We recently had a request to set up RSS feeds for the search term ‘International Baccalaureate’ from Google news. The feed had to work in English, French and Spanish, to be accessible through a single point of entry for the purposes of news monitoring, and also had to enable distribution through our public website.
First a quick summary (skip to the next section if you’re not inclined to know why it works the way it does!)
Summary
RSS is a way for website developers to make the content of a website ‘broadcastable’. When you use an RSS reader you are, to continue the analogy, ‘listening’ for RSS feeds, a bit like a radio listens for radio signals.
To ‘tune in’ to an RSS feed, you don’t need to select a frequency, you need to select a website.
You can add new websites by adding their RSS ‘channel’ to your reader. This is often identified with a small orange RSS symbol on the webpage.
On SOME websites, like Google news, the website is smart enough to allow you to subscribe to a search. This means we can search for incidences of ‘International Baccalaureate’ and subscribe to the results of that search, effectively creating custom ‘channels’.
Creating language ‘channels’ with Google reader
We need three language ‘channels’, each listening to the Google news website for incidences of “International baccalaureate”, “Bachillerato Internacional” and “Baccalauréat International”.
First, we need to set up three folders in our reader:
- English feeds
- French feeds
- Spanish feeds
We then need to find our channels. In this case we are using the Google news website to create our channels. Google news is multilingual, so we need to visit three language versions of the site:
- google.com/news
- google.fr/news
- google.es/news
On each site, we need to search for the appropriate text, respectively “International baccalaureate”, “Bachillerato Internacional” and “Baccalaureat International”. We remove any accents, because the search terms will form part of the URL, and URLs don’t like accents!
When we perform a search for the text above, a set of results will be displayed. It is these results that we wish to subscribe to.
Click the ‘RSS’ icon on the results page and select ‘Subscribe in Google Reader’ OR right-click on the RSS box and copy and paste the URL into Google reader.
We now add each of these language feeds to the folders we created earlier.
Here are the resulting feeds:
http://www.google.com/reader/shared/user%2F07097361613443079983%2Flabel%2FEnglish%20feeds
http://www.google.com/reader/shared/user%2F07097361613443079983%2Flabel%2FFrench%20feeds
http://www.google.com/reader/shared/user%2F07097361613443079983%2Flabel%2FSpanish%20feeds
As you can see, these only share ALL items that are picked up from the search in Google news. We need to be able to further refine these feeds so they only include information we select. We can do this using TAGS.
Sharing with tags
Obviously, if we want to keep our English, French and Spanish feeds seperate, we can’t simply star them as this would mean our starred items would contain a mixture of English, French and Spanish items. Though this may be useful for some users, it will not be appropriate for all.
To create Language specific news feeds, we will need a way of marking the items we wish to share that does not rely on starring them. To do this we use ‘tags’.
Folders automatically apply their own tag, so we can already identify English, French and Spanish news items. Google reader does not allow you to combine tags (at least, we haven’t been able to find a way to do it), so we cannot simply tag all items ’shared’ and combine that tag with the folder name.
We need to add additional tags, which in this example we will call ‘English shared’, ‘French shared’ and ‘Spanish shared’.
To add a tag to an item in the news feed, click ‘Edit tags’. We added the tags as described above. By tagging an item we can now distinguish it from the other items, and are able to view the following pages:
1) All items
2) All English items
3) All French items
4) All Spanish items
5) All items tagged ‘English shared’
6) All items tagged ‘French shared’
7) All items tagged ‘Spanish shared’
8) All Starred items
9) All Shared items
So, at last, we have an RSS feed of all items of interest, for each of the languages we required.
Add a feed to your website
We can very simply share this information on our website, by going into the ‘Settings’ > ‘Folders and tags’ section of Google reader, and setting our tags to ‘Public’. From this same page, we can click ‘add a clip to your site’ to get a little piece of embeddable javascript that feeds these stories straight from Google to our website.
That’s it!
All that remains is for us to get everyone who needs to review our media coverage set-up on Google reader, to give them brief guidance on how to add new feeds and how to tag items, and the rest will manage itself.
We have embedded these feeds in the language-specific versions of our website, so we now have a simple ‘hands off’ news-management system running for free. This is also a great option for school or association websites who want to feature hand-selected stories from the web on their own sites.
Check out our feed pages here
Give it a go and let us know how you get on!
