Generate RSS feeds from Dreamweaver

To get your content out to the largest audience and to make sure that they’re continually updated, you’ll need to use RSS feeds.

The thing is, if you’ve gone to all the effort of building your site in Dreamweaver and spend a large proportion of your time updating pages and posting content, then you’re only using half the power at your disposal if you’re not publishing an RSS Feed. By doing so, your content will get constantly republished (when updated) on sites such as Technorati, Yahoo or Google and reach audiences that use RSS agregators.

RSS DreamFeeder allows you to do exactly this directly from Dreamweaver’s interface without you having to retype your content or having any RSS/XML coding knowledge. The program is a Dreamweaver-integrated search engine that looks through your website for new and updated content to include in your RSS feed. When you process the feed, any new or updated content will be extracted from your HTML or XHTML pages in the manner of your choosing and listed as entries within an RSS file. In addition to this, it also automatically generates links within your pages to the feeds it creates, both as alternative content headers (i.e. link tags) and as feed links.

The genius of this program is that it generates an RSS feed from a static website so even the most minor update can be launched to the world as an RSS feed. The disadvantage of this of course is that literally every change you make, even spelling corrections, are classified as “updates” although you can specify parameters for what the program should consider an update. A wizard takes you through setting up your initial feed but then you have advanced tabs for those that want more control over how their feeds are distributed.

If you built your website in Dreamweaver and have no RSS knowledge, then this an essential add-on to make sure your website reaches the largest possible audience.