SAMNET allows for the use of customized news feeds that display your news quickly and easily, without you having to scour the Web for all the latest bulletins. This technology is based on a standard called RSS, or Really Simple Syndication,and it is a quick and easy way for you to stay up to date with your favorite news topics with a minimum of time and effort. This technology can get headlines from your favorite news sites or receive an aggregated news feed on a single topic, like "Iraq" or "computer software", that includes articles from many different web sources.
To begin using the news center, first select it from "SAMNet Home". Next, choose a category of interest in order to view the headlines associated with that topic. Finally, choose the headline that interests you, and the story will be displayed.
Once you add the news topic to your "My newspaper" area found in SAMNet home, the news is periodically updated with new content. When you return to My Newspaper, you can read news in all of your topics of interest without having to manually jump from web site to web site, or from newspaper to newspaper. In Addition, any news feed that you create can be shown publicly. Just be sure to check the make public check box when you create your news feed. When you are browsing someone's public bookmarks, select the "news Interests" link to see their public news interests.
The easiest way to begin building your custom newspaper, which contains only the news of interest to you, is to follow these steps.
First, Go to SAMNET Home. You can easily jump there by pressing alt+home on your keyboard from any SAMNet window. Next, choose the link entitled "News Center"., and then choose a topic of interest. Following that, choose the "Add to my Newspaper" link, located near the bottom of the page.
When you've done this, you'll be able to customize a few things about the section you're adding. First, you're prompted for a section name. By default, this edit field will be filled in with the name of the news category you've just chosen. If you want to change the name, simply type the new name in the field. Next, press the tab key and you'll encounter a checkbox which allows you to make this feed in your newspaper publicly browsable by other SAMNet members from the "community member resources" section of SAMNet. If you want to keep this feed private, simply leave the box unchecked. Once you tab to the "add" button and press the space bar, the feed you've just added will be periodically updated as it gathers news about the topic you've chosen.
If you wish to create a news feed not found in the SAMNet news center, you can choose the "Create a custom section" option from the "My Newspaper" link inSAMNet Home. Here you can create a category of news feeds of your choosing, as well as specify what keywords will define your search. The section name field is the title of your news feeds, the Key words field allows you to type in a set of keywords to be searched. You can choose to make the news feed public as before. You can also preview the custom news feed by activating the preview button. If you like the way your customized news feed looks, just activate the Create button. You can then access your customized news feed from the My Newspaper area.
Choosing the "Add a Third party news feed" option will allow you to add an RSS feed which contains text, audio, or even video, from a Third party web site. FIRST, you must have a web site that broadcasts RSS feeds. When you locate the RSS feed you want, you must get the exact web address, otherwise known as a URL, to the RSS feed. The web site in question will provide you this address. Just copy this address by first selecting it, then copy it to the clipboard with Control+C Then navigate to the My Newspaper area, and select Add a Third party news feed. As before, enter the section name of the news category, then in the feed URL.
Paste the URL of the RSS feed by pressing Control+V on the keyboard. Again you can make this news feed public by checking the appropriate check box. You can also preview the news feed by activating the preview button. When you have previewed, and entered all of the information for the news feed, Activate the Add button. Your news feed will then appear in the My Newspaper area.