Display An RSS Feed In A Block

Step-by-step guide and video tutorial by Nicola Quinn on how to setup an RSS Feed block on your SpaceNode. Also includes Information on how to do a link exchange with a like-minded website and why you would want to do so...

Video Tutorial

Nicola Quinn explains the process of adding an RSS Feed to a block on your SpaceNode:

Click the play button to begin playback

Step-by-Step Guide

Step One:

1. Go to "Add Blocks"
2. Plugin = choose "RSS Feed"
3. Click = Add Block (bottom of the page)
4. Now the Block Plugin Settings input box appears.

Step Two:

You now can configure the new block:

• cache_minutes:  Select how many minutes to cache this block or enter 0 (zero) to calculate this block on every page load. This is set to 60 minutes and I suggest to leave it that way. It helps your site load up faster if the cache is time is longer.
• description_length: How many characters of each item description to display. This is set to 98 and I suggest setting it to 0 to display only the headlines and save space. The maximum is 250 which can be used to make a whole page containing a detailed RSS feed if you wanted to do that at some point. Example: http://starfields.ws/NLP/
• items_to_display: The number of items to display. This is set to 10, I suggest an exchange in this case of 5 news items, so set it to 5.
• rss_url: The url of the RSS feed. In this case, enter https://energyeft.com/?output=FEED All spacenodes have the same convention, it is always sitename/?output=FEED for their feed link. Try putting your site name into a browser window and adding /?output=FEED to see the RSS feed of your own site.
• show_feed_image: Some RSS news feeds include an image to represent the content provider. Use this option to Show or Hide this image. For an RSS feed exchange such as this one, you don't need images (unless you want them).

• show_item_image: Some RSS news items include an image via the MEDIA rss namespace. Use this option to Show or Hide these images. I would set that to off in most cases.