The creative webmaster's guide to making money with your website

How to post a newsfeed to your site for free - in five minutes flat

What is a newsfeed? It is a listing of current news items. And it is something you may want to consider putting up on your website. Your website is about a very specific (niche) subject and your visitors are highly interested in the subject. It would be a great benefit to offer them up to date news on that subject.

Here is a sample newsfeed that I have on one of my websites: Take a quick peek and comeback. All of those news articles about fantasy going down the middle of the page are fed right into my website. I pasted some code and I was done. Now my visitors have fresh up to date news with one click.

With just a little cutting and pasting you can add the necessary code to your website and you are done. The code will update the news by the minute. There is nothing more you need to do. This is a great service that you can get for free.

Here's How to do it step by step the easy way:

1. Go to the Yahoo News Feed site:

http://news.yahoo.com/rss

Near the top of the page there is an input form called Search: type in the words that describe what kind of news you want for your site. Example: Fantasy Books, or Swords or whatever your site is about.

Now press the Enter button and take a look at the news headlines that come up. Are they targeted to what you want?

Now this is important: Take a look at the results and make sure it is what you want for your site. If you get subjects that arent quite right you can pull them out of the news feed. I use fantasy for my keyword but I get a lot of fantasy football, fantasy baseball and fantasy basketball news hits. I don't want these so in the search form I type in: -football,-basketball,-baseball,-NBA,-NFL . This use of the minus sign tells the yahoo feed to delete news items with this in the title. You should experiment this to get good targeted news for your web visitors. Once you get the kind of news items you are looking for copy the terms you use by highlighting them and Ctrl+C.

Now Paste those terms into the "Create your own RSS newsfeeds" input box that is a little lower on the webpage and hit the enter button.

Don't Panic! What comes up now is a crazy looking webpage with lots of blue, brown and black text. This is exactly right. This is the encoded page that has all the information to your newsfeed. This page is where you want to point your web visitors. In the top of your browser, in the Address window you see the adddress of this webpage. It looks something like this:

http://news.search.yahoo.com/news/rss?p=fantasy&ei=UTF-8&fl=0&x=wrt

copy that whole url - Just highlight it then press control+c or pull down copy from the edit menu

We are almost done - But this crazy looking page will not give the news to your web visitors in a browser friendly HTML output. To do this we need to translate it using a little bit of code. Don't worry, you don't need to code anything at all. There is a tool that will do it for you at the push of a button.

Make sure you have highlighted and copied the URL for your Yahoo news feed then go to this site: They have a nice free tool you can use.

http://www.rss-to-javascript.com/p/138.html

Paste the URL of your newsfeed into the top form space called URL.

NOw you can select several options like the number of items you want (This will be then number of news articles that show up): I chose 10. Don't leave it at Zero, it could list way too many items for your site.

For all the other options down the page you can select what you want. If you are unsure about an option you can just leave it exactly as it is.

Now press the preview button to take a look at your updated news feed. Look good? Okay lets finish up. Close the preview window and press the "Generate Javascript Button"

You come to a page titled: Feed Converter

Press the "Highlight all button" and press CTRL+C to copy the code you need. It will look something like this:

<script language="JavaScript" src="http://convert.rss-to-javascript.com/?simple_chan=1&desc=1&num=10&src
=http%3A%2F%2
Fnews.search.yahoo.com%2Fnews%2Frss%3Fp%3Dfantasy%26ei%3DUTF-8%26fl%3D0%26x%3Dwrt">
</script><noscript>Your browser does not support JavaScript. <a title='RSS-to-JavaScript.com: Free RSS
to JavaScript Converter' href=http://www.rss-to-javascript.com/?p=151,381&simple_chan=1&desc
=1&num=10&src=http%3A%2F%2Fnews.
search.yahoo.com%2Fnews%2Frss%3Fp%3Dfantasy%26ei%3DUTF-8%26fl%3D0%26x%3Dwrt&
as_html=1>Click to read the latest news</a>.</noscript>
<a href=http://www.rss-to-javascript.com target=_blank title='RSS-to-JavaScript.com: Free
RSS to JavaScript Converter'><img src=http://www.rss-to-javascript.com/images/rss-to-jss
-small.gif alt='RSS to JavaScript' border=0></a>

No need to give two seconds of thought to all this jumbled mess. You have copied it and and all you have to do now is paste it directly into your website exactly where you want the newsfeed to show up. And Voila, you are done!

 

 



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