Hey local bloggers, hey newspapers, hey anyone else who has a locally relevant website – want to display businesses in your neighborhood, city, or town, on your website? CitySquares just made it very easy for you to do that with Local Feeds for Publishers. You can add these feeds of local businesses to your website by location, by category, or both. It’s a piece of cake!

Here’s how to get started:

Let’s say you want to add a list of the restaurants in Boston’s Back Bay to your website. All you’d need to do is go to that page on CitySquares and click the Get this Feed button. Once you click that you’ll be able to copy it into your clipboard and do any one of the following:

1. Use Your Blog Platform: If you use a blogging platform like Wordpress or something similar, you should be able to add a Feed Widget to your sidebar. If you can do that, just paste the feed link into that widget. Your blog’s CSS will take care of the formatting for the feed and control how it’s displayed.
2. Get a Free Widget: If you’d like to use a third party RSS widget, there’s a bunch of options out there. One in particular at SpringWidgets is pretty good and its free, but there’s others freely available. Just Google for RSS widgets and you should get plenty of options. Once you find the widget you like, enter the feed link provided to you on CitySquares.com, then grab the snippet of code provided by the widget, and drop it into your website code.
3. Build it Yourself: If you’re a developer or you know what you’re doing, you can get a lot fancier, and you can control the look and styles for the feed on your website. Just grab the RSS feed link and have at it!
4. Subscribe: If you’re not looking to do something like this on your website, but instead you want to just subscribe to one of these feeds, that’s quite simple too. All you need is an RSS reader like any of the free ones out there.

The lists of businesses in these feeds are set up to rotate quite regularly, basically whenever business content is updated on our site, it’ll update in the feeds. This way you get a fresh list of businesses on your site, as businesses are added or edited on CitySquares.com. And based on how you choose to integrate these feeds into your site, you can choose to only display a list of businesses, or a list with verbose information about them. It’s up to you! For an example, look on the right side of this page for a list of South End, Boston Restaurants, where CitySquares is headquartered.

This is just the first implementation of RSS feeds for publishers and we’re interested in your feedback before we kick it up a notch. Please feel free to report any troubles, or submit your comments, suggestions, etc., below.

Thanks and happy feeding!

Ben Saren is Co-Founder and CEO of CitySquares.com, the premier hyper-local search site for small businesses nationwide. Ben is also a guest writer on Local Search News and a a regular at industry conferences and within the Boston high-tech and entrepreneurial scene. Ben's actively blogs at Your Suspect, where he writes about his experiences and perspectives as an entrepreneur. Email this author | See all posts by Ben Saren

Tags | business listings, feed, lists, publishers, RSS, widgets