Review of Online RSS Feed Generators

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds are great to have on your site for a number of reasons. For one thing, they allow your visitors to easily keep up with new content. There are plenty of SEO and social media benefits as well.

Most blogging software makes it very easy to make feeds available for your readers. The problem, however, is that creating a feed for a regular website involves dealing with code. I wanted to make a feed for the EndGame Public Relations News page, which features news releases I’ve written for my clients. I can write the code, but I really don’t want to. So, I set out looking for a site that would do everything for me and not charge anything. Below is a review of the best and worst (in no particular order) of the free services I found using my news page as a test site. At the bottom I give my “Best Bets“. There are probably others that I missed. Feel free to tell me about them in comments!

IceRocket
In addition to being a blog search engine, Icerocket offes a free online RSS builder. I actually used this service for quite a while. It’s simple to set up and offers a number of features, such as adding your logo to the feed and including a link for comments. There’s no option to import an existing feed or automatically build a feed. The big problem I’ve had with IceRocket is that over the last couple of weeks the site has gone down a few times for long periods.

Ponyfish
Another online business with a very odd name, this site offers a system that automatically builds an RSS feed or you. Just enter the page from which you want to build, click on the links you want to include, and presto .. RSS feed. You don’t have to sign up to create a simple feed that doesn’t include descriptions. However, if you don’t register your feed will only update every eight hours. If you sign up for a free account your feed will update every four hours. The main problem I have is that you’re unable to add link descriptions with a free account. They do have paid options that allow you to add descriptions and edit link titles. It also doesn’t appear to be possible to add a logo to your feed.

Feedity
This service is very similar to Ponyfish, except that it’s even easier to use. There’s no option to sign up for an account, free or not. You just enter the URL of the website with elements for your feed, and Feedity automatically pulls out the content. I’m not sure how it works, to be honest, but it worked perfectly with my test page. It even skipped the link to my news archives that was right below the news release list. Feedity also claims to update your feed with new content in near real time. Unfortunately, like Ponyfish, it has the downside of not adding link descriptions or a logo in the feed.

RSSPad
This service from PRWeb has some promise. Like IceRocket, you manually enter links and descriptions to create your feed. If you have an existing feed, you can import it. RSSPad is still in beta, which means you’ll find some issues now and then. I found a problem with the items in a feed I imported not being ordered correctly, but after I emailed customer service they fixed it quickly and courteously. Since then I haven’t had any problems. The huge benefit of this service is that your feed is listed on RSSPad’s “Recent Feeds” page, and whenever you update your feed it jumps to the top. The Google Pagerank on that page is five, which means Google has decided it’s a fairly important page and will be back to index it frequently. As a result, my feed is now ranking higher than the EndGame Public Relations home page for some of my key searches!

RSSpect
If you don’t mind a little code insertion, RSSPect seems like a decent service. The system involves inserting code on your website to indicate item titles, descriptions, and so on. RSSpect’s software then reads the code and builds your feed on it. This allows you to include everything you want to include, but it seems time consuming to me. I didn’t go through the process of including the markups, so I don’t know for sure how well the service works.

FeedYes
FeedYes works in a similar way to Ponyfish. You enter your webpage URL and click the items you want to include. The problem I had was that it didn’t work as WELL as Ponyfish. FeedYes missed several items on my news page that I would have preferred to include, and there didn’t appear to be a way to fix the error.

Feedburner
Feedburner doesn’t actually have an RSS generator, although why is beyond me. It seems they’d be very well served to create one or buy someone like Ponyfish. What Feedburner does very well is HOST your feed. You sign up, enter the URL of your existing feed, and you’re ready to go. When I first learned about the service, I didn’t understand the point. If I have a feed already, why do I need a host? The answer is that Feedburner allows you to include many, many extras on your feed, and they help you promote it. No matter who you use to build your feed, I recommend hosting at Feedburner. I currently host four feed there.

So, who is the best? Here are the Media Relations & SEO PR Blog Best Bets:

Best Overall RSS Feed Generation Site: The SEO benefits put RSSPad over the top. I wasn’t happy with the buggy feed item ordering, but that concern was eased by a quick response by customer service. If you don’t want to risk dealing with a site that’s in beta, I recommend IceRocket.

Best “Quick and Easy” Feed Generation Site: You can’t beat Feedity’s quick and easy RSS generation. The feeds lack descriptions, but you can create one with a whole mess of feed items in less than a minute. Ponyfish is a very close second in this category.

Happy syndicating!

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