(1) Members of Enfeedia understand and agree that Enfeedia's services comprise publishing of member-provided information into RSS news feeds. Although Enfeedia intends to comply with RSS standards regarding such news feeds, Enfeedia reserves the right to not support certain optional features of the standard. All Enfeedia-generated news feeds are given a URL with the extension .xml in accordance with standards.
(2) Enfeedia reserves the right to remove without notice any material that, at our sole discretion, is offensive, objectionable, or inappropriate in our judgment; and to optionally remove the entire account without notice where such posting practices are continued.
(3) Members are advised to maintain their own backup of critical or important information. We do make nightly backups of our database but cannot make any absolute guarantee regarding protection against loss of information from our system.
(4) Privacy and Security -- Enfeedia does not share any member data with any organization or persons outside of Enfeedia. Passwords are encrypted. All financial transactions are implemented through PayPal. No credit card or personal information, except email addresses, is maintained by Enfeedia. Email addresses are not made available to anyone outside of Enfeedia.
(5) Regarding paid advertising:
a) Enfeedia may receive support for its operations from paid advertising such as, but not limited to, Google's AdSense program.
b) However, at no time will Enfeedia's service cause third party advertising to be inserted into any member's news feed or news items of any member's news feeds.
c) Enfeedia reserves the right to place paid advertising on Enfeedia-generated NewsPages generated on behalf of members. However, members can select a membership level that omits said advertising.
d) Enfeedia reserves the right to insert a graphical icon and/or text link into news items for the purpose of linking to the Enfeedia website and the member's NewsPage corresponding to that news item. Members benefit from these links in so far as Enfeedia's importance as seen by search engines is improved with such links, and the benefit of that importance improvement passes, to some extent as provided for by search engines, to members' NewsPages. "Improved importance" generally results in improved placement in search results listings, although Enfeedia makes no guarantee or offers no assurance that such improved importance or improved placement in search results listings will be realized.
(6) Enfeedia makes no representation as to accuracy, timeliness, quality, or availability as to Enfeedia services, and provide services on an as-is, as-available basis. Enfeedia is not responsible for any loss or damage, consequential, indirect, incidental, whether known to us or not, that may result from the use of Enfeedia services. We expressly disclaim all warranties, including warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular application, or non-infringement.
(7) You will indemnify and hold Enfeedia harmless and its employees, representatives and agents against any claim or demand including attorney fees, costs and/or damages related in any way to your use, abuse or mis-use of Enfeedia services or content submitted or any use of Enfeedia services.
Enfeedia is focused on the mission of bringing the power of RSS news feeds to anyone who benefits from recurring communication with an audience—perhaps to the benefit of their business or hobby, perhaps to serve an organization or for educational purposes, establishing oneself as an authority on a topic. Large corporations, political groups and news agencies have been benefiting from this unique form of story-telling for some years.
Enfeedia is offering news feeds to anyone who knows nothing more than how to send email, while bringing important benefits to the websites of the experienced users.
And among those benefits is SEO, helping one's website to get improved placement in search engine results pages (SERP).
To achieve this mission, creating the news feed and adding news items to it must be truly simple. Likewise, for explaining to others how they can see one's news feed, and why watching a news feed is superior to email or frequent website visits to see if there's anything new.
Ease of use extends to syndicating one's feed, a valuable tool for improving one's website standing on SERP while easily maintaining website content.
Ease of use does not detract from the inherent power of news feeds. The combination of simplicity and power means news feeds are poised to become an extraordinarily significant part of online communications, as a full-fledged partner of web sites. Enfeedia is all about helping you to experience news feeds as easily and commonly as you do email.
Enfeedia offers two levels of membership: Publisher and Publisher-PRO. Choose the one that bets fits your expected application. If not sure, choose the Publisher membership, and decide later if you would like to upgrade. See "Memberships" and "Features" in the Explore section of this website for details.
Ken Gorman, Founder of Enfeedia
The Publisher and Publisher-Pro memberships give you options as to NewsPage sidebar presentation of advertisements that pay to you, and provide for a serious level of communication, in the number and length of feeds as well as the number of contributing reporters. Importantly, you can easily embed YouTube and Vimeo vidoes, and uploade photo images from your computer and your smrtphone at the Publisher level. If you want to delegate posting to an assistant, you can define an "Editor" signon that has appropriate capabilities. People can register to receive alert email that's issued when new items are posted on a feed, and they can post FeedBack comments on feed items. And you can use Enfeedia's Super Simple Syndication method to embed your feed(s) on your website; others can use this method as well to syndicate your feed on their site. Think of the opportunities!
With Publisher-Pro, in addition to Publisher features, you can offer Members-Only articles for distributing information privately using passwords; the perfect feature for a for-fee newsletter or private club or association communications. With Publisher-Pro, you can provide the ability for "Reporters" to post on feeds, e.g., people in a department needing to post on the same feed. You can insert "Pay by PayPal" links into your news item to support purchases directly from your news feed.
Consider and Publisher-Pro memberships for larger organizations where responsibilities for communication are distributed to specialists throughout the organization.
We're currently reviewing this membership level. Stay tuned for an announcement.
