!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> Streamline Training & Documentation: Bring News and Info Feeds to Your Computer

Sunday, January 07, 2007

Bring News and Info Feeds to Your Computer

As a follow-on to yesterday's post, here's an overview of how to use a personal portal to make it easier to keep up with updates to your favorite news and information sites.

Increasingly news and information sites — both traditional media and blogs — include syndication capability. This means that you can arrange to have headlines and short descriptions notifying you of updates delivered to a news reader (aka news aggregator) that you either have installed on your computer, or that you access at a Web site. You are also provided with a link to the full article for each item whose headline is listed.1

There are basically two syndication formats:
  • RSS — Really Simple Syndication, in several versions. The most recent is 2.0.


  • Atom — developed in response to RSS standardization and versatility issues.
Because it's easy (if not feature-rich), I use My Yahoo as my news reader.2 To get my customized page of news feeds set up, I used two approaches, both accessed on Yahoo's Add Content page (reached via the "Add Content" link at the bottom of the My Yahoo page).
  • For most of the newspapers that are now sending me a list of headlines, I used the search and browse features on the Add Content page to home in on the websites I was interested in.


  • For some items on my customized page, e.g., the Washington Post, I started at the publisher's website and clicked on a special feed subscription button. Often this button is orange with an "XML" label (standing for the eXtensible Markup Language in which the syndication file is written), but it may also read "RSS" or "Atom" (in which case, it's blue).

    To find the syndication URL (Web address), right-click on the feed subscription button (Ctrl+click on Macs) to "Copy Shortcut." Or click on the feed subscription button and use Ctrl+C on your keyboard to copy the URL found in the address bar of your browser. (Ignore the raw code that appears in the main window on your screen.) Return to the Yahoo Add Content page and click on "Add RSS by URL" to bring up a page with a box into which you can paste the URL (use Ctrl+V). Finish by clicking on "Add."

    Some sites have a "My Yahoo" button. Clicking on this button adds the RSS for the site instantly to your My Yahoo page.
If you want to track news updates about a particular topic (e.g., "telecommunications" or "Andy Grove"), you can do that on the Yahoo news search page. Type in your search terms. When the search results come up, click on the "My Yahoo" button and, on the next screen, click on "Add to My Yahoo." Yahoo will pull the latest headlines from any site that mentions your topic and deliver them to your My Yahoo page.

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1 Some sites now syndicate full text of articles, podcasts, images, video and metadata. So long as you have compatible software (on your computer or Web-based), you can set up subscriptions so that when new material is posted it comes to you automatically. For instance, if you wish to subscribe to podcasts, popular services enabling you to do so include iTunes and Juice.

2 You need a Yahoo ID in order to create a My Yahoo page. You can register with Yahoo by following the instructions provided on each of Yahoo's personalized services pages.

If you want to try a news reader other than My Yahoo, you can get a list of possibilities from Yahoo or Google. Two news readers you might like to check out for comparison to the Yahoo news reader are Bloglines and Newsgator.

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