Forum Moderators: not2easy
Does anyone know about any reputable news sites that provide a script for their summarized news feed?
Thanks in advance.
Zuko
Moreover is probably a good place to start.
Many news sites offer feeds in js format also so you just really have to cut and paste a js snippet into your HTML.
We have a few so we know that there are several sites that specialise in listing resources to get content onto your page, and have sections on "news". The actual names of these sites escape me just now.. maybe search for "fresh content on your sites" etc. Also do a search in google normally for lots of sites that say "free feeds for your site" or "free news for your site".
Cautions though that many feeds are nos just starting to be "monetized" (to use Googles new term). Many include some news items as advertising, many second party or scraped feeds such as the "free" feeds from newsisfree includes one item always saying something like "Get this feed on your site" (not very professional looking if you have a serious site)
Many Moreover feeds increasinly have a substantial number of headlines linking only t subscription sign up pages, (sorta decreasing the value of the whole idea) and many Moreover feed content is "bought" by companies meaning you will get not really news but things like press releases etc. A good example is their "management" feed which seems to have a good proportion of their headlines from a certain large international management consulting company in the form of press releases. Moreover is still OK for certain feeds though overall.
If you are looking for more serious magazine (rather than news) articles which you wont see on everybody elses site and his dogs, I can highly recommend magportal.com (No relation except they do include our feed among thousands others). They review every one of their items. They have a simple cut and paste js solution. (though just having a quick look now, Im not sure whether it is free anymore)
That assumes you want to DIY or not pay. Like everything on the net now, news headlines are starting be charged for as the scripts get more professional and stable. You can BUY subscriptions to customized news feed services on your sites from such places as Newisfree, Moreover, and a host of other new services. If your salary rate is $10 US per hour or over, this may well turn out cheaper...
JS is just one way that news feeds can be delivered, but its the simplest, so it gets used a lot. Using parsing software or includes, as suggested at the top of my post, it is just delivered as plain HTML. And this is getting increasingly popular. RSS and XML can be delivered in many formats. It just needs some sort of parsing to display and there are many commercial and open source scripts available to do that. Some parsing modules are almost standard in fairly recent Perl and Php versions.
That said I know its the conventional wisdom that SE's cant "read" js. Im not convinced. Agree they dont follow links, but im seeing good evidence that they can actually read the words. This may be due to different types of js, or something else completely and im no technical genius, but I think some MAY be able to read the words in some instances.. Evidence? very thin.. just that some sites that are using our js format feeds seem to be improving their ranking well on our keywords which are in the feed...
RSS feeds have several fields, including headline (title), description, date, source, link to full article, authors etc. More often than not authors do not provide all of this imformation, maybe just a title (headline) and link to the full article.
Most software and hosted solutions gives you the option which ones you want to display. It seems its around 50/50 for news feeds. Either just a linked headline, or a linked headline with a short abstract.
Bloggers who use feeds tend to give you the whole article... so each feed can be very different.
This way it turns into spider food, and get update ratings in the SEs. I'm on the prowl now with the links that were provided.
If anyone knows of the one that fits what I need exactly, then I would greatly appreciate it if you could let me know.
Thanks in advance, and thanks for the replys.
Zuko.
I you're interested in the headlines script sticky mail me.
Many of these new small services offer these feeds free but advertising is inserted in the items. One provider adds an item called "Customize this feed" . When your users click on this they are redirected to the news feed providers own site where they are enouraged to use their site and not yours. Hardly good for stickability.
The best place to start if you want to go to the trouble of cobbling together open source scripts is the "documents" section of syndic8.com All of these scripts and solutions are open source but do need either some time to customize and tweak them, OR some basic knowledge of perl, php and/or caching.
As far as my experience goes, you CAN get descriptions and abstracts too from these free scripts. We have used 3 or 4 which all privide for parsing of any content in the RSS including the descriptions, as long as it is provided by the RSS publisher. Really a basic php rss parser need only be around 40 lines long, so its not a complex job.
We are one of the "cobblers", but then again staff time is relatively cheap around our neighbourhoods.
