Syndicating content from another site

The easiest way to syndicate content from another site is to use the news apps built-in RSS viewer.  You can see the RSS viewer in action by going to the following URL:

http://www.yourWebSite.com/index/news-rss-viewer-action?newsfeed=http://slashdot.org/index.rss

Here you should see a web page with a bulleted list of news headlines from the slashdot.org "news for nerds" web site.  These are now syndicated on your web site at that URL.  Not very exciting, but in fact that's all there is to syndicating content from another site with Sitellite.

However, you'll want to <em>position<em> these headlines, of course, likely as a sidebar somewhere on your site.  Let's try that next.

Log into your Sitellite CMS at yourWebSite.com/sitellite and you should be brought to the "Web View", which is your web site, plus the Sitellite top bar, and the Sitellite editing buttons.

Next, on one of the sidebars, click the "+" icon to add a new sidebar box.  In the "Sidebar ID" field enter "rss_slashdot" and in the "Sidebar Title" field enter "Slashdot News".  Leave the body blank, but click on the "Properties" tab next.

Under the "Properties" tab, in the "Alias of (a box name)" field, enter "news/rss/viewer?newsfeed=http://slashdot.org/index.rss".  Next, click on the "State" tab.

Under the "State" tab set the "Status" to "Approved" and the "Access Level" to "Public" (I'm assuming you're on a test site here, not a public one).  Then scroll down and click the "Create" button.

When the page loads with your new sidebar in it, you should see the the slashdot.org news headlines appear in your web site, displayed seamlessly in with the rest of your web site.

Caching

The other feature I didn't mention yet in the example above is the "expires" parameter, which allows you to control how long Sitellite caches the RSS
news feed before requesting it again from the original web site.  The default, which you should stick to in most cases, is "auto", which tries to determine the preferred caching duration of the original web site by properties that may be present in the news feed itself.  If "auto" is unable to find these values, it defaults to 3600 seconds, which is 1 hour.  This is a duration that most web sites will not have a problem with.  Every 5 minutes, they might have a problem.  I would. :)

If you want to set the expires value manually in your RSS syndication, add "&expires=3600" to the end of the "Alias of (a box name)" value you entered for your sidebar.  The value is the number of seconds to cache for, which also must be greater than 0.

Next: Advanced content syndication

Page 1: RSS, which stands for Rich Site ...
Page 2: Syndicating content from another site
Page 3: Advanced content syndication
Page 4: Building an RSS feed for your own apps

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