There are many free online websites out there that will convert your HTML page to an RSS feed URL. But why would you want to do such a thing?
That’s a good question.
Having an RSS feed on your website will allow your visitors to subscribe to your news feed (or blog feed or article feed etc). This allows your visitors who regularly use an RSS News Reader (there are many free RSS readers out there) to collect RSS feeds of interest and read all their (combined) headlines in the one place. Then if anything catches their eye they can click on the link and view the complete original article (including pictures, audio and video – if any).
RSS News Readers have become a very useful time saver. Many business (and non-business) people open their RSS Reader first thing in the morning on the bus or train or when they arrive at work (even before reading their email) to catch a quick glimpse of the topics they are most interested in (yes, there are RSS Readers for your mobile phone, smart phone, iPhone and PDA).
So if a visitor to your website wants to receive just the news headlines from your web page in the packaged convenience of their RSS Reader application, and you don’t have an RSS feed to offer them, then they may just click right past your website and never come back.
Now of course, if you don’t have the expertise to create your own RSS feed (which requires writing web code to produce the specially constructed XML format file the RSS Readers consume), then the next best thing is to convert your HTML page to an RSS feed URL and place a link to this feed on your web page.
Here is a list of some free html2rss web services I’ve used:
http://html2rss.com
Easy to use. Allows you to create your own account with backlinks (which is great for SEO purposes). Provides for the conversion of single HTML documents to an RSS feed (extracting wither the articles it finds or the links). Support for converting multiple HTML URLS or RSS feeds into the one RSS feed (often called a “machup”). Resulting RSS feed can be a snippets from your HTML page or just the links. The downside to html2rss.com is not all the links in the HTML document you present are converted into the resulting RSS feed file (so if you’re worried about maximising your backlinks when feeding your RSS into the aggregators then try another service).http://www.feedage.com/html2rss/
Creates an RSS 2.0 format feed from your HTML page. You can’t create your own account. There is a bulk conversion tool (http://www.feedage.com/html2rss/bulk_html2rss.php). Fails to convert all links in your HTML document (not all of the links on the HTML page can be found in the resulting RSS feed – so if you’re worried about maximising your backlinks then try another service).http://balluche.free.fr/html2rss
Doesn’t miss any of your links in the HTML page. Provides a useful filter so you can only include certain content from your HTML page into the resulting RSS feed URL. Includes the ability to convert images (not just HTML) into an RSS XML file. The downside is Balluche produces awfully long RSS Feed URLs (ugh!). Luckily you can convert these using Balluche Blink or tinyurl.com or a myriad of other free URL shortening services.
The downside of converting your HTML page (or pages) to an RSS feed is that you don’t have control over exactly what information goes into the resulting RSS feed, and the conversion (from HTML to RSS) is a once-off process … if your HTML web page changes you’ll need to recreate the RSS feed so the new information is included.
And of course, because these are free serives, they will usually attach a link to their own website as the last link in the RSS file.
But when you need a quick RSS feed, these html2rss converters offer a quick and practical solution, even if it’s a temporary one until you can implement your own real-time, dynamic, automated RSS feed.
