Soapbox Engage Blog

RSS can be a little confusing.  I try to remember it like this: it's a no-nonsense way to push content from a website, or pull content into a website.

If you're creating content for your nonprofit's website, you may be most interested in figuring out how to push your content out so that others can view it in feed readers or other services that use RSS.

If you have a Non-Profit Soapbox or Joomla site, it's super easy.

All you have to do is grab the URL of any page on your site that has blog-style content. This could be a Section or Category view, for example. Add this to the end of it:

?format=feed&type=rss

This also works with Soapbox Events Upcoming Events views. As an example, you can see an RSS feed of PICnet's upcoming Non-Profit Soapbox training events created in this way:

http://www.nonprofitsoapbox.com/about-us/events?format=feed&type=rss

On a WordPress site, it's easy, too.  Simply end a page's URL with this:

/feed

and you will get a similar properly formatted RSS feed.

You can see an example of this with WordPress's own blog:

http://wordpress.org/news/feed/

Both examples gives you a nice RSS feeds of the content that you can then use directly... or push to Feedburner so that you can manage it and track how many subscribers you have.

Image source: TEIA MG on Flickr