1. Why should I care about RSS?
Until recently, the main approach that users had to obtain the latest information from their favorite websites was to go to the sites themselves. For example, if you wanted to get the latest news from a variety of newspaper sites, you had to go each site independently every day (or however often you wanted the update).

A better way to obtain this information is to use a software application that polls the sites that interest you and provides the latest news on the topics you choose. This type of software application exists and is called an RSS reader or aggregator (the sites would have to provide the content as RSS feeds – more on this below).

In the case of eBay, the changing content consists of item listings, discussion threads, announcements, and more. eBay currently provides feeds for eBay Stores, the General Announcements Board, System Announcements Board, Discussion Boards, and the Workshop Board. For example, the General Announcement Board feed is: Link

If you clicked on the link, you may have noticed that the feed is in a machine readable format. The specific format is the RSS format, which is based on the XML standard. If you don’t know what XML is, don’t worry, you do not need to know what it is to take advantage of RSS feeds.

Fortunately, the RSS readers or RSS news aggregators translate that machine readable feed into a human readable format. There exist standalone RSS readers and a few browsers that include RSS reading functionality (Firefox, Opera, and Safari already support RSS, and Internet Explorer has announced support for it in the next release – IE 7).

The readers are already setup to poll the feeds every few minutes (depending on the reader) so that the user gets the latest information.

An added benefit of RSS is that when you are browsing other sites you do not need to provide your email address in order to sign-up for RSS feeds. All you need to do is to subscribe to the feeds by copying the feed URL. Not giving away your email address improves your privacy and keeps you in control. You can unsubscribe from a feed anytime you want. So the content providers have to make sure that they give you relevant content otherwise you will easily unsubscribe.

3. When I click on the RSS button I get an unformatted page. Is this correct?


Yes, this is correct. The page you are seeing is the machine readable RSS feed. This is the input that the readers will use to obtain the latest information and then display it to you. Once you see the machine readable page, just copy the URL for the page and paste that URL into your reader.


We did consider formatting the page by adding a stylesheet to our feeds (if you are not technical disregard this paragraph), but decided against it because older browsers do not handle stylesheets well. Also, future browser versions will not display RSS feeds as machine readable text anymore but will instead automatically format them

5. What feeds are available on eBay?


We are currently providing RSS feeds for the following site functionality:


eBay Stores


We are currently enabling Store owners to expose their most recent listings via RSS. Up to 100 of the Stores’ most recent listings will be available in the feed. Note: We may change the 100 value based on your feedback.


To subscribe to a Store feed, go to the homepage of your favorite eBay Store. Scroll down all the way to the bottom of the page. Right above the “Tools” section there should be an RSS button ( ). Click on that RSS button to get the feed. Copy and paste the feed URL into your reader.


Note: The Store owner may have decided not to expose their listings via RSS. In that case, the RSS button will not be available.


Discussion Boards


Every discussion board and each individual topic within those discussion boards are RSS enabled. For example, you can subscribe to receive an RSS feed for the Giving Works Discussion Board. This will give you updates if a new topic has been added or updated. You can also subscribe to receive an RSS feed that provides updates when a response for a specific topic within a discussion board has been entered.


To subscribe to these RSS feeds, go to the bottom of the discussion board or the topic you are interested in and click on the RSS button ( ). The RSS feed will be shown. Copy and paste the feed URL into your reader.


General Announcements Board and System Announcements Boards


To subscribe to the General Announcements Board click on:
Link


To subscribe to the System Announcement Board click on:
Link


Once the RSS feed appears, copy and paste the feed URL into your reader.


Note: You can also get to these feeds from the bottom of their respective pages.


We are working to add RSS to other areas as well in the coming months, so stay tuned.

6. How do I RSS enable my eBay Store?

If you are a Store owner who is interested in providing listings via RSS feeds, go to "Manage My Store > Listing Feeds (within Store Marketing)". Click on "Distribute your listings via RSS" and click "Apply". The RSS button should appear on the lower left hand side of your Store.

Atjaguarx,
There are several feeds we have available on our site. A summary list is posted on posting 7 of this workshop. If you need further explanations please let us know.

Thanks,

Arturo

Hi fshdr:

The Watch this discussion link is located at the top of the page. Remember - If you click on the "Watch this discussion" link, you will receive an email each time someone posts to the workshop.

Please note, this is not related to RSS.

Thanks,

Deirdre
eBay Community Development

Hello:
This is my first experience with workshops and I want to be sure I am logged in correctly and seeing content as it is posted.