Supported features are dependent on membership level. Click "Memberships" in the Explore menu for membership specifications.
It's Simple: No Programming, No Uploading Multiple Feeds for Organizing Topics Feeds Validated to RSS Standards Unlimited Text Links in News Items Simple Inclusion of Linked Images in News Items Automatic "NewsPage" Generation for Online Presence Configurable Feed Display on Your Website Editor and Reporter Collaborative Posting Modes Consign Feed Items to Freelancers Add Autologging to Freelance Postings Email Alerts for New Posting Notification Summarize Multiple Feeds with a Headline Feed Chronological, Calendar, and Subchannel Feed Types Automatic Inclusion of Google Search Tool in Items Automatic Inclusion of PayPal Buy-Now Tool in Items Automatic Inclusion of YouTube and Vimeo Video in Items NewsPage "Share" Tool for Social Networking Random Item Selection Members-Only Private Access to News Items
Simple to use ... No programming or file uploading required
With Enfeedia, you can publish powerful news feeds without having any programming or "html coding" knowledge, and without any file uploading. If you can send email and if you know how to use a browser, you have all the knowledge and skill you need to publish your news on line.
The process is simple. On the home page, you click "Pubish" to start the process. If you are not already logged in, you will be asked to do so, in the conventional way using your account name and password.
Then you select what you want to do: Set Up Feeds, Publish Items, or My Account. When you Set Up Feeds, you will make selections to add or edit a feed, and to define that feed. To publish your news, you first establish a feed, then you publish items onto that feed.
If you already have a feed established, you can publish items onto it by selecting "Publish Items". Then you will select the feed if editing an existing one, or name a new feed, then select what operation you want to do (Add, Edit, etc.).
In either case, you will then be present with a form to fill out. Instructions are provided along the way.
When you have finished entering your information, you click a button at the bottom of the page to submit it. Within seconds, your news feed is updated and presented online.
You can make changes to your account by selecting "My Account", including your password, switching between unlisted vs listed or your account, and specifying a "See Also" website that will be listed on your NewsPages. You can also view status of feeds including editor, reporter, and freelance passwords you may have set up, and links for titles of feeds.
Finally, you can upgrade your account to add valuable features. Or if you wish, later you can downgrade your account if you chnage your mind.
Multiple Feeds
Even with the basic FREE account, you can publish two feeds. Having two feeds makes it convenient to sort out your information by topic. For example, if you are responsible for communications for a organzation, you can use one feed for publishing business items, another for social items. You can have up to 20 items on each of your feeds. When your feed is "filled" and you post another item, the oldest is automatically deleted for you. Or you can choose to delete the items you'd prefer, before adding the next item.
Premium memberships offer more feeds, up to a maximum of 25! With the number of items up to 200 per feed. As you learn more about Enfeedia, you will discover that a complete website can be driven by a collection of your feeds. And with each feed, you get an automatically customizeable (think SEO) NewsPage.
Enfeedia's simple method for automatically displaying feeds (or portions thereof) on websites ("syndication") offers one the ability to post content onto a website page without ever touching the code for that page. And without uploading anything to your server. Simply post an item onto the feed and within seconds, it appears on your website page. Read on, you'll learn that search engines index the content of your feed with your webpage.
Feeds Validated To RSS Specifications
When you use Enfeedia to publish news feeds, Enfeedia encodes your information to conform to RSS specifications. These specifications ensure that "news readers" can interpret that encoding to produce human-readable feeds on your screen.
So it's critical that your news feed conforms to those specifications.
Enfeedia does indeed generate feed files that conform to those specifications, and validates those files using an independent service.
Unlimited Text Links in Item Descriptions
Each item within a feed comprises a title and a description. When you create the item, you enter a link address ("URL") for the title. When one clicks the title of your item, their browser will open that online document (typically a web page, but possible an image or an Adobe PDF file).
But that's only one link. Perhaps your item calls for additional links to present to a person reading your feed. Enfeedia offers a simple way of adding an unlimited number of such links within the item description.
When entering the information for your item, you can also enter the some text that appears within that description that you wish to be made a link, and next to it, you enter the URL. For example, the text might be "see our website" and the URL the address for your website. That's all there is to it. Instructions are provided on the form to help you.
Are you interested in search engine optimization? These text links provide an excellent way to enter anchor text that leads to other topic-relevant websites such that search engines bring value to both websites.
What's a URL? It stands for Universal Resource Locator. But you are already familiar with URLs. It's the address that appears in your browser address bar. It looks something like "http://www.mywebsite.com......" perhaps with the http:// part omitted (implied).
Include an Image (photo) with Your Item
You no doubt have seen news feeds that show an image, for example, for Yahoo News. You can do the same thing publishing your feed with Enfeedia. Here's how it works.
When you are entering information for your item, you will have the opportunity to specify the URL for your image. You can upload an image from your computer, upload from your smartphone, or reference an image that's online somewhere; in this case, you need to have the address for it. Perhaps it's on your server with your website. Or perhaps you have posted it on a popular photo sharing site such as Flickr, Hi5, shutterfly, facebook, or Google's Picasa.
