As you may know, the eMichigan Web site has a page ...



RSS Refresher

Michelle Stiffler

CMA Users Meeting

November 1, 2006

As you may know, the eMichigan Web site has a page entitled “What is RSS?”. You’ll find it under “Reference Center” in the “Articles of Interest” component. This document briefly explains that RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is a way to manage the news available on the Web you are most interested in by organizing it in a single interface. You no longer need to go to several different Web sites for the latest news, you can organize it all in one place.

To use RSS, you need to have installed or have access to an RSS reader, also known as a news reader or aggregator. There are standalone RSS readers, as well as those that install right in your e-mail client. (You can browse to some of those listed on the page if you wish, or simply Google “RSS reader”). Most users will download and install a newsreader, but there is also a free online newsreader from NewsGator. You simply register on their Web site, and you can add RSS feeds as you wish. This option will be beneficial for those who can’t install software on their workstations due to managed desktops, or those who just don’t want to install more software on their machines.

CMA review on how to create RSS feeds on your Web sites: In order to enable RSS on a component for your agency Web sites, you must be a site administrator. Log into the CMA, browse to the page category (EMICHIGAN in this case) where your component is assigned, then click on “Modify page”. Select the component where you wish to enable RSS, then just a little click in the checkbox next to “RSS” will produce the RSS icon at the bottom-right of your component. You can preview it to be sure.

The RSS “button” on the home page will take you to a list of all the RSS feeds currently available on agency sites. Clicking on an RSS icon will display the XML file (you will see XML tags unless you have upgraded your browser to one that reads XML files), while clicking on the link will display the page where the content in the feed is located. Clicking on the RSS “button” on the individual agency sites will display the available feeds on that particular site (AG in this case). If there are none, the page will display “None Found” (MDCR in this case).

Take a look at the online RSS reader from NewsGator. (I already have an account set up, so I’ll take you through adding a RSS feed. Currently, I have a feed from the Lansing State Journal as well as a feed from the home page. You can see that the content listed in the newsreader is the same as the content listed on the home page of both these sites, since that is where I obtained the links to the feeds.)

Once you’ve registered and logged in, click on ‘Add Feeds”. Select the URL tab at the far right. Where do I get the URL to the RSS feed? Go back to the home page of eMichigan and right-click on the RSS icon. Select “Copy Shortcut” from the menu, then place the cursor in the “Feed URL” text box on NewsGator. Right-click again and select “Paste” and you will see the URL of the RSS feed in the box.

Go back to the eMichigan Web site, to see where that URL came from. Just (left-) click on the RSS icon, and the XML file will display in the browser. The URL in the address bar of your browser is the same as the one where we simply selected “Copy Shortcut”. Copying and pasting this URL into the newsreader will produce the same result, which is “subscribing” to an RSS feed.

Update: If you have installed the latest Internet Explorer version (7.0 currently), you will be able to add RSS feeds directly in your browser. While this is a nice feature, the benefit of NewsGator is that you will not have to configure both your home PC and your work PC or your laptop to see the same feeds; you just log in to the online NewGator wherever you go and all your feeds can be managed in the same place.

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