How to create a news feed and embed it on your website
What’s important for a good news feed and how to set one up in minutes
It’s important to bundle information from various reliable sources and provide a curated mix of news, maybe even mix it with content from official social media channels.
For example, I created a microsite for the coronavirus crisis based on two different feeds. One feed focuses on news sources, while the other one provides distraction for the lockdown. I will show you how I did it.
Here’s how you can do something similar for any topic.
- Use an aggregator that allows you to combine content from multiple sources to set up a news and information hub centred around a particular topic or focusing on local news from your area. I used Walls.io which allowed me to combine content from RSS feeds, social media platforms like Twitter, YouTube and Instagram and also allowed me to add custom posts I created.
- Find RSS feeds. Just Google the name of the publication you would like to aggregate news from + RSS feed and you will surely land on a page like the one The Independent set up for their RSS feeds.
- Pick the RSS feeds you want and add them as a source. Here, I filtered the New York Times’ World News RSS feed only to include posts that contain the word “corona”.
- Find social media profiles or hashtags and mix them with RSS feeds. Pick the social media feed you want and add it as a source to Walls.io. Here, I added Reuters’ Twitter profile as a source and limited posts to those that contain the keyword “corona”.
For a news or entertainment hub, it makes sense to show only content that is an original tweet by the source you chose. For example, you don’t want other people’s posts on a Facebook page to show up or tweets that are just the account replying to another user’s tweet.
For tweets, simply tick the “Ignore replies” box when setting up a profile as a source (see our example using Reuters Twitter as a source above). For Facebook pages, tick “Only posts by [profile name]”, and no user posts will show up.
- Embed the news feed on your main website, a microsite, a blog or landing page. Once you have all your sources set up, you can embed your social wall wherever you need to. Simply grab the embed code from the Embed & Display section of your Dashboard.
You can create a news hub on an international basis like I did or go as small and local as makes sense for you. Add the very specific news sources that matter to your small town, for example, to keep your community informed and up-to-date.