Flickr terms of use requires that when you embed an image from a Flickr gallery, that the embedded image link back to the Flickr gallery. Enfeedia automatically manages that for you. Just follow the instructions when entering the share code provided by Flickr, and Enfeedia takes care of the rest. The good news is that linking back to your Gallery brings visitors to your gallery on Flickr, further immersing them into your content.
The NewsPage -- Your Customizeable "Feed Website"
When you publish a feed, Enfeedia encodes it into an industry standard form. Standardization is important so that others can provide "news readers" that know how to parse that encoded file and produce a human-readable version of it.
Enfeedia has a built in news reader for Enfeedia-hosted news feeds. Enfeedia automatically generates a NewsPage for every Enfeedia-hosted feed. The NewsPage is generated "live" so that whenever it is opened, the contents are always current.
What's valuable about NewsPages is that they are bona fide web pages. That means search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN index your NewsPage, so that when one searches the web using search terms that correspond to your news feed, your NewsPage will appear in the search results. The more clever you are about promoting your NewsPage, the higher up in the search results will your NewsPage appear.
The NewsPage includes a number of buttons and links that help the viewer subscribe to that feed in several ways, and to set up alerts for that feed such that they get email notification when a new item is posted ... without you needing their email address or maintaining an address book.
Depending on you membership, Google ads may be displayed, even ads that pay to your account, as well as a second feed ... all on the same NewsPage.
Enfeedia provides the code for a NewsPage icon that links to the NewsPage. All you do is copy the code onto your website, you need not have any coding knowledge. The graphical icon gives site visitors an easy way to read your feed. You can also insert Enfeedia-supplied code onto your webpage for a traditional RSS icon that links directly to your RSS feed. Some browsers will read your feed and directly present it for viewing.
ShootOnSite ... Configurable On-site Display of Your Feed
The most effective way to publicize your feed, as well as gain favorable treatment by search engines in placing your website on search results pages, is to display some or all of your feed directly on your website. Enfeedia's "ShootOnSite" feature gives you a tool to configure your display just the way you want.
Enfeedia provides you a small "code snippet" that you copy to your website to cause your feed to be displayed. Your feed is presented on your webpage in advance of search engines crawling the page, so the contents of your feed get indexed by search engines and influence search results placement.
You can choose how many items to display and how much of each item to display, whether or not to display an item image, and controls over font size and colors for text, links, and background areas.
You can specify filters to be compared to words in the feed "category" field to selectively display items that match.
When displayed, the NewsPage icon is also shown with each item. When one clicks that icon, the NewsPage opens displaying every item in the feed with each item at full length. At the top are various buttons for subscribing to the feed and setting up alerts.
Collaborative Posting -- Editor and Reporter Modes
Enfeedia provides you the ability to delegate posting of items on your feed. Two methods are provided: Editor posting and Reporter posting.
If you provide someone with your Editor password, they can log into your account as Editor and add and edit items, and delete items, in the same way that you, the account owner can. In effect you can turn total control over the feed to an editor without the editor being able to access your account settings or represent themselves as the account owner. You can assign several persons the role of editor, but be sure you know they will collaborate -- because they can edit or delete each other's items!
If you would like to assign permission to post items on your feed to individuals who don't collaborate, perhaps don't even know each other, then give them your Reporter password. When they sign on as reporter, they will create a personal identification code (PIN) which gets assigned to items they post. Only they can edit or delete those items. You can choose to moderate a feed such that Reporter postings don't go online until approved. You or an Editor can perform that review and approval process.
Editor and reporter modes of posting to a feed can be very effective for organizations where various departments or groups need the ability to post their news on the organizaiton feed without putting you to work for them!
When you set up feeds (or later edit them), you can specify Editor and Reporter passwords. You can also see your settings when you view "About My Account" after you login in the "Publish" section of the website, should you forget.
Consign One or More Specific Items to One or More Freelancers
With the Freelance feature, you can assign passwords to some or all of your feed items. Give that Freelance password to whomever you wish to enable posting information to the specific item "spot". We refer to a feed for which freelancing is allowed as a freelance feed.
By assigning different Freelance passwords to different item spots, you can have multiple contributors to your feed without giving them access to each others items. If you wish to give one freelance writer access to multiple spots, give those spots the same Freelance password. To throttle how frequently a freelancer may post to their consigned spot, remove the password, then reinstate it later. Whenever you or a freelancer updates an item, that item becomes the most recently posted and shows at the top of the feed.
Consider the applications:
- In a public organization, the heads of various organizational units can publish their announcements on their individual item "spots". The overall feed, then, offers a comprehensive view into the organization through the writings of each unit head.
- For private businesss, use the Members Only feature to use freelancing for private communications from organizaitonal units while benefitting from the ease of use and alerting capability of RSS feeds.
- Consider using freelancing with the Members Only feature for a "family feed" where members of a family can keep each other posted on goings on in their lives without using email that is subject to getting buried in inbaskets, or worse, shuttled off to spam folders.
- Rent space -- item spots -- on your feed to advertisers. Perhaps negotiate with other website owners the presentation of your feed on their site such that advertisers gain exposure through those sites.
