Home Inspector Pro Inspection Software Forum

News feeds are a great thing. They are constantly updating feeds from websites such as Google or Yahoo News. If you choose keywords related to the area you live you are added content to your site where search engines will find words like city names that people are searching for as well. You can add multiple news feeds and allow them to appear under the News Aggregator link (which you can rename to Local News or something). Because the feeds are constantly updated it keeps the search engine spiders coming back more often. The content is also interesting to your site visitors so it keeps them on your website longer. Each news feed automatically becomes a block as well which you can place into any region on your site.

An animated tutorial on the following can be viewed at http://www.homeinspectorpro.com/Home-Inspection-Website-Tutorial/Add-a-news-feed-to-your-website.html or by going to Website Tutorials on our home page.

1. Decide what your news feed is on, for our example we will use 'Los Angeles Home Inspector' so we will be getting stories about Los Angeles Home Inspectors. This will include the city Los Angeles and the words Home Inspector on our page/site multiple times, great for search engine optimization.

2. Go to http://news.google.com , though you can use ANY site that provides a news feed such as Yahoo News or even your local paper might have news feeds.

3. Type into the search box: "Los Angeles" "Home Inspector". I put "Home Inspector" in quotes because I want to make sure the results have the words together. Hit enter.

4. Google shows the link to the RSS feed for your search on the left side of the page. Right click on the word RSS and click on "Copy Link Location" or "Copy Shortcut" (actual words may change depending on browser).

5. Go back to your website and click on News Feeds under the Administrator menu.

6. Click Add Feed (note on this page you can even create categories for your feeds if you wanted to).

7. Give a name to your feed, and then paste (ctrl-v or right click and click paste) into the second space.

8. Change the update time to 1 day. Even if you select more often we have the script set to run once a day to update all the sites, more often wouldn't be necessary and would add a lot of load to the server.

9. Click Submit.

10. The news feed will now appear under the News Aggregator link. It will also appear on the blocks page as a separate block. You can set the block to appear in one of the regions if you'd like. I've seen a few guys add it to their left or right column, but obviously you don't need to.

All done!

Cut & dried instructions - nicely done - thanks!

By the way, I have a script which triggers the feeds to update every few hours. If you want to force a feed update go to http://www.yoursite.com/cron.php . You'll see a blank page, go back to your feeds and you'll see they are updated.

Animated Tutorial on this is complete: http://www.homeinspectorpro.com/Home-Inspection-Website-Tutorial/Add-a-news-feed-to-your-website.html

Dominic,
We deleted the sample news feed you had and have been trying to get my own news feed from the denver google news feed (home inspections and real estate news)
We get it to the news feed under the administrator menu but it does not come up under the "news aggregator link" When we do this the word "source" comes up as a sub-menu, so to speak immediately under the news aggregator then when you click on source the page come up with a little orange box that says XML, and when you click on that the written url for the denver news comes up.

Are we missing a step? Weve tried it over & over but cant get there.

Dave K.

Hi Dave,

Yup, you missed the last step, which it seems I added to the animated tutorial but not on here. The news feeds update automatically every few hours. So you either wait until the next update, or under News Feeds in the Admin Menu you can click "Update Items" and it will update it manually right now.

I just clicked on it for you and you'll see all the stories showing up under News Aggregator now (which you can rename to Local News or something else by the way in the Menus section).

Thanks! Yeh we were reading the instructions above, we did not think to wait for an update. Duh! That makes sense now.
Later........
Dave K.

Not only can you add news feed to your site, I added the local paper and the weather .com local weather to my site also. It updates just like the news. And the local paper feed will have my city names. Check it out.

                   www.clarksvilletennesseehomeinspector.com

Great idea Gary!! Nice work with the site.

Hi Dominic & Gary,

When I clicked on the link in Gary's last post and in the signature I got a "Page Not Found" message.
Maybe it;s just my computer, but I figured I'd let you know.

Daren,

Thanks for pointing that out, I just fixed it. Gary renamed his home page but didn't update it under Site Information.

not a problem. glad i saw it

Me too, it's a good thing to iterate as I've had several inspectors have the same issue and ask me.

REMINDER: If you change the url of your home page you must change it under Site Information as well.

thanks dominic. I had a problem and did not no it. Thanks for the fix.

No problem ;)