How To: Republish Your Blog Entries as Part of an Existing Website Using RSS Feeds

This post was originally posted as an update on the FAQ page. I've since realized that it makes more sense to answer questions in separate posts, archived by category, and provide a link to the post in the comments where the question was asked. I've also added some new info at the bottom of the post.

Question: I can't for the life of me work out to have a feed on our website showing our recent news articles from typepad. Any chance you could point me in the right direction?
Posted by: Craig | March 23, 2006 at 06:36 PM

There are a lot of services that let you do this. I recommend these two:

1.BuzzBoost (a free service from Feedburner)

BuzzBoost republishes your burned feed's content as go-anywhere HTML. Want to promote your blog on another site you manage? BuzzBoost gives you a snippet of JavaScript you can paste into your page templates.

This is definitely the easiest of the many html republishers I've tried! You really should be using Feedburner to manage your feed anyway, as they provide a host of other free and useful ways to extend the utility of your feed. To use Buzzboost, sign in at Feedburner, "burn" your feed, then chooseBuzzboost from the top of the menu of services under the "publicize" tab of your feed's account. It's so easy, I'll just let their instructions walk you through it.

2. Feed2JS (a free service from Maricopa Community Colleges)

The interface for Feed2JS is not quite as simple as Buzzboost, but I've had better luck with applying CSS styles to the feed and getting it to match the look of my web site. Again, I'll let them walk you through it at their site. I recommend trying this service only after trying Buzzboost, because it's a little more difficult and if you are able to makeBuzzboost work for you, then you're all set.

Feed2JS does have one advantage over BuzzBoost that might make it useful for you in specific circumstances— you can create scripts to bring in feeds from sites other than your own.

For instance, I wanted to create a feed for a specific tag in del.icio.us to use in the sidebar here. If you want to bring in a feed from your del.icio.us account itself, they provide javascripts for several options:

• The link rolls feed allows you to keep a list of your del.icio.us bookmarks on your own site.
• The JSON filter allows creating a feed that contains a specific subset of your del.icio.us links.
• The tag rolls feed allows you to keep an updated tag cloud on your site.

However, I wanted not only my own bookmarked pages for that tag, but also any pages tagged by other del.icio.us users with the same word. Del.icio.us automatically creates an RSS feed when you do a search for a specific tag, but they don't provide a javascript to import searches outside your own bookmarked items into your blog. So I used the feed from del.icio.us and the javascript generator at Feed2JS to create a hybrid that does exactly what I want.

Comments

[Posted: May 13, 2006 8:10:52 PM]

I definitely recommend the Feedburner service, but having used the service from Maricopa Community Colleges (and since I live in Maricopa County), they deserve some love as well.

I've always been curious as to how long Feed2JS will be available.

[Posted: May 13, 2006 8:37:38 PM]

Thank you for a useful post. I, too, use Feedburner, but only because I was unaware of others. Now I am better informed—thanks!

[Posted: May 13, 2006 8:51:08 PM]

Cortland,

Yeah, I've wondered too whether Feed2JS will always be around… But so far, so good. It's a great service and I definitely hope they continue to maintain it.

Jack,

Glad you found the post useful!

[Posted: Jun 17, 2008 6:33:33 PM]

Service relocated to:
http://feed2js.org/

[Posted: Jun 19, 2008 9:56:20 PM]

Thanks for the heads up, Scott.

I've changed the links in the post to point to the new domain.