Put very simply, RSS is a way to pull out the newest headlines from most database-driven websites, including those built in WordPress and Blogger and Twitter streams. Many news websites also make RSS feeds available. They are a way of subscribing to new content through a feed reader, but here we are concentrating on using them to add news headlines to your website. This is a nice way of automatically sharing headlines from local news sites, other blogs you are friendly with or activity on local networks and forums.
An RSS feed is easy to spot, look out for the orange stripy signs like these. They’re often at the bottom of a page or some sites will have a full section of RSS feeds. In Firefox, if an RSS feed it available you will see the orange button in your browser bar.
Clicking on it should take your browser to a raw list of articles (example). Copy the URL now in the browser address bar (highlight the URL, control-c will put it into your clipboard).
In your WordPress dashboard, find the section called Widgets and drag the RSS widget into your sidebar. Now, paste the RSS feed you copied and complete the other sections as you wish. You can always go back and change this when you’ve seen how it looks. All being well, saving this should generate the RSS feed, but it sometimes takes a bit of fiddling to get it right.
When you revisit your site, you should now have an automatically generated list of headlines from the website and when people click on them they will go to the source article.
- add a hyperlocal news feed from Twitter.
- use delicious to create an RSS feed
Video: RSS in Plain English – CommonCraft.com
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