Dynamic News Display on Department and Location Sites

In an effort to provide appropriate news coverage for your department, the communications team has made some enhancements to your web site.
 
We have recently added a news section to your home page that displays the most recent news specifically related to your department. In addition to reading the news headlines directly on your page, visitors can subscribe via an RSS feed from your department’s home page. This will allow visitors to read the news using their favorite RSS reader online.
 
The news on your page is being generated from the College of Technology news database. To add news, use the online Submit News form: http://www.tech.purdue.edu/News_and_Events/Submit_News/
(This form can also be accessed from the “Contact Us” tab on the College’s home page.)
 
How it works:
When you submit news, the Communications department will be notified to review it. We will categorize the news for departments and statewide locations, and determine if it’s appropriate for college wide distribution. You can also pre-select the distribution options including departments and locations on the submit news form. If a formal news release is drafted, you will be contacted for input and during the review process. Once the news item is approved, we’ll publish it and it will be automatically added to your home page and RSS feed.
 
What is RSS and why is it on my web page?
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It’s a way for visitors to subscribe to web page content that is updated frequently. Visitors can subscribe to multiple RSS feeds and read them all in one place, rather than going to multiple web sites to see if anything has changed. You can learn more about RSS feeds on the college’s website blog here: https://cotweb.wordpress.com/2008/05/01/rss-feeds-explained/

 

 

 

Adding Content to the Rich Text Fields for Directory Data, Submit News, Etc.

Why not to use Word

Using any word-processor with our webpage editor is not a good thing to do.
Microsoft Word is not a standard, everyone should not use it and our editor should not be expected to cope with what it produces. A Word document cannot be pasted into any other proprietary word-processor and look just the same – our editor is no different.

Here is why any word-processor – including Open Office – should not be used.

This text was written in Open Office then copied and pasted into our editor. Right now it looks okay.

 

 

If you click the HTML tab though you will see what the real code looks like:

That is what just 2 short lines produced. If you have written a long entry then it becomes a mess of tags – and if just one tag does not get closed properly – your page looks bad. It’s a LOT of tags there and you would need to dig through each one to find the unclosed tag.

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This is almost identical text written directly into our editor. It looks similar.

 

 

Clicking the HTML tab shows only a few tags:

 

Because there are less tags it is easier to see if one has gone wrong.

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We recommend that you:

• write directly to our editor
• use either a plain text editor then post to our editor and format the text
• use a desktop client

Just don’t use Word – or expect to see and have to fix mistakes.

New RSS Feed Available for TCN

There is now an RSS feed available for TCN. Get the news online at the TCN website, or subscribe.

Submit News Specific for Locations and Departments

Use the submit news feature to submit news for your department. It will be stored in the CoT news database and be available in RSS feeds and on the department site.

watch the video to learn how to select specific departments and locations:

RSS Feeds Explained

This is a great video explaining what RSS feeds are, how to find them and what to do with them. Enjoy!

One more thing… I like to add my feeds to Outlook. There is a folder called “RSS Feeds” in Outlook 2007 that makes this easy.