Have you ever subscribed to a website to get special bulletins, news headlines, or newsletters sent directly to your e-mail account? I have subscribed to quite a few but find that they tend to clutter up my inbox.
There is a new option for subscribing—web feeds. Feeds are a standardized web format used to publish frequently updated websites such as blog entries, news headlines, and so on. Feeds have many benefits over e-mail subscriptions, a major benefit being we do not have to provide personal information such as an e-mail address while subscribing. Feeds can be set up in Lotus Notes with ease, as we will see in the following pages.
More and more companies are enabling their websites with feeds. So, having a good understanding of the abilities of feeds will be helpful for us. In this chapter, we will delve into what a feed is and how to set them up in Lotus Notes. We will also look at how to view feeds. Then we will see how to set up our feeds so that we always receive the latest content from the websites we are interested in.
To summarize, this chapter will cover:
- What are feeds
- How to add feeds
- Viewing feeds
- How to manage our feeds
A web feed is also known as RSS Feed. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and provides people with frequently updated content from websites. Content distributors syndicate a web feed, thereby allowing users to subscribe to it. Typically, feeds provide people with a summary of any recently added information or content such as a news headlines or blog entries to a website.
Most often there are several sites that we want to subscribe to and there are tools that allow us to subscribe to these websites and have those feeds come into one place. Such a tool or software is known as a feed reader or aggregator.
Many companies including news-related sites, blog sites, and many government and corporate sites distribute their content as web feeds. To know if a website is enabled for feed subscriptions, look for the feeds icon. The examples below can be placed anywhere on the website, however, typically we will see them placed somewhere on the first page.
Often we can select what we want to subscribe to—for example, if it is a blog website, then we may be able to subscribe to the content or the comments that people make; on the other hand, if it is a news website, then we can select if we want content on sports or business. When we enable our subscription, we select how often we want to be updated and how long we want to keep the information. We will look into this in more detail further on in the chapter.
Feeds can be accessed and managed from within the Lotus Notes sidebar. We learned about the sidebar in Chapter 1, First Impressions (The Client Interface). The following is a screenshot of the Lotus Notes client with the Feeds sidebar expanded:
If we can't see the Feeds sidebar panel, select View | Right Sidebar Panel and select Feeds. The Feeds panel can be collapsed by clicking click on Feeds in the sidebar. If we click on another panel in the sidebar such as the Day-At-A-Glance, then Feeds will close and we will see Day-At-A-Glance panel expanded in the sidebar. If we want to display our feeds separately, we can select Open in New Window when we right-click the Feeds option in the panel.
First, we need to identify if the website we are visiting has enabled syndication of its content (the fancy way of saying you can subscribe to it). We can tell if a website or blog syndicates its content by the feed icons displayed on the site, usually on the front page.
We may also see the feed icon in the navigation toolbar of our browser. The following is an example of a web blog by Ed Brill, who is the Director of Product Management at IBM Lotus Software:
The following is an example of a news website, USA Today:
Both of these websites allow us to subscribe using feeds.
Alternatively, on the USA Today website, we also see an area at the bottom of the front page that gives choices for subscriptions—the RSS option is circled in red.
Once we have identified a website that is RSS enabled, there are a number of ways to add it to our Lotus Notes feed reader.
Let's use the USA Today website as an example. There are a three different ways we can add feeds to Lotus Notes.
- Click on the RSS icon which, in the case of USA Today, is available on the first page of their website.
- Add the feed using any of the following techniques:
- Drag the RSS icon to the area where feeds are listed in our Feeds sidebar panel (make sure you hold your left mouse button down). This will open the Add New Subscription dialog box in Lotus Notes.
- Rather than dragging the RSS icon, this time click on it. This will take us to another web page. Select the URL on that web page and copy it to the clip board. Then go to Lotus Notes and select the Subscribe to Feed button in the Feeds sidebar panel. The Add New Subscription dialog box will now appear. Paste the URL into the space provided and then click the Go button.
- Drag the RSS icon to the area where feeds are listed in our Feeds sidebar panel (make sure you hold your left mouse button down). This will open the Add New Subscription dialog box in Lotus Notes.
- We can select our preferred options from within the Add New Subscription dialog box such as:
- Which feeds we want to subscribe to if it's a multiple feed name—for example, the selected feed name in the following screenshot is Top Headlines, which I would change to USA Today Top Headlines.
- How often to check for updates.
- How long to keep entries.
- Once we have selected all our choices, click the OK button. This will close the Add New Subscription dialog box and add that feed to the Feeds sidebar panel.
Once we have added a subscription, we are given a choice as to how often we want the feeds to be updated and how long to keep entries for.
The choices available in the Check for Updates drop-down list are:
- Every minute
- Every 10 or 30 minutes
- Every hour (default)
- Every 2, 4 or 8 hours
- Every day
- Once a week
- Manual (only check for updates manually)
The choices for Keep entries for are: