What it does

The News tool uses RSS to bring dynamic news to your worksite. RSS is a data format used to syndicate news on the web. It allows continuously updated content from a remote news site to appear in another website.

Key concepts

RSS: To set up your worksite to display news, you must specify a URL pointing to an RSS news feed. An RSS news feed is a specially formatted list of news articles. You can find RSS feeds by using an Internet search engine (e.g., Google or Yahoo). Sites that distribute news in RSS format are called "news feeds". The News tool is an RSS "news aggregator" (or "news reader") that reads and displays content from RSS news feeds.

Things to consider

• You can add more than one News feed when you set up the site, or at a later time.
• In addition to news, some websites use the RSS format for information that is updated often, such as blogs (web logs that serve as publicly accessible personal journals), events listings, or the revision history of a book.
• When you edit the news tool you can change the "tool title" which corresponds to the top toolbar and the "page title" which will be reflected in the left toolbar. When you first add the News Tool in Site Info you are only able to give one name and this will be both the tool title and the page title. There is not really a need to have these two title names be different, so it is recommended that you leave them the same.