One of the issues that many of us face is that its difficult to find time to update our sites regularly week in week out – particularly through some of the ‘quieter’ periods of the electoral cycle.
To help with this, we have created an “ALDC News Feed” which will supply a ‘national’ story (i.e. UK wide), roughly once a week, on your site. This is OPTIONAL – the detault will be to that people have this as part of their site, but you can choose to turn it off. This national story will be mixed with the local content that you produce yourself in date order.
Here’s an example of a site that is running the ALDC news feed (and nothing else).
The feed will try to be of general interest to all areas. We would really like to support a couple of people who would be willing to produce Wales and Scotland versions of the “feed” – any volunteers please don’t hesitate to get in touch with Tim in the office.
Other “feeds” could be developed over time – there has already been talk of a London news feed!
The feed is being turned on on Thursday.
It is our plan to turn ON the feed for all myCouncillor sites on Thursday. If you want to turn it on yourself now, or if you want to turn it off after Thursday, then…
In the dashboard go to “Tools”, “RSS” and edit tick or untick the “ALDC Posts” option and press SAVE.
Advanced Users Only….
The RSS facility also provides for more flexibility to choose the content of individual sites.
- Ward and Area level posts. At present all sites receive content from Ward and Area levels of postings – some people use this to share content accoss sites, but it could be that some sites want to “opt out” of one or both.
- Adding your own feeds. You can add your own feeds to your myCouncillor system – basically any RSS feed in the world. You might want to use this to syndicate content across a number of sites, or bring in content from Lib Dem websites that aren’t in the myCouncillor system. In Bury we use this to syndicate press releases across a number of websites from a Tumblr blog.
- Snippets – You can choose to have all posts as “snippets” – a short piece of text, with a link to “read more”.
Notes:
This is a new facility, so we’ll learn more as we go along. Your site speed will depend on the speed of any RSS feeds you are importing. We tried importing a Posterous blog, but it made the MyCouncillor sites so slow as to be unworkable. Tumblr worked fine, but we have not tried other platforms like Blogger, self hosted WordPress or Prater Raines. Let us know how you get on!