In the ongoing battle to keep your Web site fresh, you probably find the most difficult part is generating new content. It's all well and good to say you should keep your site fresh, but who has the time? With that in mind, perhaps the best content is the kind YOU don't have to produce. How is that possible? Well, this week's article will give you one idea.
One of the simplest things you can do to freshen up your site is to add an information feed. An information feed is a set of links provided by another Web site. The links take your visitors to a Web page, usually one that is located on the site providing the feed. The provider regularly updates the links and the new links automatically appear on your site without any effort on your part, beyond the initial setup.
If you have visited the Computor Companion home page (http://www.computorcompanion.com) in the last month or so, you will see that we include an information feed from the CC Tips site (http://www.cc-tips.com) at the right of the page. We also have a tech news feed at the bottom of the page. Both work similarly. For the CC Tips feed, we include the following HTML at the appropriate location on the page:
<script language="javascript" src="http://www.cc-tips.com/LPMFeed.asp?CMD=TOC"></script>
The script tag runs the LPMFeed.asp script on the CC Tips Web site. That script generates links to the articles in the current CC Tips issue and returns them to the browser. When a new issue of CC Tips goes on-line, the feed automatically sends out links to the latest articles. We use styles to control the look of the information returned by the script, so we have full control over how things are rendered on the Computor Companion site. You can add this line to your own Web page and customize the look with the predefined styles. Here are the style definitions we used:
<style type="text/css">
.LPMFeedTOCCover {color:#003399; font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;
font-size:10pt; font-weight:bold;}
.LPMFeedTOCTitle {color:#0066CC; font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;
font-size:8pt; font-weight:bold;}
.LPMFeedTOCSummary {color:#000033; font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;
font-size:10pt; font-style:italic; font-weight:normal;}
</style>
All of the style definition names are prefixed with LPMFeedTOC. The Cover style controls how the cover date looks, the Title style controls how the article title looks, and the Summary style controls how the article summary looks.
The tech news feed is a free service provided by HeadLiner (http://headliner.net). Adding the news feed was just as easy as adding the CC Tips feed. HeadLiner also uses styles to give you control over the appearance of the links. We just pasted the following HTML into the home page at the appropriate location in the page:
<script language="javascript"
src="http://headliner.net/go/js/1.js?title=yes&time=no&indent=yes&number=5&new=yes">
</script>
If you are interested in adding fresh content to your Web site without having to do the work to create it, try searching the Web for "news feed," and look for a feed that interests you. Most feeds give you instructions on how to include it on your site (usually you just have to paste some code into your page). Some feeds cost money, but you can usually find something acceptable that doesn't. Ideally, you want a feed that complements your other site content, which is why we chose tech news for www.ComputorCompanion.com.
The next time you lament the fact that you haven't had any time to update your Web site, consider adding a news feed or other information feed and let someone else do the work! |
