You Probably know that many of the feed aggregators and ISP homepages allow you to add RSS feeds of live content to your home page. I have several feeds that keep me up to date on what's going on in the market. I also spend a lot of time contributing to what's going on by participating in AR discussions. I recently stumbled upon the Google button that allows you to add a feed to your Google home page. This html code generator is located at this link.
Why would you want a button on your site like this one?
Here is what Google says:
1. Why would I want to place an "Add to Google" button on my site?
The "Add to Google" button makes it easier for people to discover your feed or gadget. The button helps you promote your site by making it easy for readers to quickly add content right to their Google homepage or Google Reader.
2. How do I add a button to my site?
Use the form above to create the HTML for your site. Be sure to go to the right section for either your feed or Google Gadgets API gadget. Simply enter the URL for your feed or gadget, click "Create HTML" and copy and paste the resulting text onto your website.
3. How do I know the button works?
Once you've placed an "Add to Google" button to your site, you can test it out by simply clicking on it and going through the process. You'll know it worked if your content is successfully added to your Google homepage or Google Reader.
If you have a frequently updated website, such as a blog or news publication, you can use a feed to help people stay up-to-date with your site. A feed is a specially formatted version of the content on your website. Feeds are machine-readable, which means that users' feed readers and aggregators can automatically show them your latest content and alert them whenever updates appear.
5. What are gadgets? How do I create one?
The Google Gadgets API is a way to create rich gadgets with a greater functionality than a feed. Use it to turn your web content or application into gadgets that users can add to their Google homepage. You can also develop features that affect other aspects of the page, such as font and color schemes. The Google Gadgets API doesn't require any downloads, and was designed to be flexible and easy to use.
6. How do I create a feed for my site?
Most blog hosting services make it easy to create a feed. Check those sites' help content for more information (e.g., Blogger, LiveJournal, or Typepad). You can also create custom feeds using Google News and Google Groups. If you host your own website, there are a number of resources on the web to help you get started creating feeds, such as this guide by Danny Sullivan.
7. How do I add a thumbnail to my feed?
Most of the gadgets displayed in the Google Directory have thumbnails associated with them that illustrate what the gadget does. You can specify a thumbnail in your feed. The suggested dimensions for thumbnails are 120 pixels wide by 60 pixels high. Google downloads this image, scales it to 120x60, adds padding as necessary, and for performance and reliability, re-hosts the image on a google.com server.
The syntax can vary depending on the type of feed format you are using. Here is an example of how you might include thumbnail information in an RSS feed:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<rss version="0.92">
<channel>
<!-- The title is used in various places in the directory and Personalized Homepage
to help users. Please keep the title as short as possible. -->
<title>Test Feed</title>
<!-- The link is used in the Personalized Homepage title-bar, to link to your site -->
<link>http://www.google.com/</link>
<!-- The description is used in the detail page about your feed -->
<description>A nice long description of your feed.</description>
<!-- ... other channel sub-elements may go here, e.g. ttl ... -->
<image>
<url>http://www.google.com/ig/gadgets/sticky-thm.png</url>
<!-- ... other image sub-elements may go here, e.g. width ... -->
</image>
<item>
<title>RSS Item title #1</title>
<link>http://www.google.com/</link>
<!-- ... other item sub-elements may go here, e.g. description ... -->
</item>
<!-- ... more items ... -->
</channel>
</rss>Here is an example for Atom:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<?xml-stylesheet href="http://www.blogger.com/styles/atom.css"
type="text/css"?>
<feed xmlns="http://purl.org/atom/ns#" version="0.3" xml:lang="en-US">
<title mode="escaped" type="text/html">Test feed</title>
<tagline mode="escaped" type="text/html">A nice long description of your feed.</tagline>
<logo>http://www.google.com/ig/gadgets/sticky-thm.png</logo>
<!-- other feed sub-elements, including id, links, etc. -->
<entry xmlns="http://purl.org/atom/ns#">
<!-- ...item elements... -->
</entry>
<!-- ...other items... -->
</feed>
8. What feed formats are supported?
There are a number of popular feed formats out there. We currently support Atom (0.3 and 1.0) and RSS (0.91, 0.92, 1.0, and 2.0).
9. I still have questions. Where can I get more help?
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