RSS Feeds, or, How Does This Stuff Work?

To begin with, ClickBank does not have an RSS feed. Instead, they provide a large file called the "Marketplace Feed." This is simply a large XML (Extensible Markup Language) file that describes the products available at ClickBank. This file is updated daily. You can download a copy of it here. Included in this zip file is a small DTD file, which describes the format of the larger

The marketplace feed is not intended to be viewed with a browser; it's intended to be parsed and filtered and the resulting information displayed in some useful format.

The feeds that are reviewed here do just that: they parse that XML file, filter it, format it according to their subscribers, and generate the RSS feeds. Depending on the product, your account at the server will be provided with a small database of product descriptions based on keywords you specified in your account profile; or product ads will be added to your database based on information periodically culled from your site by spiders.

In still other instances, keywords are provided in the Javascript you maintain on your HTML page will be used to search for product ads.

So because all of these products originate from the same XML database, the differences between them are the simply result of the different goals and abilities of the people writing and supporting the server code.

In fact, because you can get your own copy of the file, if you have some skill with various programming tools such as Perl, you can create your own personal interface to the ClickBank Marketplace. Because Perl's big strength is processing text, and XML is entirely text, it's natural that there would be many Perl modules available at CPAN to help you out with such a project.

But knowledge of Perl, XML and RSS feeds are not necessary to use any of these products.