How to Create an RSS Viewer for Your Website

Suppose that you have a website about some subject like 'sheep', for example, and you want to display a live feed of current news about your subject on your site. This is what I wanted to do, but it was not very easy finding out exactly how to do it. This is how I managed it in the end and it was all free.

First, you need to find a suitable news service to take a feed from. The BBC news site is good:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/

Using the BBC search engine, search on 'sheep'.

By default this is likely to show all results. Click on the button at the top of the screen to select only 'News & Sport'.

Now, if you scroll down the bottom of the screen, after all the items you will see the RSS logo and the link 'News feed for this search'. Click on the link.

This should now show the RSS feed for your search. What you need is the URL from the address bar. Copy this and paste it somewhere for use later. It should look something like this:

http://newsapi.bbc.co.uk/feeds/search/news+sport/sheep

Now you need to turn this feed into something that you can link to on your site. I used feedburner to do this. Feedburner is now owned by Google and you will need to register to use it, but it is free. Feedburner is here:

http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/home

To burn a feed, you will need to supply the URL above from the BBC site (http://newsapi.bbc.co.uk/feeds/search/news+sport/sheep).

When you have created your feed, you will have a feed address for it, which will look something like this:

http://feeds2.feedburner.com/co/LKIR

Copy this, because you will need it for the next step.

The next step is to find a RSS feed viewer which you can use to display your newsfeed on your site. I used the Feed Burner Weblog Widget from SpringWidgets:

http://springwidgets.com/widgets/view/345

Click on 'Customise this Widget'

Set the widget width and height for your site.

Paste your feed address (http://feeds2.feedburner.com/co/LKIR) into the box beneath replacing the feed address already there.

Select the colour for the surrounding frame and leave the Branding URL blank.

Click on 'Click Here to Get The Code' (you might have to click twice)

A small dialog window pops up over your widget design giving different options on using your widget. Select 'HTML' to use the widget in a webpage.

Copy the code supplied and paste it into your HTML file.

You should now have a webpage containing an RSS viewer showing the latest newsfeed based upon your selection above and updating as new content becomes available.

The 'Sheep News' widget can be seen in operation at http://www.flossie.me.uk