To set up a spot on your feed for freelancing, create an Item as a placesaver and give it a Freelance password. When the freelancer logs into your account using your account name and the Freelance password and posts an item to that spot, the freelancer's content replaces your placesaver.
Add
"Autologging" to Freelancing for Multi-Dimensional Communications
With Freelancing, when one posts an item on their consigned item "spot", the previous item is discarded. But by using Autologging with Freelancing, the items being posted onto the freelance feed can be automatically copied to another feed, the "log feed". As each item is posted on the freelance feed, the log feed accumulates all the postings, creating a history of those postings. The log feed can be used just as any other feed.
The freelancer can set up his/her own account to create a log feed to be used for their own purposes. Or, with permission of the owner of another account, a freelancer can log their items to a feed in that other account. For example, the freelancer can be hired by the owner of that other feed in a public relations capacity, providing communication on a shared feed (the freelance feed) as well as generating a feed the account owner can display on his/her own site.
A specific case of the above would be a freelance feed that advertises restaurants in some location and is displayed on a travel site specific to that location, with log feeds automatically generated for each restaurant through the postings of the PR freelancers onto the shared feed. The restaurant log feeds can be displayed on the restaurant websites to gain the promotional and search engine benefits in doing so. The log feed for a given restaurant only contains items specific to that restaurant.
To set up a feed to be a log feed, an Editor password is assigned to that feed. Then when the freelancer posts onto the freelance feed, (s)he specifies the log feed by entering the account name, the feed name, and the editor password for that feed.
Receive Notification of New Postings by Email Alerts
What makes RSS feeds so useful is users can get automatic notification of new postings "pings" by email alerts. We call this email "FeedMail".
To set up FeedMail for a particular feed, click the circular orange RSS icon associated with the feed to open the feed's NewsPage, then click the "Alerts" menu item for instructions. You will go through a simple process to set up the alert, taking only about a minute.
In some cases, a publisher of a website with an embedded feed may include a conspicuous link for directly registering for alerts. This is done on the Enfeedia home page. For our main "News" feed embedded on the home page, in yellow highlighting above the feed, you will find an orange & black icon to click to start the registration process. Also, when you click either the "Tips" or "Articles buttons on the home page, you will likewise find find that icon.
FeedMail is available for all membership levels.
Use a "Headline" Feed To Summarize Other Feeds
If you offer multiple feeds on your website, you may find a Headline feed as an attractive benefit to those wishing to keep track of your news. Instead of subscribing to each of the feeds, or setting up alerts to each of the feeds, they can subscribe to the Headline feed and be notified of postings to any and all of your site feeds, as you choose. When they click an item on the Headline feed, they are presented the feed that has that posting, with of course all the previous postings to that feed.
The account owner sets up a feed to be a Headline feed. Then when one posts to any other feed in that account, one can specify that the item also be posted on the Headline feed. Actually, only the title is posted on the Headline feed, and is presented as a link that when clicked provides the complete posting. Thus the Headline feed is a clickable index of postings onto other feeds in that account.
Three
Kinds of Feeds: Chronological, Calendar, and Subchannel
The traditional RSS feed presents items in chronological order. Originally, Enfeedia only offered chronologically ordered feeds ("standard feeds"). Now you can organize your feed items in two other ways. With Calendar feeds, you specify an event date, not to be confused with the item posting date, such that items are presented in order of event dates. Or you can choose Subchannel feeds; in this case, you specify categories for items, and items are presented organized by those categories, with the category serving as a title for the collecton of items in the caterogy, and organized by posting date within category.
You can specify that a second feed be displayed in a NewsPage sidepanel; if that feed is a Calendar feed, items are presented for those items whose event dates are in the past, beginning with the most recent past. Whereas the main feed on a NewsPage, if a Calendar feed, shows only those items in the future by event date, beginning with the next upcoming event. This combination is ideal for presenting, for example, announcements and minutes for meetings. The main feed on the NewsPage can show upcoming meetings, wheres the second feed can present minutes for past meetings.
Insert Google Search Tool Into News Item
To draw the visitor to your website, you can have Enfeedia insert a Google search tool into a news item. You specify the website to be searched. The tool also allows the visitor to choose to search the entire internet. If they choose to search the website you specify, they will receive a listing of search results relevant to their search term. (Do you know of any other feed publishing service that lets you put a search tool into a news item?)
Insert a PayPal "Buy Now" Button Into News Item
Consider a feed for ecommerce applications. Items can present products or services for sale, including a PayPal "Add to Cart" button for that impulse buyer. You simply provide a button code that PayPal provides to you when you set up your button with PayPal. Enfeedia codes up the PayPal button and inserts it into your feed item.
So visit your PayPal account, select "Merchant Services", and create an Add to Cart button. PayPal provides you the code for your button, but all you need is the "value" code associated with the "hosted button id". When you post your feed item on Enfeedia, you will find a place on the data entry form to enter that code. That's all there is to it.
When one clicks the PayPal button, the transaciton with PayPal proceeds without any Enfeedia involvement, just as if the button were on your website. (Do you know of any other feed publishing services that give you the ability to perform ecommerce using PayPal right on your feed?)
