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Adding an RSS Word of the Day Feed to your Website
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Thursday, February 16, 2017 at 4:27 PM
This is my first try at adding an RSS Feed to import new material daily to my site. I'm sure there are other programs out there that may work better, I'd appreciate any suggestions, but this works and I thought someone else might use this as a starting point. To add an RSS Feed, you need a program to create the the Feeder. I used Feed.Mikle.com and it was Free at the time this was prepared. I wanted to insert a Word of the Day on our website and after trying several, settled on Merriam Webster This is the RSS feed URL that I inserted on the Mikle.com Creator Page. Once you have stepped through the creation process, click "Save and Get Code" on the Mikle site. Copy the top code (Java script) (there is an option at the bottom to click to get iFrame Code, but JavaScript works on both Webpages and Announcements and does scale for the Responsive Design (Mobile Friendly). Creating the Program is a little complex, but you can't break anything and your Results Display along side so you can do a trial and error. This will not answer all your questions about how to use the Mikle site, but perhaps this will help get you started with some of the more complex selections. First, select the Feed Source, options presented are Facebook and RSS Feed. I selected RSS Feed. The creator program will auto-populate an RSS feed URL, but you can immediately insert your own Feed Source. To find one, Google "RSS Feed Sources." The General Section permits you to select the Width and Height. Inserting a PX (pixel) size will Set that specific Size (Width) on your web page. Select "Responsive (Mobile Friendly)" IF you're using that design. The Height is a function of the height of the RSS Feed Page and offers to permit you to select the Height in Pixels OR by the number of Feed Items. Think of "Word of the Day," selecting one (1) Item will display the Word of the Day for a single day, while selecting 4 Items would present a window on your web-page that displays 4 days worth of pages. Selecting a specific pixel size will give you that specific size and will Not be scalable. I selected One (1) Feed Item, which displays just the single day's word, but has a scroll bar to display the prior 4 days if desired. More on this later, but further down the Creator Process in the Feed Content Section, there is a drop down menu that will permit you to select the "Display" the "Number of Feed Items." This is where you select the number of items, in my case, how many Days to display. Here, you also have the option to "Display Content" with options of Both, Title Only, or Content Only. The RSS Feed will probably have both streaming in by default, but here is where you can select to omit THEIR Title, and you have a place to Add Your Own TITLE is desired, along with Font Sizes. Be sure to expand all options on the Creator Program and scroll back and forth because there are some settings that are hidden by default, but you have the option to select one of several Background Colors for your Header. This appears a weakness, because I could not find a place to enter my own Header Background Colors, although you CAN specify Text Colors and other colors, Font Sizes, etc. The creator program has Pre-set packages of Font Combinations that you can select, but again, I couldn't figure out how to specify my own individual selection of Fonts, only the Group as a whole, but most were adequate. NOTE: This is my first attempt at adding an RSS Feed, and the second Creation Program that I used. The first wanted $50 per year, this one at the time of this writing, is Free, with no indication that it will change. I'm sure there are numerous other programs out there, but this is the first one I found that was Free, and Works to create a Mobile Friendly (scalable) feed that worked well on both Webpages, Announcements and My Mobile Phone. (If you have any suggestions, I'd appreciate them.) Oh yes, if you want your content to display on the Home Page daily, I set it as an Announcement, and kept that Announcement in the Top Position. It seems there was a heading that said Announcements, or something like that. I set the Text Color to White to match the Background, in other words, to make it disappear so that my Word of the Day appears like part of the page. I'm sure there is probably a better way to do this, but it works, at least the way I'm trying to use it. Here is a link to a webpage if you'd like to view it. Sample Word of the Day Page I've gotten positive feedback and more importantly, it gives people something New to look at Daily and Automatically, when they visit and hopefully, gives them a reason to visit the site more often. Daily traffic has increased since I added it. Good luck, and I hope you might find this useful.
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Friday, February 17, 2017 at 5:51 PM - Response #1
This is really ! The announcement doesn't have to a the word announcement on it. I do announcements all the time. You don't have to have a bullet showing either. Now if I can remember how I do it..would be a good thing?
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Saturday, February 18, 2017 at 1:30 AM - Response #2
Love the moments, Darlene! I am interested in this as well, Gary. I'll be watching the thread.
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Saturday, February 18, 2017 at 3:17 AM - Response #3
Thanks Guys. I'd always wanted to do something like this but never took the time to figure it out until now. I'd searched for topics, but most that mentioned RSS were dated from 2008. I hope it might provide a starting point for others. The thing I like the best is the daily change to the website that hopefully many will appreciate.
