RSS is an XML-based format for publishing frequently updated content such as news or blogs. Most news portal and blogging software is capable of autocatically generating RSS feeds from the portal's or blog's content.
Office Live, however, doesn't generate RSS feeds. Come to think of it, that' not unreasonable. After all, Office Live is meant for building business identity web sites, not news portals. But even if you have a plain-vanilla business identity web site, there may be times when RSS feeds for some of the content on your site could come in handy - new product introductions, product updates, or company news, for example. You may not need to update such information with the same frequency as Reuter's news, but an update once a month wouldn't hurt. If you find yourself in such a situation, you'll be happy to know that you can generate RSS feeds and add them to your Office Live web site.
You can confront the problem in two ways: Entering feed details manually with a service such as IceRocket RSS Builder, or ceating an XML file in good old Notepad or another text editor of your choice. Creating the XML file manually can be a pain. Unlike HTML, XML is not a forgiving format. If you make a small mistake your feed won't work as exptected. IceRocket Feedbuilder, therefore, is the better option without question.
I generated a sample RSS feed for designerwebsites.org, Acxede.Net's companion site (See the RSS button in the top right-hand corner). I just added two entries to my feed. But you can add as many as you want. If you want to generate a similar feed, follow these steps:
- Sign up for IceRocket RSS Builder.
- Log in to your account and click on the
My RSS Channels link in the top menu.
- Click on the
+ Add Channel link to the right. The Channel Configuration page, shown in Figure 1, comes up.
Figure 1
- Enter the requested details. Note that in Figure 1, the e-mail address reads
acxede@acxede.net (Acxede). You must type a human readable name in parentheses otherwise the XML validator throws a fit. The name can be anything, as long as it is enclosed in parentheses.
- Click
Save Configuration for Channel to save the configuration and return to My RSS Channels page, which will now look something like Figure 2.
Figure 2
- Click the
Add Entry link next to the name of hte channel you just created. The Edit Entry page, shown in Figure 3, comes up.
Figure 3
- Enter the requested details. Note that in Figure 3, the e-mail address reads
acxede@acxede.net (Acxede). Recall that you must type a human readable name in parentheses otherwise the XML validator throws a fit. The name can be anything, as long as it is enclosed in parentheses.
- Click
Save Item to save the configuration and return to My RSS Channels page.
- Repeat steps 6 through 8 for every entry you want to addd to your feed.
- When you're done, click on the
Publish link next to the Add Entry link. You'll come to the Publish page shown in Figure 4.
Figure 4
- CLICK ON THE RSS BUTTON. (Don't forget, otherwise the code will show raw XML when someone clicks on the RSS link on your site).
- Cut the code and paste it in an HTML module on your web page. See what my page looks like. Click on the RSS button to see the feed. You should see the feed shown in Figure 5.
Figure 5
RSS builder has several options, including one to validate the feed. You can explore it further on your own.
You can exert a lot more control on the look and feel of a web page if you put the text on it in an HTML module rather than typing in directly in a Zone. That's because you can style the text with HTML markup or with CSS styles in an HTML module. There's a tiny little problem with the scheme, though: the text tends to get cut off at the edges. You'll often find the last letter or two in every line partially or completely missing. You can fix the problem by encolsing all the text in the moule inside a padded <div> like this:
<div style="padding: 5px 5px 5px 5px;margin:0px; overflow:visible">
...All the text and HTML goes here...
</div>
It's that easy
Acxede.Net's companion sites are built with Office Live Small Business. They will show you what goes into the process of building web sites, demonstrate some of the techniques you'll find on this web site, and give you a few ideas to kick-start your web site.
- DESIGNERWEBSITES.ORG This web site is built using only Office Live Small Business's built-in Web Design Tool.
Office Live's web site themes and color schemes make your life a lot easier. Agreed, they are quite restrictive in some ways but for people who don't know anything about web site design or HTML, they are godsent.
But if you have even a tiny bit of aesthetic sense, you'll want to match the colors in backgrounds and images on your pages with those in the color scheme you have chosen. There's just one tiny little problem. Every color scheme in Office Live has seven colors, but you don't know which seven. You don't know their codes, in other words, so you can't match your backgrounds and images with them.
Figure 1. The PIXIE window
There's a great little utility out there, called PIXIE that solves the problem. PIXIE is free, of course, and it doesn't have annoying pop-ups or advertisements included gratis. Nor do you have to lie about your past on lengthy registration forms by cooking up a maiden name for your mother or name the teacher you hated with your gut as your all-time favorite teacher.
It's a great little utility that I've used for a long time. And for the benefit of doubting Thomases out there, I don't know its developer and I don't get paid to recommend it.
