MSIfetch Lounge - Feed Directories - Software - Other Applications - Other Products

From: the Desk of Quentin Brown
Ref: RSS Tutorials and software

Click here to download the latest version

Click here to watch the install video A complete tutorial on how to use the different features of MSI Fetch and also a couple of videos on how to create your own feeds.

Watch them Seperately:

Install MSI Fetch  -  Acquire Feeds  -  Add your own Content  -  Embedding  -  Google  -  Options

Using MSIFetch is very easy and most people find wrapping their head around the different terminology a little difficult so lets just get this out of the way first.

What are the different formats?

Web Page Extensions.

There is no difference between .htm and .html. Early web servers for Unix used .html, while early servers for Windows 3.1 were limited to .htm because of the MSDOS three-character extension limit. Modern web servers are configured to accept both. Web browsers, on the other hand, only pay attention to the "content-type" that the server reports, which will be text/html in either case, and essentially ignore the file extension altogether. Consistency can be helpful though there is no fundamental difference between the two.

The really interesting page extensions are .asp, .shtml, .php, and so on. These are all ways of enhancing a regular HTML page with commands that cause the server to insert files at various points, fetch parts of the page from a database, perform computations and so on. These are known as "dynamic" web pages. The simplest are .shtml files, which feature server side include directives. Almost all web servers support these and they are easy to learn first. .asp files are Active Server Pages, Microsoft's contribution to this category. .php files are PHP pages, which allow pages to be enhanced with the PHP programming language; as of this writing this is a very popular option and what we use for this software.

So instead of having a page index.htm we can also have a page index.php and it will act exactly the same but we can now embed and do things inside that we could not do with the plain htm page.

What is RSS?

RSS is simply a text file with some code in it which is then saved with an .xml extension. Short for Extensible Markup Language, a specification developed by the W3C. XML is a pared-down version of SGML, designed especially for Web documents. It allows designers to create their own customized tags, enabling the definition, transmission, validation, and interpretation of data between applications and between organizations.

Basically what it means is that by incorporating xml with PHP you can have hundreds of pages of content that will change every time the author adds a new entry either through a blog or software. Because it is basically text you don't have to worry about viruses or spam because it is a direct link and just text.

Most big companies like Yahoo, Google and MSN have been using it to simply deliver headlines and then drive you to their site. Because it is text you can also use it for articles, audios and videos if you want, making it a very powerful format. You would have seen it on our main web page. Imagine being able to deliver training and tutorials direct to your customers desktop or even syndication your information to hundreds of other sites.

So what does this mean to you?

Basically what this means for you is that you can now add either your own content known as feeds or anybody else's feeds in to your webpage's and have a constant stream of new material very easily. If you add your own it also means you can be seen on many other pages who might want to syndicate your content.

This is just the tip of the iceberg however as there are also readers and compilers that we are going to give you that will allow you to deliver this content right to someone's desktop and also the webpage's. This is going to revolutionise the reading of tutorials, delivery of newsletters etc.

We will show you how all this works in the following tutorials. First you will probably want to play so here are a whole buch of feed directories. Just copy the xml or feed into MSIFetch and add them to your page as you have seen in the videos.

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