Carmine

One of the hottest stories around the web at the moment is Squidoo.com -- yes, it sure is a funny name.

And here's another funny thing. They don't call them web pages. Nope they're lenses. And the singular is lens.

But on the good (very good actually) side is how popular the Squid is with Mr Google.

One thing you can do with your Squidoo lens is to suck in fresh content by using a nifty piece of technology called a RSS feed.

WHAT IS THIS "RSS" THING ANYWAY?

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and it allows you to add content from other websites to your website or Squidoo lens, simply by copying one line of code into the page you control.

That means -- if you can copy and paste, you can do this thing.

One of the great things about RSS is that the content from the other site is automatically updated on your site whenever it changes at the original site. I think now is the time to say... Ah, the wonders of automation.

So to recap:

Freshly baked new content is sucked into your lens every hour/6 hours/12 hours/day (whatever you choose) and you don't have to do a single thing after you set it up.

Another benefit is that it helps you flesh out your Squidoo lens.

Know why that matters? They won't even display your lens until you have at least 4 "modules". In other words, 4 blocks of various kinds (basically info, RSS feeds, YouTube videos, eBay ads, Amazon ads, etc).

At least one of your modules has to be text you have written (or copied-and-adapted from elsewhere).

So we come to our question of the day:

WHERE DO YOU GET RSS FEEDS FROM?

Answer: All over the internet, actually. You have undoubtedly seen the orange XML rectangles and square orange RSS logos on lots of websites. Underneath those graphics you will find the web address (URL, to be technical) for that particular RSS feed. You just copy that into the RSS feed module at Squidoo and site back and marvel at your handiwork.

Was that what you wanted to read?

No?

You wanted more??

Okay, here ya go...

This URL is going to pull in news from Yahoo about American Idol. See those 2 words at the end? You can change them to any other 2 words and it will still work. Or delete [ +idol ] if you only want news about a one word topic... like incontinence. Oops, did I say that?

http://jeremy.zawodny.com/ynews-search-rss.php?q=american+idol&go=go

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