Using Manila to build a news site
I've been collecting Circumpolar news items for some time now. I've got them stashed in text files, in binders full of print-outs, in a database and cut-and-pasted into static web pages. I've always hoped there would be an easier way to store and share the news items I find.I'd seen RSS feeds in boxes on other people's web sites and I'd looked into ways of using other people's feeds, but I couldn't really learn how to make my own. I also wondered if, depending on how you actually created a feed in the first place, one could use the technique to make a "static" (or relatively unchanging) RSS feed that could function as a navigation aid for students using a fairly complex web site I'd built to support a distance delivered (though largely paper-based) Northern Studies course.
I brought my questions to Yukon College's Community and Extension Services department. Sylvia Riessner had told me about some of the educational technologies she'd been learning about and Grant Dunham has a reputation for being both knowledgeable and a miracle-worker. They were the people, I was sure, who'd find some answers for me.
The easy answer turned out to be Manila, which Yukon College has been using for a couple of years for a wide variety of educational and community purposes. The software has a number of features that allow it to produce different sorts of web sites suitable for different purposes: course sites, blogs, etc. Manila allows one to choose to make a home page of news items. Those could be blog entries, or, in my case, they could be links to circumpolar news items I'd located here and there on the web.
I started with two Yahoo! News custom RSS feeds (see Circumpolar News Headlines -- sorry, no longer functioning due to some upgraditis), by using the search words 'arctic' and 'circumpolar'. That supplied me with automatic and relevant (more or less–I get a lot of Arctic Cat snow machine news items!) news headlines.
Grant added my custom RSS feed to the Manila server's list of feeds (you can find the list from your own site by choosing Prefs | Subscription). To prevent the list of items from getting unmanageably long (the server keeps items for 100 hours), I created a new Story called "Circumpolar News Headlines" and inserted the special Manila macro {viewAggregator ()} as the text for the page. I limited the number of headlines to the 35 most recent by giving it the parameter 35, like this: {viewAggregator (35)}.
To allow other people to subscribe to my site's headlines in the same way I subscribe to the Yahoo! News feed, I permitted "Sydication," an option in the Prefs menu. I chose to syndicate my home page. In addition, to syndicate every page on my site, we added another Manila macro to the footer defined in the site template: {rssLink ()}. Another Manila site can then subscribe to my news headlines.
I also found that the fabulous open source web browser, Firefox, has the ability to identify sites with RSS feeds and offer you the option of subscribing to them. If you use Firefox, look for the little orange icon in the lower information bar. Click the icon and choose where you want to file the new "Live Bookmark." Once you've done that, you can click on the link and see a list of bookmarks to the most recent items posted to the site you have subscribed to. The links on my site will either take you to an item somewhere on the web or to the item in a story on my site.
There is also software that you download to aggregate feeds you subscribe to. They are called, simply enough, aggregators. You can find lots of them on the internet. There are lots of Firefox extensions that you can add onto Firefox that will give you news reading capability right in the browser.
If you're moving between a bunch of machines, you can choose to use one of the many Personal Information Pages (Google, Yahoo!, Netvibes, to name a few) to collect feeds and see lots of headlines all in one place. The advantage of using a service like this is that you don't have to worry about moving the data between your work or home computer. It's all there on the web, just waiting for you to call it up.
The last cool thing I was able to do was to include the Yahoo! CP Headlines in a special box in the navigation panel (I've changed it since I first wrote this, but the process is the same no matter what feed you put in the box). That was accomplished by using yet another Manila macro, {viewRssBox ()}. I couldn't get it to work to begin with. Finally, I just copied the example that is given on the macro description page:
{viewRssBox ("http://radio.weblogs.com/0001015/categories/soap/rss.xml", boxTitle:"SOAP News", align:"right", width:50, frameColor:"#000000", titleBarTextColor:"#000000", titleBarColor:"#F5F5F5", boxFillColor:"#FFFFFF", timeZone:"PST", hspace:15, vspace:0)}
I then changed the individual details to include the information I wanted and the look and size I needed:
{viewRssBox ("http://news.search.yahoo.com/news/rss?p=circumpolar", boxTitle:"Yahoo! CP Headlines", align:"left", width:160, frameColor:"#000000", titleBarTextColor:"#000000", titleBarColor:"#F5F5F5", boxFillColor:"#FFFFFF", timeZone:"PST", hspace:15, vspace:20, maxItems:5)}
To get it to display in the navigation panel, I put the macro in the navigation section of the site template, which I found by looking for the code <div class="sidetitle">Site Navigation</div>. I copied that code and pasted it below the list of links. I then changed the text to read <div class="sidetitle">More CP Headlines</div>. The template automatically converted the text into capital letters. I put the {viewRssBox ()} code below that.
Sylvia's preparing a step-by-step guide on how to do this for your site. I'll put a link to it once she's finished.
Here is a list of the web links included in this article, in case you want a print-friendly version that hides the links:
http://news.yahoo.com/rss (customize news feeds)
http://macros.userland.com/ (information on Manila macros)
http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/ (product page for Firefox)
http://www.hebig.org/blogs/archives/main/000877.php#000877 (a blogger's list of news aggregator software)
http://macros.userland.com/basic/viewRssBox (detailed instructions on using Manila's viewRssBox macro)
email to: agra...@yukoncollege.yk.ca
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