I hate to sound like a groupie or something, but I love your site, Dave, and I’d love to be able to include a little box somewhere on my own site that featured your latest entries! Is this doable, and if so, how do I do it?
Gosh, thanks. Just don’t hang out in my neighborhood with super-long telephoto cameras, okay? 🙂
It turns out that I was visiting my pals at NewsGator and they showed me an incredibly slick way that we can use their online RSS aggregation services – for free – to accomplish exactly what you ask.
Let me step through how I set this up, then show you the one line of code you need to add to your site to get exactly what you seek, a displayable version of my RSS feed, updated automatically every time I post something new here on Ask Dave Taylor!
First off, I logged in to my NewsGator Online service and clicked on the “newsgator manager” tab, then on “Edit Locations”:
To accomplish my custom RSS feed info, I need to skip past the existing locations (which let Newsgator automatically keep my feeds in sync, whether I’m checking via mobile phone, within MS Outlook, or through Newsgator Online, but that’s another story) and create a new location, conveniently labeled “Create location”.
I’m going to call the new location “ADT RSS Feed”, and press submit:
Now I have a new “Location” that’s ready to be customized:
First off, I really do not want my new RSS subscriptions to suddenly show up on your site’s mirror of my content, so I’ll change that option by choosing “Click to change”.
Next, I click on “feeds” and get this:
Since I want the resultant feed to be just Ask Dave Taylor, I’ll click on “uncheck all”, then scroll down and just select Ask Dave Taylor (yes, I subscribe to my own weblog. Doesn’t everyone? 🙂
I check the box adjacent to my site, scroll to the bottom, click “update” and I’m back at the main Edit Locations window again. This time I’ll click on “headlines” since that’s what I want featured in the feed. It shows me:
That’s just a single box to check, once. The fun part’s a bit lower on the page:
If you have even the slightest geeky tendencies you should be looking at this and saying “ooohhhhh cooooool!” because, as you can see, it’s incredibly easy to tweak the feed info to be exactly what you want. Since I’m only including data from one feed source, for example, I’ll lose the $feedname$ and the date of the posting, and instead slip in some CSS classes so that people who want to fine-tune the results for their own design templates can do so. Here’s my template text:
<div class="adt_feeds"><a href="$link$" target="blank" class="adt_feed_link">$title$</a> <div class="adt_feed_desc">$description$</div></div>
Notice also that I can decide how many entries to include from the RSS feed and whether to show full-feed or partial feed info regardless of whether the feed itself is a so-called “full feed” or not. I’ll stick with the defaults for now, and here’s the result:
I’ve dropped it into a CSS box so it stands out from the surrounding text on the page. You can do that too by wrapping the entire div in a “<div style=”border:1px solid black;padding;3px”>” or similar, or just definite that attribute for the class “adt_feeds’ in your CSS style sheet!
That’s right, to get that slick box showing up on your site, featuring the ever-changing world of Ask Dave Taylor on your own weblog or home page, simply cut and paste the following one line of code:
<script src="http://services.newsgator.com/ngws/headlines.aspx?uid=5079&mid=5"> </script>
That’s astonishingly simple both for me to configure and, most importantly, you to include my feed info on your own Web site. Kudos to Newsgator for yet another way cool hidden feature. And it’s free! What’s not to love about it?
For the rest of you reading this, you’re also welcome to paste the above line of code into your own site: the more, the merrier.
I want to know, how can i add contact us form to my website which will automatically mailed to me & send auto respond mail to the person who has filled that form.
Hey Dave,
Great tutorial, i just have one problem. I added my blog to Newsgator and set the rss feed to appear in the ‘Blog’ section of my website, this worked fine. All the posts appeared. Then, when i edited older posts or added any new ones, none of the changes appeared in the rss feed, either on my website or in newsgator….does it take a while for these to update? I only changed them about an hour ago but its kinda worrying me. I also noticed that the Newsgator website is only copyrighted from 2003 to 2008. Is everything ok with Newsgator. Any info would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.
Wow. I just implemented it for my website and I have to say it was a breeze to set up! Thank you for this amazing article. REALLY helpful!!
Dave,
Once again I found a beneficial tutorial from you! I think newsgator changed up their design a bit, but I was able to figure it out. My feed will be on my new site design in a few weeks!
Thanks again!
Calvin Hanson
Photo Graphics
Logo Designer
Ohhhh
what I’m looking for is a way to have, let’s say the last five headlines from my blog appear on the home page of my site.
is that even possible?
Thanks, Von, but it’s not supposed to point to your account on Newsgator, but to make it easy for other people who use Newsgator to easily subscribe to your weblog.
Great Tutorial, but I’m not sure how to use this to add make the reader show MY blog on MY site. I went to Newsgator and added my blog, but when I pasted the script into my site, nothing…nada
I’m not sure how that script is suppose to point to my account at newsgator
Legend! I am very geekily excited that my site can now churn out all the rss feeds I could want. Thanks a lot!
DOES A RSSFEED READER IS TO BE SET FOR MY SITE TO READ THE FEED, THAT I GET FROM YOUR SITE
Hi Dave,
My site is developed using AdobeFlexbuilder.
where should i include the oneline of code in the
tag.Thanks for your support.
is it possible for me to put a rss feed on my site i am basically new to online business thing and seeking all the advice i can. help!
عكس-جوك-وغيره
Dave
As with one of the other recent posters, you just helped me figure out a few weeks worth of researching how to do this. My only issue is that I have a calendar being imported and the dates are being listed with the upcoming stuff being listed last. Any idea how to fix it?
Dave, it’s Dave here. I’m trying to get RSS on to my pages so that they’re search engine friendly. I’ve tried the rss2html script (php) but can’t get it to work on my IIS6 server. Is the method you demonstrate here friendly to the search engine spiders or not, like a Java script for example. I really need to get rss transformed into html for my pages. Thanks Dave, from Dave.
Thanks Dave! That was extremely helpful!
Things have been super-busy… BUT, wanted to drop you a line and say thank-you for this awesome tutorial! Your help continues to be much appreciated!
Thanks Dave!
Jonathan Kraft
Dear Dave!
I finally found the solution for what i’d been referring to a BIG PROBLEM for a month now. And I made it work for me too.
Thank you very much!
Thanks for taking the time to produce that post Dave – I tried it and it worked like a charm 🙂
Incorporate an RSS feed into my web site or blog!
It’s a question I hear with some frequency; how can you add an RSS feed to the pages of your own web site, home page or weblog? Many of the solutions are pretty complex, but it turns out that Newsgator Online – a free RSS aggregator and tools service -…
How can I incorporate an RSS feed onto my web site?
It’s a question I hear with some frequency; how can you add an RSS feed to the pages of your own web site, home page or weblog? Many of the solutions are pretty complex, but it turns out that Newsgator…