If you’ve ever tried to get your website featured on the front page of a site like digg, reddit, or Slashdot you might have felt frustration when you didn’t get the right number of votes to make it.
There is a site called RSS2.com that will automatically put your website’s content directly on its homepage.
How to get onto the homepage
Here are the 3 easy steps for you to take to get your website featured on the homepage of RSS2.com:
- Go to the site and make sure that your RSS feed is in the database. The easiest way to do this is to paste in the URL for your RSS feed into the “Read a Feed” input box at the bottom of the page.
- Verify that your existing site RSS feed was imported correctly. You should be forwarded to the page that shows you your feed’s page on RSS2.com if it was imported successfully. (For example, the page for this site is http://rss2.com/feeds/Gabriel)
- Publish a new item on your website. RSS feeds are updated every 5 minutes so you should only have to wait for a minute or two. Refresh your feed page until you see your new item appear. Now check the homepage. Your new item should be at the top of the list, and will remain until 9 newer items are published by other people in their RSS feeds.
Bonus tip #1 – how to get into the top 30 feeds list
If you want to make it into the top 30 feed list (featured at the top of every page), all you have to do is tell people about your RSS2.com page that features your feed and increase your view count. The easiest way to do this is to use the RSS feed stats widget at the bottom of your feed page (copy and paste the HTML into your blog sidebar or another HTML page) — note that your site must allow <script> tags to enable the live updates of your RSS2.com feed stats information. You can also promote yourself to the top 30 by linking to your feed page in your blog roll and by sending the link to your friends.
Bonus tip #2 – Pretty site icon
To have your site icon show up nicely in the all feeds page and in the explore lists make sure you have a favicon installed for your website. RSS2.com will look for that and use it for your site icon. If it doesn’t find one, it will use a generic one that doesn’t set your site apart from any of the other ones. See the Wikipedia entry on favicons for how to get one installed for your site if you don’t already have one.
So, 3 easy steps to get your website content promoted on the RSS2.com website.
Try it for yourself: Submit your site to RSS2.com
(P.S. It usually accepts most Atom feeds as well as RSS feeds.)
3 responses to “The secret to getting your website featured on the frontpage of RSS2.com”
i tried to add my feed to rss2.com but it keeps showing me the 692 feeds page, how do i know it has been added, yes i did create an account
Jean,
Earlier there had been a problem where no sites were getting added at all. That has now been fixed.
I tried adding your feed and found that the PHP xml_parse function was finding an error in your feed (It was choking on the not-correctly-encoded title … elements in this entry: http://www.irintech.com/x1/blogarchive.php?id=664 ).
The fastest way to get your site added would be to edit that one entry (try deleting the …. and the ‘ , then type them back in) and then try resubmitting your feed.
I will look into the xml parsing error and see if it can be a little bit more forgiving.
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Gabriel
Jean,
After doing some looking into the problem, it seems that the issue is in fact that your RSS feed isn’t valid. (You can use http://feedvalidator.org/ to check the validity of your RSS feed.)
It looks like the PHP developers don’t want to support parsing non-valid XML due to the fact that would break the standards-compatibility. So unfortunately it looks like you’ll have to clean up your feed in order for it to be added correctly. 🙁
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Gabriel