My-RSS: Spread the News
Frequently Asked Questions
- What IS My-RSS.co.uk
- My-RSS is a website that allows anyone to create manually edited, focused RSS feeds. It was designed primarily for information professionals in specialist information units who need to keep their customers informed about news from a wide variety of sources often on very specific subjects.
- What is RSS?
- RSS is a simple, but very powerful, internet syndication technology. RSS feeds (basically a structured file on a webserver) allow people to disseminate the latest information about their website, organisation or topic to people all over the world irrespective of their web browser, feed reader, operating system etc. Most news websites (e.g. the BBC) supply RSS feeds that you can put into your news reader. The news reader will let you know when new news items have been added to the website.
- Where can I get a news reader?
- A news reader is a piece of software you download and install on your PC. There are also web based news readers available. A search on google will give you lots of options - but I recommend Sage for Firefox.
- How does My-RSS work?
- Once you have registered you are able to start creating your own news feeds. You can add items to the feeds by simply entering the basic information into a form, or by "scraping" news from other websites or you can "cherry pick" items from existing news feeds. Once you have added all the relevant items to your feed for that day - click the UPDATE FEED button and your feed is then hosted on our server. You can disseminate the URL of your feed to your users who can put it into their news readers. Then, whenever you add new items - their news reader will inform them of the latest news.
- What does "URL or ISBN" mean on the form?
- The URL is the website address you want people to be taken to when they click that item on your feed. ISBN was added recently to make the creation of book lists easy. If you want to create a book list - just type the ISBN (10 or 13 digits) into the "URL or ISBN" field on the form (leaving the rest of the form blank). The website will fill in the rest of the form for you and turn the ISBN into a URL so that your users can get more information about the book you have listed and, if required, purchase it from Blackwell Online Bookshop. The URL will contain my affiliate code (source=1148119081). Any income generate from book lists will support the development of this website. You are, of course, free to change the code to your own affiliate code (if you have one) or remove the code before adding the entry to your feed.
- Scraping?!
- As most news websites are database driven - the content on each page is, generally, presented in a consistent way. My-RSS can read the pages of many news sites (e.g. the BBC, The Guardian etc) and extract the basic information about that page (e.g. The Headline, Date, Summary of the news item). If you want to try scraping news from a webpage - just enter the URL of the news page or the ISBN for books into the "URL or ISBN" field of the item form and click submit. The website will try to read all the relevant detail from the page and it will put it into the appropriate field on the form. All you then have to do is check that it is ok - and click submit. That item has then been added to your feed. If it can't extract all the information - it will tell you. N.B. Not ALL websites work - new templates need to be written for each website. Please contact us if you would like us to create a template for a particular website.
- Cherry Pick?!
- The website contains a summary news reader. This allows you to enter the URLs of RSS feeds that are of interest to you (e.g. from News websites like the Times or the Guardian). These URLs will be saved and available to you whenever you log in. For each of these feeds, the summary news reader will display all the latest items. You can then simply check on those items that are of interest and then click the button at the bottom of the page. All the checked items will be added to your feed. It really speeds up the process of creating daily news bulletins for your customers!
Please contact us if you have any questions or need support using the site.