insert in the back end is show below.  The part in bold is the Zazzle RSS.  The rest is related to Feedzy and how it displays.  This one is set to show a category (rss?cg=numberofyourcategory).  

[feedzy-rss feeds="http://feed.zazzle.com/antiqueimages/rss?cg=196678254011872685" max=“60” feed_title=“no” refresh=“12_hours” lazy=“no” size=“350” meta=“No” summary=“no” keywords_inc_on=“title” keywords_exc_on=“title” price=“no” columns=“3” template=“style2” ]

Naturally you can also set your RSS to pull a query string that gets the results you want such as “rss?qs=kittens+vintage.”  You can also combine parameters to pull from a product department plus a search term.

[Fantabulou_Stef]

I missed this message at the time it was posted. 
Basically a rss feed is a mechanism to get website information updates in a standard format. 
The data format is based on an xml syntax as we can see in your example above. It is flat descriptive data.

As the format is standard, many different tools can be used to read it and display it. It’s what is powerful with it. 
The idea is to have a kind of standard language allowing to transmit information between technical tools that didn’t define interface contracts beforehand and even don’t know each other.
So, if the website A deals with information that have frequent updates, it can choose to publish them in a rss feed. It means that it makes them available to external tools for display and will refresh the data periodically.

if the website B is interested in showing the information to its users, it will pull periodically the data of the rss feed of A in order to display them.

So, a widget for displaying rss feed, periodically gets the file, and reads the content to interpret it, and then displays it in a readable format by a human in a web browser. ( it answers your question: no, you don’t need a browser add-on to see the rss feed, once the widget is integrated in your website, because the widget creates the small snippet of html needed by your browser to show the information to you human.)

As this is a standard format, widgets may display several different rss feeds from different websites at once ( or in the case of zazzle from different stores, different collections… We can even imagine that it displays your products from several pod platforms providing they all have rss feeds …)

There are several aspects to take into consideration when choosing a widget for a website:

• Is the widget able to read and display all the data I need to show my products ? ( for example, are they able to show the pictures, lots of rss widgets were initially used to display only news, so not necessarily pictures)

• What is the frequency of refreshing of the widget and is it enough for my needs ( i.e how many times a day does it read my rss feed) ?

• Does it allow to mix several feeds ( in the case I need it ) ?

•  look and feel of the  widget, is it customizable ( in order to display on my website for example a grid of x*y products, with my brand colors…)

• free or paid. Generally if you choose a free solution, you will be limited on the updates  frequency and the possible look and feel customization. But it can be enough for your needs.

As an example I integrated a widget here on my website ( where everything is free) on the bottom right of the page: https://fantabuloustef.wixsite.com/fantabuloustef/new

As a comparison, the  widget just on its left also displays products, but the difference is that I have to enter each product with its picture, link and description one by one in the tool, it’s really time consuming, now that the rss widget is integrated on my website, I don’t have anything to do, it updates automatically and it’s the reason why Zazzle rss feeds are extremely interesting.

Hope it helps.

[ColsCreations]

Where I last stalled out on this is the “widget” part. If you have Wix or Wordpress or blog, most of those type sites offer widgets you can choose and give you a snippet of code to paste where they tell you to to have the widget on your page.  I’m hosting my own bare-bones website and finding a free RSS widget code that actually worked right + offered some customizing, well I couldn’t find one. Searching for how to add your own to a website gave me mountains of results of directions for installing a widget using Wordpress or Wix or some other specific site builder. Sigh. I did though find a couple of resources on coding your own but it was honestly way above my modest skill level. I do love the idea of them (since learning visitors can still see them even without a reader app installed in their browser) but gave up on pursuing it any further for the above reasons.

[Fantabulou_Stef]

I use the free version of wix which is extremely limited, so I had to search by myself for the suitable widget(s) for my needs. ( But I was a software engineer in a previous life, it helps a little bit!)

I use the html embed control in wix, it just allows you to add a bit of html of your own in an existing page. ( as I can’t access the full html source in my version)

The widget itself remains hosted on its own external platform, it just gives me, once configured, a bit of html to integrate on my site, ( sometimes through iframes or scripts depending on the widget you use.)

On the example I give above it looks like this: 

The reason why I chose wix is that I wanted a free, quickly made website because I had no time to spend on it. I created the first version in four days, 1,5 hours of work per day.  For sure it’s not the best solution for a good SEO, but I couldn’t do more in the given time.

[Fantabulou_Stef]

I will try to see if I can get back the widgets I shortlisted for my own needs and give the names to you.

[Fantabulou_Stef]

Sorry for my late answer. I had a computer problem and my tools history was on it.
I send you a private message with the tools I tried, because the conclusions only reflects my own perception and I don’t want to make any public criticism of them. 

[Teesed]

Jim, that is some incredible stuff! I’m playing around with the rss feed now to build out some sites. Are you scraping those pages, or how are you getting the additional data if you don’t mind sharing? I’m having a terrible time finding any updated information on the available rss feeds.

[JimCarnicelli]

We do scrape Zazzle’s product detail pages for users who choose to import their stores. There’s a lot more detail there than in the RSS feed.