SAMNET allows for the use of customized 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. 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 checkbox when you create your news feed. When you are browsing someone's public bookmarks, select the News Interests link to see their public news feeds.
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,
Once you've done this, you'll be able to customize a few things about the section you're adding. First, you are 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 Spacebar, 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 from SAMNet Home. Here you can create a category of news feeds of your choosing, as well as specify what keywords will define your search. 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 Web site not already listed on SAMNet. 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 to the RSS feed. The Web site in question will provide you with this address. Just copy the address by first selecting it, then copying 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 the press Control+V to paste the feed address. Again, you can make this news feed public by checking the appropriate checkbox. 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.