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Saturday, February 18, 2017 at 1:56 PM - Response #4
RSS is really nice for multiple topics, however, for just a single topic, an IFRAME might be better/simpler. The word of the day can be done that way. Then every day there's a different word. Just for fun added Word of the Day to page, top left. This Day In History is also done that way (it's not CC which is .. mmmmm error prone). They have to be https sources if you use the FB Class connection. The RSS is very cool for a News type feed. This is just to show that a single topic might work better with an iframe.
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Saturday, February 18, 2017 at 4:41 PM - Response #5
Jack Vermeulen wrote: RSS is really nice for multiple topics, however, for just a single topic, an IFRAME might be better/simpler. The word of the day can be done that way. Then every day there's a different word. Just for fun added Word of the Day to page, top left. Thanks Jack. That is a nice presentation! Jack's URL is Here and you all will remember you can right click on the page and select View Page Source to see how the page is done.
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Wednesday, February 22, 2017 at 10:36 AM - Response #6
Thanks for starting this topic, Gary. Here is the feed from The Free Dictionary that I use for our Brain Fodder page: It's been up a long time with no feedback from classmates, so I put a plug for it at the top of the home page.
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Wednesday, February 22, 2017 at 2:38 PM - Response #7
Thanks LeAnn, I like your Brain Fodder Page. I'd heard about RSS Feeds, but knew little about them, but hoped this might help get some people started. Now I'm trying to figure out how to tell classmates if they have blockers like NoScript set up, that they need to "permission the feed" otherwise they either see nothing, or the same word every day.
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Wednesday, February 22, 2017 at 4:57 PM - Response #8
Remember, any page that is not https will NOT work on FB. You also can't preview that in Edit that since preview is https. Just something to remember. The dictionary feed is very nice, however, I'd modify the width to "100%" vs 350px. Looks nicer.
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Thursday, February 23, 2017 at 1:01 AM - Response #9
Jack Vermeulen wrote: I'd modify the width to "100%" vs 350px. Looks nicer. Unfortunately, the program that I used only gives the option to specify the px or select "responsive (mobile friendly)" which I assume is 100% vs 350px, but I don't know for sure. I'm pretty sure there is probably a better "feed program" out there, but just haven't found it yet. You mentioned using an iFrame. I'm still not very proficient at those. Can you show me what the coding would look like for that? The program that I used did provide HTML code, and I tried that, but it seems like something didn't display properly and I shifted over to the other. The code they generated was . Does this look right?
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Thursday, February 23, 2017 at 1:47 AM - Response #10
I meant to type "Brain Fodder", not Dictionary, sorry. That code has a width of 350px. I'm playing with a bit to try to simplify. Has interesting content I'll probably mmmm borrow I also meant to say that scripts have to be https or anything that invokes code like aspx pages. I fixed the "Brain Fodder" so it works with https pages. Luckily all the links that need to be https can be replaced with https. Below is the code I used for the word-of-the day. Width is automatically adjusted for screen size, height is fixed. RD will just fill the width available for iframe. stuff inside an iframe does not 'respond' to sizes automatically. RSS code can take care of things like that. So that's an issue for more complicated sites. This LINK shows what you get into.
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Thursday, February 23, 2017 at 5:50 PM - Response #11
I borrowed everything from LeAnn (including the name - it fits perfectly) and made some changes so it's easier to change color and fonts. I created two new styles that affect ALL the feeds if you change them. View in source and see this code that is easy to vary to suit your own taste. I didn't care for the font style and some other visual. This is the CSS control I added - and then the source was changed to use this code (actually shorter and easier to see vs original) For example, to change the background colors, modify databoxfont for the top and databoxsize for the big box background. This is the LINK to the page. Use view source to see how it's been rearranged. Thanks for the info to both LeAnn and Gary for motivation.
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Friday, February 24, 2017 at 1:27 PM - Response #12
Thanks Jack, but we've just gone over my head. How do I implement those codes?
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Friday, February 24, 2017 at 1:35 PM - Response #13
I have to go right now, but that code includes a lot of things that are not related to the RSS feed. I'll post the complete code in a few hours, meanwhile just edit the post so people don't get the wrong idea. sorry I'm getting the sign to leave
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Friday, February 24, 2017 at 5:01 PM - Response #14
Here's the code I used, but you might want different colors or feeds. Top title color is set by databoxfont, display area color is set by databox size. It's recommended to keep the width at 100% since that automatically adjusts to whatever display is active. RD designs might be too wide depending on the options there. If portable devices are not a concern, make the width a fixed value. |