Archive for June, 2008»
Working smarter, not harder: RSS
We haven’t posted in a while so I developed the “working smarter, not harder” series to demonstrate some of the ways that you can use the Web more effectively and to highlight some of the features of the Central College Web site that you might not have known about. RSS has been around for a while, but until recently it hasn’t been easy to use.
Introduction
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and provides you with the ability to keep tabs on tons of sites without actually visiting each and every site. This is especially handy for all of those Web sites that you visit every day to see if there are any updates. By using an RSS feed you can subscribe, and be notified whenever there is new content to read. Some feed owners even include all of the text in their RSS feed so that you don’t even need to visit the site. Central has three RSS feeds (campus news, Central College Abroad and athletics) that are available for you to subscribe to.
RSS is coded in XML which is used to define exactly what content is included in an RSS feed. One example of XML that isn’t an RSS feed would be the weather module on myCentral. It collects weather data from the National Weather Service and then parses the XML feed to display the handy dandy weather module.
How do I use RSS?
The first thing that you will need is a feed reader. Before you get too excited about installing another piece of software on your computer, take a look at some of these options:
- Outlook
- Outlook 2007 allows you to subscribe to RSS feeds through your email client.
- iGoogle
- iGoogle is Google’s customized homepage that is available to anyone that has a Google account. If you have a gmail account, you have access to this customized homepage. If you don’t have an account, signup here. You can also add different widgets besides RSS feeds.
- Internet Explorer 7 or Firefox
- Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox allow you to bookmark feeds. They then show you the content in your Web browser and alert you via your bookmarks folder if there is new content. In Firefox the process is much the same, except that Firefox calls them smart bookmarks.
How do I know if a site has an RSS feed?
There are variety of ways to see if an RSS feed is available on a site. For example this blog has the RSS logo on the right side of the page with the subscribe text to show that there is a feed available. An easier way to see if there is an RSS feed available for a site is to look for the RSS icon in your browser. By clicking on the RSS Icon, you can see your options for subscribing.
How do I start using RSS feeds?
Below is a quick tutorial on how to subscribe to one of the RSS feeds that we have available on the Central College Web site. There are many other ways to subscribe to feeds, but to keep the playing field level for everyone on campus we’ll use Outlook 2007.
- Using Internet Explorer go to the Central College homepage at www.central.edu.
- In the top right of your screen you will see the RSS icon like this:
- Click on the icon and you will be taken to a page that shows the RSS feed.
- Copy the address that is in the address bar (http://www.central.edu/news/rssFeed.cfm).
- Go to Outlook and right click on RSS feeds in your mail folder.
- Select “Add new RSS feed…” and a dialog box will open.
- Paste the address that you copied earlier and select “add.”
- Outlook will prompt you to confirm that you want to add the RSS feed. Select “Yes” to confirm that you wish to subscribe to the feed.
- You now have subscribed to the feed and every time there is a news story available from the Central College Web site you will be notified through Outlook.
If you want to, you can repeat this process to add the athletics RSS feed and the Central College Abroad RSS feeds if you are interested.
Conclusion
Hopefully you found adding RSS feeds pretty straightforward. Now take a few seconds to think about all of the sites that you visit every day. What if you didn’t have to navigate to all of those different sites, but instead were notified when they posted new information? How much time would that save you? Below are just a few sites that I keep tabs on that are specific to my job. Each site has an RSS feed that saves me the time of checking them each day:
Development server changes
As the Central College Web site continues to evolve, we found that we needed a place to test out different pages on our site. In the past http://dev.central.edu filled that role pretty well for most of the testing that we did. It allowed us to send a proof to people on campus without launching pages to the http://www.central.edu site. The one downside was that we didn’t have the ability to generate dynamic pages through the ColdFusion software.
Let me now introduce to you our new testing server: http://dev1.central.edu. Notice the “1” after the “dev.” Dev1 as I like to call it can now render dynamic pages using ColdFusion 8, allowing us to have one place for our entire test site. It is also important to remember that dev1 is only available when you are on-campus and on the administrative or academic networks.
We hope that this change will allow us to provide better service to our customers on campus, as well as improve our workflow as we develop new applications for the site.
Hello world!
Welcome to the Central College Web marketing blog. The purpose of this blog is to facilitate communication with the general campus community regarding the marketing efforts on the www.central.edu Web site.
My hope is to vary the topics enough that we encourage a healthy discussion in the comments of each post, while educating different campus constituencies. It also helps to gather feedback on some of the new marketing efforts that we implement on the Web site. I also hope that it provides an opportunity to provide examples of new or unique ideas on other sites.
