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News Feeds

News feeds are a great source of free, constantly updated content for your web site. Providing fresh updated news related to the content of your site enhances a visitor's experience and makes your site appear to be current with your market segment.

What is a News Feed?

A news feed is organized data containing news article titles and links to the online articles. Some news feeds provide abstracts or exerpts from the articles along with publisher name, date and time stamp, and even accompanying photos, video or audio clips.

How To Put a News Feed into Your Web Site

      News feeds are typically available in either XML/RSS, (eXtensible Markup Language / Rich Site Summary), format, or by placing JavaScript code in your HTML pages.

      XML/RSS offers the most flexabile solution, as you can parse the feed and reformat and edit the text.  Under XML/RSS, it is necessary to use additional programming to perform the parsing, and adds steps to including the feed in your site that are not necessary if you opt for the JavaScript type of feed.

      With the Javascript method, the only options are any configurable parameters established by the feed's source.   With Javascript, in effect, the feed content is placed directly into your page, also users must have Javascript enabled on their browsers to view the news feed.

      With XML/RSS feeds, after parsing the data, you put only the content you want into your site.   The trade-off is javascript gives less control but is easier to implement and XML/RSS gives more control but with additional programming time and expense.

      RSS News Feed Demo - incorporating an RSS news feed from www.craigslist.org into a web page on our site where RSS headlines for jobs postings for web page designers, perl programmers, web graphics designers, and online systems engineers.

Reviewed News Feed Sites

Below are reviews of some of the news feeds we checked out. We've created sub-pages for each news feed provider so you can see the feed working, and get it running on your site quickly and easily.

General News Feed Providers

NewsTrove.com - highly configurable free news feed which includes thousands of publications. Allows keyword based headline results and other options.

FreeNewsFeed.com - US, world, tech and business news.

WorldPress.org - global news, US Foreign Policy stories from world news sources.

Industry Specific News Feed Providers

InsuranceJournal.com - insurance industry related news feed.

CircuitNet.com - covering the world of electronics manufacturing.

International News Feed Providers

Scotsman.com - news from Scotland, International, UK, war reporting, etc.

(UK) Liberal Democrat News - putting the latest Liberal Democrat News on your web site.

Standards, Source Code, and How To Tutorials
for using XML / RSS News Feeds on Your Web Site

Although we can't go into full detail here about how to use an RSS / XML news feed in your site, there are is some information in our programming area about Markup Languages / RSS. There are also many exellent online tutorials, free Perl source code, and official standards documents online:

Using RSS News Feeds - a tutorial from WebReference.com explains some of the basics and provides Perl / *nix source code listings.

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