Rss Feed For My Newsletter

Quaffer · Joined: Aug 28, 2003 Posts: 3

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I am a technically challenged persistent old guy who built and runs a regional boating-fishing WYSIWYG web site that gets good enough traffic. I also write and publish a monthly email newsletter that has about 8,000 subscribers and is faced with the typical problems of spam filters and subscribers who change their e-mail addresses often and forget to tell us about it.

The newsletter is done in textual format and mailed by a listserver. I then paste this content into the web site’s “email newsletter” page so it is available each month on the site in an html format with all its links live.

I want to try an RSS Feed for the newsletter, but am not quite clear on a couple of things. I need help and advice, please. (I have read most of the basic RSS stuff on the web, but maybe it is not basic enough for me.)

If I set up the RSS Feed with the Item Link as our newsletter html page URL and the Description as something like “September Boating-Fishing Newsletter” with a little detail on what it contains, it seems I have a couple of potential problems:

First, this is a fairly large newsletter, perhaps a little large to be appropriate for reading in a News Aggregator;

Second, the newsletter has a lot of links in it, and ampersands and html code that I might have to fix before it will read okay in the Feed. I am not good at this and it is more work than I want to take on at this time.

I really would like to set up the Feed so that it suggests that people hit our newsletter link and go to the web site to read it. But I am not clear on just how to accomplish this.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Quaffer

fuzzygroup · Joined: Aug 24, 2003 Posts: 51

Hi there,

Before I respond, can I see your site so I don't say anything too stupid? Just post the url and I'll try and take a look.

Scott

sghalliday · Joined: May 06, 2003 Posts: 8

I have a similar question.

I publish my newsletter (http://www.hightechaid.com/newsletter/2003/HighTechAIDCourier_Aug_03.htm) every month as both an email newsletter and as a web page.

I want to provide an RSS version of it but am unsure of a good tool to do this. I currently create the newsletter in a combination of Word/Frontpage and then use a mailing list program to send both text and html versions.

What recommendations/suggestions do you have

...steve

fuzzygroup · Joined: Aug 24, 2003 Posts: 51

Hi there,

I'm sorry for not responding as promptly as I might have but I got hung up on other problems today.

An answer is forthcoming.

Scott

Quaffer · Joined: Aug 28, 2003 Posts: 3

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Thanks Scott,

I understand. We have (boating-fishing) forums on the site I run too, and we can't always get to questions as quickly as we would like too. I await with baited breath...

Quaffer

fuzzygroup · Joined: Aug 24, 2003 Posts: 51

Hi Quaffer,

I just wanted to let you know that I think I have the technical solution to what you need sorted out and it should be demonstrable early next week.

Scott

sghalliday · Joined: May 06, 2003 Posts: 8

Hi Scott:

Just wondered if you ever got back to this question. I am still fighting the issue here and though I have created a demo of a feed for my newsletter, I would like it to be easier to do.

You can see the demo at RSS Feed. This is not announced to anyone and will move to a different location before it goes live.

The body of the text exists as an html file and I have just done a cut and paste. I suspect that means that some of it is broken, but I haven't had a chance to go through it all yet.

...steve

Quaffer · Joined: Aug 28, 2003 Posts: 3

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Steve,

I have looked everywhere for information on doing an RSS Feed through FrontPage and have concluded that it cannot be done. I am using FP 2000 and understand that FP 2003 when it comes out will be able to handle XML.

I am giving up on this for now, but may use some kind of blogging software and place a copy of my newsletter in it and run and RSS Feed from it.

Quaffer

sghalliday · Joined: May 06, 2003 Posts: 8

Quaffer:

You might try what I did. Go to the link above and save the file.

delete everything between the [[CDATA and ]] marks.

Fix all the stuff above this and copy and paste your stuff in the gap, see what it does. Mine doesn't validate yet, but I only got three errors which I will work on. I haven't relesed it to the unsuspecting public yet while I work on these issues.

My reader (feeddemon) reads it fine, but I haven't tried it in any others yet.

...steve