Insert a YouTube or Vimeo Video Into an Items
It's easy: Just copy the URL that YouTube provides when you click the "Share" button below the video screen, and enter it into the form when composing your item (detailed instructions provided there).
Enfeedia sizes the video screen at smaller than normal size so as not to mess up formats of narrow column feed display on websites. There's a control on the face of video screen that provides for full screen display.
When the feed is displayed, a frame of the video is presesnted, but the movie does not start until the viewer clicks the "start" symbol. And that's good -- loading your webpage and feed are not delayed by the loading of a sizeable video file. Only when the viewer starts the video does the file start downloading.
NewsPages Include "Like" and "Share" for Social-Networking Feeds or Items
Folks can click the optional "Share" button on the NewsPage to open a collection of tools (including email) for sharing the whole feed. And the collection buttons (including email) are also provided for each item in the feed, for sharing an individual item.
Sharing can be done on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and many more social networks.
Facebook "Like" and Google "+1" are also supported".
Optionally Choose to Display Time-Insensitive Items Randomly
Instead of specifying how many of the 'top' items are to be displayed, you can specify a number of items to be selected at random from among all items in the feed.
Usually RSS feeds are used to announce time-dependent news. Showing news items in chronological order makes sense, so that what the viewer sees is the most recently posted news. When feeds are used for news items, often only the most recently posted half dozen items are of interest, the older ones now being old news.
But there are important applications of feeds for items which need not be shown in chronological order by posting date and for which all items in the feed maintain their value because they are not time sensitive. Applications include using feeds for art or photo galleries, for publishing reports such as investment and health tips, for promoting music, tour guide information, "how to" advice, product applications, and so on.
The question then arises of how to give all items "equal time" when syndicated on a webpage -- your's or other's. If many items are posted on the feed, showing all the items may not be practical because of space limitations on the webpage. The random selection feature allows you to control the display and give all items in the feed equal opportunity to be displayed.
Those of you who are familiar with SEO techniques know that search engines favor websites that have fresh content. With this randomizing feature, items are selected at random for presentation each time the page is opened, search engines are highly likely to see different item(s) each time they crawl the page, interpreting the new item(s) as fresh content. Your webpage in which the feed is syndicated will get the benefit of that fresh content.
Members-Only Items for Private Communications
RSS feeds are a powerful communication tool because, among other reasons, of their ability to effectively reach the public. But perhaps you wish to draw upon the power and convenience of RSS feeds for private communications, for example, within a club, an association, or a business. Or perhaps you wish to offer information to those you subscribe to your RSS "newsletter".
With the Members-Only feature, you can mark any or all items in a feed as private, requiring a password to read the item description (the title remains viewable by the public). Give the password to those who you wish to be able to read your feed, and only they will have access to those private items.
(Remember, as is the case for anything on the internet, nothing is truly completely private. For example, someone could give the password to another who you did not want to have access to the item. Even with paper communications, one could make copies of documents and mail them to others. But password protection has been proven to be an effective means to prevent unwanted access to online content.)
What is Enfeedia?
Enfeedia is an RSS Online Publishing System, a web-based application for publishing and promoting your RSS feeds. Now you can publish feeds with ease using plain English and simple-to-use "feature tools". By publishing a feed, you project yourself as an authority and a professional communicator, interested in informing and educating your audience.
An application provides the mean to carry out particular functions. Enfeedia's RSS publishing system is to feeds what Microsoft's Excel is to spreadsheets, or what Apples's Mail is to email, or what Adobe's PhotoShop is to photos ... only a whole lot easier than any of those applications!
Enfeedia is a web app; all the work is done on a server. You do not download Enfeedia to your computer. Your feed file is hosted on the Enfeedia website. In other words, Enfeedia and your feed files exist "in the cloud", you access it from your computer to publish your feed(s).
By simply filling out a few forms, you can create a feed and publish articles in minutes, and include links, images, videos, google search tools, and more. You don't need to know anything about programming or coding. Enfeedia hides all those ugly arcane details from you.
What's an RSS news feed?
A news feed is a convenient and simple way to provide a series of informational messages to others over the internet without pushing the information to them with email. In fact, no email addresses are used to publish a news feed.
A news feed file contains feed information (title, description) about your overall feed topic, and news items (title, description, link) pertinent to the feed topic. (It's a misconception to think that an RSS feed is useful for publishing a single item and then letting the feed stagnate.)
RSS stands for "Really Simple Syndication". It's just a name given to news feeds that comply with an industry-standard specific file format, and indicates that the feed can be easily syndicated (embedded) on websites.
You don't need to know anything about file format; we take care of those ugly details for you. The file format is very specific so that "news readers" out there know how to interpret them and convert the code to human-readable form.
Because of the special nature of news feed, news readers can keep track of your feed and know when you've posted another news item to your feed—that's a very key feature of news feeds and why they are so popular. One can subscribe to feeds such that they can easily find new items as thay are posted, and they can subscribe to email alerts if they wish to receive items in their inbasket.
What's an RSS news reader?