Figure 2. PIXIE at work on my web site
You can download it at http://www.nattyware.com/pixie.html.
Download and intall PIXIE on your computer. When you run it, it pops up a little window, like the one in Figure 1, that displays the color of a pixel on the screen that the cursor points to. Alongside it, it displays the color's code in several formats. The one you're interested in is the HTML color code. The window always stays on top, so you don't have to fish for it after clicking around in Site Designer.
Figure 2 shows my Office Live web page in Site Designer and you can see the HTML color code in the scheme I've chosen.
You can use PIXIE to find the color code of just about any pixel on your screen.
With the number of identity thefts skyrocketing, most people are reluctant to part with their personal information online. The trouble is, almost anything you do online requires parting with some personal information, or at the very least, tolerating some invasion of privacy in the form of cookies and server logs. People who visit your web site face this dilemma too. You can allay their fears by posting a comprehensive privacy policy on your web site.
The Need for Privacy Policy
Inspiring confidence in customers is not the only reason to have a privacy policy. Sometimes you are legally required to post a privacy policy on your Web site depending on the nature of your web site, the location of your server, or the location of visitors to your web site. If you are in the financial services or healthcare industry, there are specific regulations as to what your privacy policy should contain. Some states like California have specific requirements too. So the first step in developing your privacy policy is to find out legal requirements, if any, which may be applicable to your web site.
What Privacy Policies Contain
Your site’s privacy policy must contain information about:
- What information you collect on your web site
- How you store it online and offline
- How long you store it in your system
- What you do with the information
- Whether you share it associates and partners and why
- Whether you sell it to mailing list companies and under what circumstances
- How users can alter or remove their information from your database
- Whether users can opt out of their information being collected
- Whether you allow third parties, such as advertisers, to collect user information from your site
- What users can do if they find that your site is in violation of the stated privacy policy and the contact information of people responsible for resolving these issues
How to Generate and Post Privacy Policies
Unless you are lawyer, you may find it difficult to draft such a policy. It is a good idea to have a lawyer draft it, or at least look it over. But if you don’t want to hire one for whatever reason, you may want to look at the privacy policy generator on The Direct Marketing Association's web site.
The generator asks you to provide some basic contact information and then answer a few multiple-choice questions about how user data is collected on your site and what you do with it. After you check the applicable options, the generator produces a privacy policy document in HTML which you can cut and paste on your site.
Once you create a privacy policy, make sure that your users can find it easily. People typically look for privacy policies in the About Us section, in the footer, on sign-up or login pages, and on shopping cart check out pages. Put a link to your privacy policy at these locations or pages.
Managing Changes to Privacy Policy
You can’t forget about the privacy policy once you create it. Web sites change over time and the changes may affect the privacy policy. Therefore, whenever you make a change to your web site, you must ensure that the change complies with your stated privacy policy. If it doesn’t, you must alter the policy and inform the users by prominently displaying a notice to that effect on the privacy policy page on your site. For example, let us say your privacy policy states that your site does not allow third parties to place cookies on the user’s computer. If you then want to hook up with an advertiser that sends down third party cookies, you must either reconsider the alliance or change your privacy policy.
Machine Readable Privacy Policies
If you think writing privacy policy is difficult, imagine how difficult it must be for users to read and understand privacy policies of scores of sites. To get around this problem the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the web’s standards body, decided to incorporate machine readable privacy policies into its standards. It came up with a specification called Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P).
New browsers such as Internet Explorer 7 have built in support for P3P. You can click Web Page Privacy Policy … on IE 7’s View menu and a dialog box such as one in Figure 1 pops up.
Figure 1: Web Page Privacy Policy in IE 7
If you click the Summary button after selecting the site or one of the pages in the dialog box, a summary of the applicable privacy policy pops up in a new window, as shown in Figure 2.
As you can see, this summary is a lot easier to read than a legal document with lots of hereinunders and thereinafters.
Generating P3P Documents
P3P documents are written in eXtensible Markup Language (XML). XML is even more tedious to write by hand than legalese. Fortunately, there are many editors which can generate P3P documents. Most of them require you to pay a fee, but a complimentary 90-day evaluation version is available from IBM here.
Figure 2: Privacy Policy Summary
A Web page on O'Reilly's web site describes how P3P works and how to use IBM’s P3P editor to generate and deploy P3P policy documents.
If you don’t want to install software or try to understand the various P3P options, several paid P3P generators are available on the Web. You can look for them by typing "P3P generators" in Google.
A good, easy to understand privacy is key to reassuring visitors and customers that their information is in safe hands. Make sure your web site has one.