Publishing RSS feeds

If your web site includes a blog or other news content, you should probably publish your latest content in one or more RSS feeds. Most blogging platforms and many other web site publishing systems include built-in support for outgoing RSS feeds, but a few tools enhance that basic function by making your outgoing RSS feeds a little more reader-friendly, or by providing a way to republish other people's RSS feeds on your own web site.

Note that if you are republishing RSS feeds you should pay attention to copyright laws. Most Creative Commons licencesed content is free for nonprofits to republish on their sites (though be sure to look carefully before republishing); however most conventional news sites are still governed by conventional copyright (which means you can't republish their content without permission). These concerns may not apply to republishing news on an aggregator that is strictly for internal (i.e. non-public) use; check with a lawyer if you're worried about your organization's liability.

FeedBurner is the most popular tool for enhancing your own blog or web site's outgoing feed. FeedBurner makes sure that your feed is readable by just about any news reader, no matter how old, and it provides you with a little more information about how many people are subscribing to your feed.

FeedWordPress is a plugin for the WordPress blogging platform that makes it easy to republish other people's RSS feeds on a Wordpress blog.Even if you don't have a WordPress blog, you might find that the combination of WordPress and FeedWordPress is a relatively easy way to set up a news tracking site for your members or staff.

Drupal is a content management system (web site publishing platform) that offers a couple of options for aggregating and republishing RSS feeds.  The default aggregator lets you set up a single page to track all inbound RSS feeds (or republish select feeds in the sidebars of particular pages); the add-in Aggregator2 offers fine-grained control over inbound feeds and lets you set up highly customized ways of displaying aggregated content.