An RSS news reader is an application that understands news feed file formats, converts the content of that file to human-readable form, and displays the converted news feed.
You can compare this with the familiar browsers: Browsers are applications that understand "HTML" and certain other file formats, interpret them, and display the familair web pages. In a similar fashion, RSS news readers understand "XML" and other file formats, interpret them, and display the news feed.
Just as browsers use a website address ("URL") to locate a webpage on a server, news readers use a news feed address (also a URL) to locate the news feed file on a server. The good news is, you don't have to know anything about these details.
Besides being a news feed publishing tool, Enfeedia is also a news reader for the feeds it publishes and hosts -- the powerful, customizable NewsPage is the presentation of a feed.
(By the way, sometimes news readers are called aggregators).
What's a news item?
A news item can be any message you wish to publish. It need not be "news" in the conventional sense.
An item has a suscinct title, a perhaps-lengthy body (aka description, aka article) and optionally a link to online content for further reading. Typically the link is to the website related to the news item. Except for the link, you might think of an item as a newspaper article.
A news item could be, for example:
- a time-critical announcement,
- investment advice,
- a recipe of the week,
- sports commentary,
- organization events and news,
- a political opinion,
- a restaurant review,
- a featured property for sale,
- an art piece that's part of the feed as a "gallery",
- a tease to readers to visit a website.
Let your imagination roam.
How do I start up a news feed?
Once you have an account, you can proceed directly to setting up a feed. From the home page, click the "Publish" menu item. In the next screen, you will now log in as Account Owner. Enter the userID and password you established when you opened your account and click "Owner Log In".
In the next screen, click the "Set Up Feeds" button, and on the next screen, click the "Create Feed" menu item, enter a feed name, and submit it by clicking the "Create This New Feed" button. Follow the on-screen instruction, taking advantage of the Help feature along the way.
About selecting a feed name: The feed name should reflect the overall topic of this specific feed and be consistent with the overall theme of your account as expressed in your account name.
For example, if this feed is specifically about NFL football injuries, a good feed name might be simply "injuries". Similar to giving your account a topic-related name, there's an important benefit about giving your feed a name specific to the topic of this feed. Like the account name, the feed name will appear in the address of your feed (URL), and search engines will easily detect the specific theme of this feed, rewarding you with better placement of your feed "NewsPage" in search results.
So, using the example started previously, if your account is all about NFL topics and you chose "all-about-nfl", and this feed, being about injuries, you gave the feed name "injuries", then the following will appear within the URL for your feed: "all-about-nfl/injuries". Notice how nicely this combination of words announces to search engines what your feed is about! And imagine the improvement in your search results placement that's possible when people search using terms like "nfl player injuries" and "football injuries".
By the way, unlike account names, you can name your feeds anything you want without conflicting with feed names used by other Enfeedia members.
How many feeds can I have?
The limit is a function of your membership level. For specifications, go to "Explore">>"Memberships".
How do I add, edit, or delete news items in my feed?
After you login, click the "Publish Items" menu item. You will be asked to specify what feed you want to work with (assuming you have multiple feeds in our account) and select an operation ranging from adding an item to editing an item (several variations of editing are offered) and deleting an item.
Follow the on-screen instructions. Look for the context-sensitive "Help" links to popup information about the process you've undertaken.
How do I put my photos in my items?
If your photo is already online somewhere, you just need the URL (internet address) for the photo. If your photo is on one of the popular photo-sharing sites such as flickr, shutterfly, facebook, picasa, myspace, photobucket, and snapfish, go to that photo sharing device to get the URL. Once you have the the URL, you simply insert it in the Enfeedia form where are are entering other elements of your news item.
You also have the ability to upload your photo from you computer, or your tablet or smartphone "camera roll" -- that's the place your photos that you take with those devices are stored. Moreover, you can take the picture "live" while you are writing an item; think about the benefits to realtime reporting.
What if I don't have a website?
You do not need a website to use Enfeedia and take advantage of news feeds. In fact, you might have even more motivation to use a news feed if you don't currently have presence on the web. Enfeedia generates and hosts your own mini-website (a "NewsPage") that presents your news items, all derived from your news feed you publish using Enfeedia.
And with premium accounts, you can customize your NewsPage to build it up with information that complements your feed. In effect, you are building a multipage website with side-panels that the user can open that offers more opportunities for content than a normal one-page website.
Many people find that can't justify a website for the endeavor given the technical issues and cost of developing and maintaining a website. But they can publish one or more news feeds using Enfeedia to give them on-line presence, at no cost, and requiring no technical skills.
Unlike a news feed, the NewsPage does not require a "news reader". The NewsPage has an embedded and is displayed by any browser just like any other webpage.
What's a NewsPage?
In it's simplest form, a NewsPage is a webpage generated and hosted by Enfeedia that presents a complete news feed, along with a title and some useful buttons for subscribing to and syndicating the feed. With premium memberships, side panels are included. They are opened by clicking "Hub" and "Nub" buttons.
The customizable Nub side panel includes up to four sections for adding text, pictures, videos and another feed. The word Nub is used to suggest inclusion of information that is of central importance to the feed and the account associated with this feed.
