How to Setup a Virtual Tour Feed

How to Setup a Virtual Tour Feed

As an RTV provider one of our main goals is to keep up with our website’s content, but as we all know, we seldom make updates to its content unless we change or add a promotional item. Two days ago our company, Virtual Vista, made major structural and content changes. During this conversion, we decided to make the commitment to keep its content fresh, thus increasing traffic and improving search engine ranking.

As a result of this commitment we decided to use the Real Tour Vision’s Blogs to keep it fresh. While researching the best way to incorporate this feature into our website, we stumbled up on this web page (http://www.rss-specifications.com/displaying-rss-feeds.htm); this article is all about RSS Specifications.

The article explains the different ways and technologies we can use to accomplish this task. The easiest way to accomplish this is to use JavaScript, but this option would defeat our purpose. Why? Because search engines DO NOT actually “see” the content of the RSS Feed, thus the content of the feed within our website would not be indexed (bummer).

Another option was to use a PHP to display the RSS Feeds. The beauty of this option is that the content will be displayed as HTML and thus Search-Engine-Friendly! This is what we were looking for! But wait a minute; we really are not comfortable with PHP Scripting, so we kept on reading.

Finally, an ASP solution, just like the PHP one, but using ASP Scripting! Please don’t take us wrong, PHP is great, but we are ASP people since ASP was conceived.

We proceeded to download the FREE code from the website and after learning how it works, we decided to make some adjustments to suit our needs.

We made some small changes and converted the code to work as a function; this function accepts parameters and can restrict the output to display a specific number of blogs and whether we want to display just the titles or the entire content.

We just wanted to share this with you all, you can see a working sample by clicking the following links:

http://www.virtualvista.net (this shows the title feeds)

http://www.virtualvista.net/Virtual-Tour-Blogs.asp (Shows the full feed)

Keep in touch,

Ric Castro
Virtual Vista
West Chester Virtual Tours
610-429-0288
ricc@virtualvista.net

SHARE THIS STORY