Adding News Feeds to Your Site
Ok, so a number of my clients have thought about using news feeds on their web sites - specifically their home pages. Naturally, I had to find out for myself what this was all about. Maybe my site could use some news feeds.
I was hoping that I could go to my favorite blogs (such as Fast Company), click on the RSS link and have their feed display on my web site. Alas, this is not how it's set up to work. The Site Feed buttons are meant to be used with third party software know as news aggregators. The thought being that you would collect all sites/or blogs you wanted to pull information from, customize what information reached you then scroll through specific news each day. Great, but I'm all about the web and if I can't share my favorite news, what's the point?
It seems there is a whole industry devoted to helping web masters create web news feeds. I found a freebee that I'm testing out in this blog called Feedroll. Basically, you pick the news provider you'd like (e.g., NPR), I picked Fast company, then you can select colors, widths and some other preferences (works best in Explorer 5.5) then it creates some html code that you cut and past into your web page where you'd like the new feed to appear. I've pasted mine below.... This may or may not work once it's live on my server. I tested it on a html page on my server and it worked...so I've got my fingers crossed.
Apparently, Blogger just allows Atom.xml news feeds and not the more common RSS news feeds, Feedroll is suppose to be compatible with both systems. It doesn't work in this text editor, so I'm going to try to embed it directly in my blog template.
It worked! I put it in the right-hand column and removed the background, so it almost looks like it was designed as part of the site.
I have to say even though Blogger is VERY easy to use, as usual, it helps to know a little html and be comfortable mucking around in code a bit.
I was hoping that I could go to my favorite blogs (such as Fast Company), click on the RSS link and have their feed display on my web site. Alas, this is not how it's set up to work. The Site Feed buttons are meant to be used with third party software know as news aggregators. The thought being that you would collect all sites/or blogs you wanted to pull information from, customize what information reached you then scroll through specific news each day. Great, but I'm all about the web and if I can't share my favorite news, what's the point?
It seems there is a whole industry devoted to helping web masters create web news feeds. I found a freebee that I'm testing out in this blog called Feedroll. Basically, you pick the news provider you'd like (e.g., NPR), I picked Fast company, then you can select colors, widths and some other preferences (works best in Explorer 5.5) then it creates some html code that you cut and past into your web page where you'd like the new feed to appear. I've pasted mine below.... This may or may not work once it's live on my server. I tested it on a html page on my server and it worked...so I've got my fingers crossed.
Apparently, Blogger just allows Atom.xml news feeds and not the more common RSS news feeds, Feedroll is suppose to be compatible with both systems. It doesn't work in this text editor, so I'm going to try to embed it directly in my blog template.
It worked! I put it in the right-hand column and removed the background, so it almost looks like it was designed as part of the site.
I have to say even though Blogger is VERY easy to use, as usual, it helps to know a little html and be comfortable mucking around in code a bit.
posted by super webgirl at
10:10 PM
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