The Hub side panel includes five sections each having a pre-determined role. These include a reference (link) to the website associated with this feed, a list of other feeds in this account, feedback comments presented on other feeds, feed comments made by others on this feed, and an optional Directory feed. The Directory feed is a nice way for the account owner to point visitors to other online assets that are in some way related to the topic of this account and may be of interest to others. It's not limited to links to assets owned by the account owner. The word Hub is used to suggest that information in the side panel is closely related to the feed/account which together are seen as hub common to the presented information.
With the richness of features of a NewsPage, beyond just being a reader for your news feed, you can understand the value of having this separate page in search result. Customization provides you the ability to include material for search engine optimization.
This symbol
indicates availability of a NewsPage.
Is it necessary to insert code onto my website?
There is no necessity to insert code on your website to publish feeds and have Newspages generated for you and hosted by Enfeedia.
But to get the maximum benefit from your feed, you will want to comunicate its existence to others. Some methods depend on little code "snippets" to be placed on your site, whereas more powerful methods require you to also upload a "script" to your server. In all cases, Enfeedia provides the code for you, so you need not have any knowledge of coding. Someone, though, will need to insert the snippet onto your webpage and upload the script on your behalf. It's easy stuff for anyone you has designed even the most basic website.
Let's go through the options.
(1) The simplest method is to place a "text link" on your website that when clicked, opens your NewsPage. The text link might say something like "Read My Feed". This code is a simple HTML tag.
(2) Better yet, you might want to display an icon that catches the eye better than text, and when clicked, opens the NewsPage. This is very similar to the text link, but instead the icon (specifically the Enfeedia-supplied NewsPage icon) is the object that is also the link. Again, a simple HTML tag.
(3) Very similar to this is an orange industry-standard RSS icon that instead of opening a NewsPage, is a link to your actual feed file (aka XML file). Many browsers understand feeds and will open and display (parse)your feed if you use the XML link. People savvy about feeds know that the XML file is what "news readers" and "news aggregators" want in order to include a feed into their system. Again, this is a simple HTML tag.
(4) Now let's take a look at a more powerful way of promoting your feed to others. This method displays a portion (that you control) of your actual feed on your website, not just a text link or an icon. By using this method, search engines can "crawl" the content of the feed along with the website.
We refer to the above method as "NewsOnSite" and use the term "ShootOnSite" as the process of posting items on a feed. The term "syndication" is used in the industry to indicate that a feed published by some author is presented on a webpage, much like syndicated columnists in the newspaper industry. It's also said that a feed can be "embedded" on a webpage.
Learn more about syndication at the "What is syndication, and why is it important" FAQ item on this page.
What is NewsOnSite?
NewsOnSite is an Enfeedia feature wherein you can display all or a portion of an Enfeedia-published news feed on a website. One-time placement of an Enfeedia-supplied code "snippet" onto a webpage and uploading of a script to the website server is all that has to be done.
From then on, whenever you publish an item, the website will be automatically updated to show the most current news—without writing any code, without uploading any files, without calling your too-busy-to-help web designer.
Typically, the publisher of a feed will display the feed on his/her website for the many benefits accrued (see "What is syndication, and why is it important" FAQ item on this page). This is also called embedding a feed on a website, or syndicating a feed on a website. Any website publisher can choose to syndicate an Enfeedia hosted feed on their website, with or without approval of the feed publisher. This is what syndication is all about, and why the moniker RSS -- Really Simple Syndication -- is used.
NewsOnSite is dependent on your website server supporting PHP (version 4.3.4 or later) with the php.ini parameter \"allow_url_fopen\" set to 1 (the default setting). Also, the domain name for the web page that will display your feed must have the .php extension, or the server .htaccess file must be modified to direct php code to be parsed in html files. Don't worry, your webmaster will understand this and be able to help you. Most servers support PHP.
How do you get the code snippet and script? When you view a feed's NewsPage, you will see a "Publish" menu item near the upper right. Click it to get the snippet you want and the optional script. Using Super Simple Syndication, the script is not required.
The reason the NewsOnSite/Syndication information, snippet, and optional script are included on each and every NewsPage is wanting to provide the easiest possible way to help others to syndicate your feed on their website. If you do a good job writing exciting, education, provocative, or entertaining material, it can happen. And when it does, you feed and your website will get immediate SEO benefits. If you have a relationship with others who have websites, you ought to consider encouraging them to syndicate your feed. And likewise, you might offer to syndicate their Enfeedia-hosted feed on your website.
What is ShootOnSite?
ShootOnSite is an Enfeedia-provided news reader script that implements the NewsOnSite feature, using our "Original Syndication Method". When it executes, the script accesses and reads the cryptic XML feed file and translates it into human readable form such that the feed is displayed on the site at the location that the code "snippet" was placed.
Using our newer "Super Simple Syndication Method", you no longer need to upload the shootOnSite script. Super Simple Syndcation is available to premium members of Enfeedia.
You place an Enfeedia-supplied code snippet on your webpage to cause that script to be executed resulting in the display of your news feed at that location.
