Author Topic: How do I display News on my Forum?  (Read 435 times)

Offline hiigara

  • Level 12
  • *
  • Posts: 85
  • Reputation: +0/-0
    • View Profile
How do I display News on my Forum?
« on: February 10, 2010, 11:27:14 AM »
I would like to create a Sports Discussion Community to attract Traffic to my Soccer Game.
I would like to display news about current Soccer events to get Discussions going. I would push those news from BBC or FIFA or other news Sources.
Is it RSS feeds the technology to use?

Offline dsheroh

  • Level 21
  • *
  • Posts: 235
  • Reputation: +6/-0
  • Perl Vicar
    • View Profile
    • Psi Rangers
Re: How do I display News on my Forum?
« Reply #1 on: February 11, 2010, 04:46:30 AM »
I'd go with either reading RSS or using the Twitter API to follow sport news accounts.  (I don't know of any specific dedicated sports accounts on Twitter, but I'm sure there are several similar to http://twitter.com/cnnbrk with sports news, scores, etc.)

RSS has the advantage that you'll generally get a headline/title and either partial or full body content from the feed, but the disadvantage that some feeds contain partial body content and others contain the full body.  If you want to display the content on your site, you'll need to check the feed's licensing terms to avoid copyright problems and, even if it is allowed, you'll need to work up some code to retrieve full bodies for any feeds which only contain partial content.  You can sidestep these issues by just putting the headlines on your site and linking to the original source.

Twitter has the advantage of consistency - it will always be just the headline and a (usually bit.ly shortened) link - and the disadvantage that longer headlines will be cut off by the 140-character limit.  It avoids the licensing and partial-vs-full content issues by only providing you with a link to the original source and no body content.

Having done both in the past (scraping RSS feeds for http://seethefnews.com/ (Warning: Extremely slow site!) and filtering Twitter for http://fishtwits.com/), I would personally go with Twitter.  It's a lot easier and avoids having to do feed-specific coding to deal with various publishers' quirks.  Plus Twitter's all trendy and everything right now, so it could score you some cool points with certain people.

 


SimplePortal 2.3.3 © 2008-2010, SimplePortal