How can you offer an RSS feed with a good old static website without being forced to make extensive changes to the HTML of every single page? Which of course would mean to invest lots of time and thus money. Some alternative solution was needed for a client of mine. And the answer to it all was found with: twitter!
We had been already informing the website’s readers by regular tweets anyway. But many of them just aren’t on twitter! So here’s what we did:
- We transformed the existing twitteraccount to a feed only profile. All you need to do for this is to add the words “FEED ONLY!” in the bio-box so people can immediately see that there will be no conversation possible from this account. Then stop sending @replies or anything else but the content you want to appear in your feed.
- Take the URL of the RSS offered by twitter /which you can find at the end of a twitter profile’s sidebar) and make it accessible from your website by offering a link named RSS.
That’s the easy version. 
As we knew that many of my client’s website are not that web savvy to use RSS technology and feedreaders yet, we “upgraded” the possibilites of our feed by using feedburner. Feedburner is a service that amends the usability of ordinary feeds. (Feedburner has just moved to Google btw.)
- By activating the option “Smart Feed” in the “Optimize” tab of feedburner you make your feed compatible with any feed reader application. Depending on what settings or browser you use, you might also get right to your feedreader of choice instead. The “Chicklet chooser” in the tab “Publicize” will give you the code to implement the resp. link to your website.
- The main point about using feedburner in this concrete case was the option “Email Subscriptions” that feedburner offers in the tab “Publicize”. Adding this option to your website makes RSS accessible to all those who don’t use a feedreader (yet). The code need for implementing the resp. link to your webiste is offered in feedburner once you click on “Activate”.
All that is left for you to do then is to implement the two links in a place on your website that can be found at first sight. We added it to the navigation sidebar:
We also wrote an article about this new service on the website and promoted it on all our other social media channels explaining what we did and what consequences this will have for the look of the feed. Now we’re curious to see if people will accept the service.
Do you have any feedback about this way of implementing an RSS feed to a static website? Then leave a comment right here. 
Thanks, great help!