Big Medium's content-syndication features allow you to build your own news feeds and reach beyond the boundaries of your website to stay connected to your audience even when they are not browsing your site. The news feeds let your visitors display automatically updated links to your articles on their own websites or in their own RSS news readers.
Configuring your news feeds
Users with administrator or webmaster privileges can configure news feeds in the site's widget settings. To get there, click "Widget Settings" under "Templates" in the left-column menu of the Big Medium control panel.
The news-feed settings are located in the "News Feed and Content Affiliates" panel. (After saving these settings, you should rebuild top-level pages on the site to refresh your news feeds).
News feed content
Click the "Select News Feeds" button to select the content you would like to offer in your news feeds. A new window will appear in your browser with a set of checkboxes for individual news feeds. Check the news feeds you would like to offer and click the "Save" button. (To add/remove a news feed of your site's tips, go to the "News and Tips" panel in the site's widget settings.)
- Latest articles from the entire site. This news feed more or less contains the articles featured on the site's homepage. The actual number of articles in the feed may be different than the number of articles displayed on the homepage, depending on the "Number of articles in each news feed" setting you specify under News Feed Format (see below).
- Main sections. These news feeds contain the latest articles from each of the site's main sections, including their subsections if applicable.
- Subsections. Below each main section is the list of its subsections, if any. These news feeds contain the latest articles from only that subsection, allowing your site's visitors to subscribe to very focused content.
In addition to using the "Select News Feeds" option in the widget settings, you can also turn news feeds on/off in each section's settings page in the Section Editor.
Text to display in ++NEWSFEED++ link
The ++NEWSFEED++ widget displays a link to the site's news-feed page, which allows site visitors to subscribe to the news feeds. This setting determines the text that is displayed by the ++NEWSFEED++ widget.
News feed format
- Number of articles in each news feed This is the maximum number of articles to include in a news feed. (Note: For tip news feeds, the number of tips is always 10, no matter what value you set in this field.) Content affiliates using the JavaScript news feed can choose to display any number of headlines on their websites, up to this number.
- Offer your news feed(s) in RSS format Checking this option enables RSS news feeds for your site.
- Offer your news feed(s) in JavaScript format Checking this option enables JavaScript news feeds for your site.
If you leave both the RSS and JavaScript options unchecked, Big Medium will not generate any feeds for your site.
The news-feed subscription page
This is where your site's visitors can subscribe to your RSS feeds and/or pick up the HTML to include the JavaScript feeds on their sites. Brief instructions are provided, along with links to RSS news readers if your site offers RSS feeds.
To link to the news-feed page, include the ++NEWSFEED++ widget in your site's page templates.
Need more help?
For further assistance and documentation, visit the website of Global Moxie, the developer behind Big Medium.