Where do you get the optional shootOnSite script? Every feed Newspage includes a "Publish" menu item near the top right of the page. Click it to open the page, to reveal the snippet, how to access the script, and instructions.
ShootOnSite also refers to the process of posting items on a feed especially when a feed is syndicated on a website ... the item gets "shot onto the site."
Original vs Super Simple Syndication?
Our Original Syndication Method is what was introduced into Enfeedia when Enfeedia was first created. It requires that you fetch a "shootOnSite" script from Enfeedia and upload it to your websote.
Our newer Super Simple Syndication Method eliminates the need for that script. Instead, the code snippet you place on your website where you want your feed to appear invokes a process at Enfeedia wherein your cryptic feed file is converted to human-readable form (in HTML code), and causes it be be placed on your website in place of that code snippet.
We introduced Super Simple Syndication because of our concern that some webmasters might be reluctant to load that sizeable script onto their client's website, being unsure of any side effects that might appear. With Super Simple Syndication, from the "website's point of view", the code snippet simply gets replaced by feed HTML code prior to the webpage being delivered to the client, i.e., the person viewing your webpage on their computer.
Do I need to know anything about website design or file uploading?
No. Enfeedia hides all that ugly stuff from you. You just create a feed and post your items in a fashion similar to how you write email or fill in a form when you register an account at a website. This is what we mean by Enfeedia being "form-driven". You fill out forms, and Enfeedia takes care of the rest.
Even syndicating your feed requires no coding or programming knowledge, other than to understand where in your code would be a suitable place to put your feed. Enfeedia supplies the code snippet that you simply copy and paste into your webpage code where you want the feed to appear.
How do I control the appearance of my news feed display?
You can control the appearance (color, font sizes, number of items to display, length of items to display, and more) by setting certain parameters, using the fully customizable snippets available with the Original Syndication Method. The predefined code snippets for the Original Method limit customization to the number of items to display and the length of items.
For Super Simple Syndication, predefined snippets are provided currently having the same customization limitations as for the Original Syndication method. In a future release of Enfeedia, we will support additional customization opportunities by adding paramaters into the snippet.
See Promote Feeds foro instructions.
How do I find space on my website to syndicate a feed?
There are two parts to this answer: Controlling the amount of space needed for the feed, and selecting an orientation of the feed.
You control the amoount of space by selecting the number of (most recent) items you want to appear and limiting the length of item descriptions. For example, if you have plenty of room, you might allow up to 10 items to appear with descriotion length of, say, 500 characters (approximately). If space is very limited, you might allow only one or two items to appear, and limit their length to 150 characters. When the item descrption exceeds the limit you set, the permissible number of characters are presented, followed by a "read RSS feed item" link, that when clicked, opens the NewsPage for this item where it is presented in full.
You have two choices regarding orientation, vertical (or "column", where items appear one above the other) and horizontal (or "row", where items appear next to each other). For websites that are completed, the row format might be easier, since one can usually find a way to introduce a "slice" in the design, at the bottom of the page if nowhere else. The column presentation is more traditional, and depending on your webpage structure, you might find a place for the feed if you also select the number of items and length of item descriptions thoughtfully.
If you are in the process of developing your webpage, we recommend the column presentation as it gives you more flexibility as to the number of items and decscription length. For row presentations, you probably need to limit the numner of items to four or five, depending on the width of your webpage.
The predefined snippets for both the Original Syndication and Super Simple Syndication Methods provide the opportunity to specify row vs column.
What is "BlogBlender"?
BlogBlender is Enfeedia's feature wherein you can beautifully blend in your Enfeedia-hosted feed-driven blog into you home page (or any page) such that it inherits the look-and-feel of your website design. It's also the name given to one of the five predefined code snippets.
Why bury your blog in a subordinate page, or worse, send them off to some blog hosting site? Instead, immerse your site visitors into your story and captivate them when they land on your home page. Your Home Page based blog will also help your SEO efforts because of search engines appeal for RSS feeds and fresh content.
Our BlogBlender feature integrates blog hosting into your webpage. (Our little secret is that BlogBlender is actually based on code that syndicates your feed, but with pre-defined parameters that provide the best blending of the feed onto your webpage.)
What does it mean to "subscribe" to a feed?
When one subscribes to a news feed, one gains the ability to receive updates to the news feed when they are posted. One doesn't have to subscribe to a news feed to read it, but does need to subscribe to take advantage of one of many methods for being notified about updates to the feed.
The method by which one is notified depends on the features of the news reader (or aggregator) that is selected for subscribing to the feed. For example, with Blogtrottr, one can ask to receive what we call FeedMail digests at various 2-hour intervals or daily.
How does one subscribe to a news feed?
There is a "Subscribe" menu item on every NewsPage. To subscribe to a feed, go to the feed's NewsPage, click the "Subscribe" menu item, and follow the on-screen instructions.
How to you open a feed'a NewsPage? Wherever you see the feed being displayed, you will also find a circular orange NewsPage button having the RSS symbol. Click it to open the NewsPage. In other words, whenever you see an Enfeedia hosted feed, you are two clicks away from the screen that shows you how to subcribe to the feed.