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Advice on choosing a newsfeed service for displaying external feeds

Which one is the best?

         

apprentice

1:46 pm on May 21, 2006 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Since I am relatively new to syndication, I would like your opinion on picking a service that will allow me to display a newsfeed on the homepage of my site. The ones I found so far include 'Feed2JS', 'feedroll' and 'rss 2 javascript'. After a quick look, I quite liked Feed2JS a bit more than the others. Does anyone have in mind of a better (free) service that I can use to display a newsfeed? Have I already picked the right one or is there any other service that is head and shoulders to the competition (i.e. more features)?

Regards.

redherring917

12:12 am on May 22, 2006 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Just out of curiousity, is yours a "for profit / commercial" site?

We're looking into the same thing - providing news headlines on our site - but are having difficulty understanding our options since all major sources appear to state that their feeds are available for "non-commercial use only".

Thanks.

apprentice

7:52 am on May 22, 2006 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



It is not really a commercial site; it does have some ads, but yet again, everyone has. When I mentioned 'more features' I meant in terms of layout customisation (i.e. changing the appearance of the feedbox into something more consistent with the overall layout of the site).

Regards.

seolole

9:00 am on May 22, 2006 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



For your needs, I would consider newsfarm.net
Its a RSS aggregator site with the option to publish any of their feeds (from the original publisher or customized by keywords) on your site.
I think they use a tweaked version of feed2js to provide their service.

contentmaster

2:04 pm on May 22, 2006 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Hi

My query is similar to yours...I have implemented rss feeds earlier using rss2javascript..
However, these scripts display the feed in a php file.which means to open these pages, I need to add a static link somewhere on my page.only on clicking the link, the related template page opens with the rss feeds....

My question is - I want these feeds / news items to display on my home page on the right side column....how can I do this? Isn't this different from what I have already achieved....

seolole

2:40 pm on May 22, 2006 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



"I need to add a static link somewhere on my page"

If your page is also in PHP, you just have to do an include('page_with_rss.php') on your main page.

If your not using PHP, use instead a script with javascript or html output (although i don't know any that directly outputs html).

apprentice

4:17 pm on May 22, 2006 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Thanks for the suggestion. My mistake - I forgot to mention that I want to choose an RSS feed from an external site (which is not listed in newsfarm). In the meantime I found some more: rssmix, feedbucket, tickermyfeed, feedforall. All of them seem to offer similar features but I am still unclear of which one I should use and more importantly why.

Another issue here, apart from the design customisation features that these services offer, is SEO-friendliness. I have read that SEs value regularly updated content and RSS can potentially help, as major sources update their feeds quite often. I wonder, as with Feed2JS you have to insert a piece of JS code that does the job - however this content is not crawlable by SEs (as SEs do not resolve JS if I am correct). However, Feed2JS is powered by magpierss which is used to parse RSS. I will have a go and see if I can use that directly as a first step, although I am afraid it might be too complex for me to configure:-(

Regards
-Apprentice