Does your website have an RSS Feed? Step 1 in Advancing your Website in 2010!

The most efficient way for your readers to keep up-to-date with news from your nonprofit’s website is by subscribing to its RSS feed.  Don’t have RSS feeds on your site? Did you know that within just a few minutes your website could be displaying fresh themed content from RSS News Feeds around the web?  If you are a Google Reader user you can now subscribe to be notified of changes to any web page, even if the site doesn’t have a feed…and it’s free!

On Monday, January 25, 2010  Brian Shih wrote:   “At Google we're always looking for ways to take advantage of work being done in other parts of the organization. So when a team approached us with a way to follow changes from websites without feeds, we jumped at the opportunity. Post by Liza Ma, Product Manager.

Feeds make it easy to follow updates to all kinds of webpages, from blogs to news sites to Craigslist queries, but unfortunately not all pages on the web have feeds. Today we're rolling out a change in Google Reader that lets you create a custom feed to track changes on pages that don't have their own feed.

These custom feeds are most useful if you want to be alerted whenever a specific page has been updated. For example, if you wanted to follow Google.org's latest products, just type "http://www.google.org/products.html" into Reader's "Add a subscription" field. Click "create a feed", and Reader will periodically visit the page and publish any significant changes it finds as items in a custom feed created just for that page.  We provide short snippets of page changes to help you quickly decide if the page is worth revisiting and we’re working on improving the quality of these snippets. If you don’t want Google to crawl or create feeds for a specific site, site owners can opt-out.”

Here are some more example feeds for sites without feeds that you could follow:

• Macy's - special offers [view in Reader]
• NYU Computer Science homepage [view in Reader]
• Zillow.com homepage [view in Reader]

If you have a feed-less page you've been dying to follow, sign in to Google Reader and try it out for yourself. 

Now, Rebecca at Wildapricot  takes you step by step on How to Create a Feed for any Web Page with Google Reader.  She also delineates three more ways to create RSS feeds for web pages: FeedYes, Femtoo, and Page2RSS.

If you decide to test drive Google Reader or any other way to create RSS feeds for your Web page, let us know by sharing your comments here.