With Feedburner’s BuzzBoost feature, you can turn any RSS feed into a neat auto-updating feature on your site. I use it for both my latest blog articles on my non-Wordpress based homepage and for all three of my Goodreads‘ book shelves you see to the right.
Anything that has a feed to it can be style via CSS and controlled by BuzzBoost. You can set the max number of updates that show on your page and whether or not you want a title or even a subscription link. BuzzBoost then gives you a bit of Javascript that outputs a nice <ul>, complete with plenty of classes for styling.
These tricks are also great for using on your blog and are often quicker, smaller and less buggy than using a similar plugin by a third party.
So what are some of the neat things you can do with RSS feeds, besides subscribing to things?
If your website and your blog are two separate entities, a great way to tie them together is display a nice list of the newest articles and/or comments on your site, that link back to your blog.
Instead of using a heavy JS twitter feed, or even Google’s Twitter JS (which I use and can be slow to load sometimes), you can use the RSS feed that every Twitter account has to display new tweets on your site.
Goodreads‘ has some great looking widgets to add to your site or blog, but the problem is that they’re all static and don’t update when you add, move or delete books. You can burn the feed that comes with each shelve and use that to display instead. I’ve used display: none and font-size: 0; to hide all the text from the feed to display a college of book covers. You can leave the book title and/or description if you want.
Do you sell themes on themeforest or stock of some kind on the internet? The quick way to connect them to your own site, without having to update your site everytime you add a new item for sale, is to simply use the feed that comes with most accounts. You can easily style it to make it a huge feature or just a small sidebar.
I’m a huge fan of cross-platform social integration, my time is valuable and I can’t spend it updating all my social media all day. (Sorry about the soapbox) Save some time by adding your Flickr feed to publish new photos on your website, instead of having to take the time to add to them both separately.
What are some of the neat things you’ve been able to do with RSS?
Photo courtesy of GeekMom Heather
About the authorI have over 10 years of experience in coding valid and semantic XHTML, CSS and WordPress that is both clean and SEO-friendly. Also a lover of books, interior design and cheesecake! More »
Copyright © 2010 Amber Weinberg. All rights Reserved. Please don't steal, it's really not cool! But if you'd love to work with me (you do don't you?), please contact me :)
Ya feedburner is great to combine multiple feeds and to create custom simple buzz widgets which are nice. I remember it was getting really popular and then they sold to google which made sense.
I’ve just started to work with RSS Feeds and your list will be very helpful for this. Thanks a lot!