Welcome back custom pagers! Last time, we spoke of some of the new tools that we were making available to our custom page design, including both new/old widgets. I had been promising to outline one of the more powerful widgets you can utilize on a custom page : The RSS Widget. But before we do that, a quick discussion of RSS is needed.
So what exactly is it? RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication – it is the format for distributing news and other web content through ‘feeds’ – (aka) linkable lists of your content! You can add feeds to your Assets, Users, and/or other documents (through the ‘subscription’ link) and tap in to the power of the social web, as a feed will increase the ease by which your subscribers/users have access to your feed updates/information. You can use RSS to distribute Press releases, educational articles, videos, tech support updates, specials, product news, announcements, job openings, etc… But the best part?
RSS feeds can be used for all and ANY type of content from SAVO!
The RSS feed contains an index – a list of items – and each one is identified by a link o the content on your site. Most RSS feeds include a title for the link and a description of the content:
RSS can be used in two ways: RSS feeds can bring external information into SAVO, or they can bring information that’s in SAVO into other tools. When you bring RSS feeds into SAVO, you can keep track of external news directly in the application. For example, you can pull in feeds of key prospects, financial results, or company news. When you link RSS feeds from SAVO into other programs, RSS feeds keep your audience constantly updated, as they allow people to see your content (and sometimes a brief synopsis) without having to enter the application – or they can use their browser to track real-time updates to our new Forum feature, including new questions asked and new replies, as well as comments and new uploads, and newly added Blogs. RSS beautifully fills an underutilized role, as with RSS feeds, once someone subscribes the content, it then comes directly to them.
True to its simple form, RSS has become so mainstream that all the browsers now read RSS (or one can use one of the many RSS readers, such as Google, Yahoo, etc) Once you set up your reader with your preferences, it will collect the feeds you’re interested in every time there is an update – You’ll never miss an important update again!
Next time: Utilizing RSS feeds for Blogs, Questions/Answers, and Custom Pages.
