How can I improve my news feed?

This screen is part of a Web Feed Reference section for the Web Feed Generator. Please ask us if you cannot find the answer to your question.

The Web Feed Generator is designed to work well with the basic information found in most Web pages, but you can enhance your feeds by adding more detailed metadata, fragment anchors and hyperlinks.

Web pages should contain a title element that shows the title at the top of a Web browser window, and in Bookmark or Favorites lists. These titles are also used by many Internet search engines to index Web pages, which is why Web designers sometimes make them very wordy. By putting important words in the page title, you can get better search engine ranking for your site.

Metadata titles

The Web Feed Generator uses the main page title to name your news feed, unless more specific title information is available. If you add a less wordy title to the metadata for your page, the system will use this instead.

<meta name="DC.Title"
 content="Snappy page titles for human consumption"/>
      

Metadata description

If your Web page has not been optimised for the Web Feed Generator, it may have been optimised for search engine ranking and is likely to include a description that is used to give a summary of your page on search result pages. In this case the Web Feed Generator uses the same description for your news feed summary too.

<meta
  name="description"
  content="A general description"/>
      

To make a more specific news feed summary, you can use the Dublin Core metadata scheme to mark a preferred description, as below. If this type of description is present in addition to a general description, the Web Feed Generator uses the Dublin Core version for your news feed.

<meta
  name="DC.Description"
  content="A preferred description"/>
      

Fragment mode

Many Web pages also contain fragment anchors to mark important headings in the document, which work like a table of contents. You might have heard fragment anchors called accelerators, ID links or jump points. Fragment anchors let you use hyperlinks to jump down the page to specific points.

The Web Feed Generator will generate additional news items for each fragment identifier it finds in your Web page, and use the text that follows as the summary text for the item. So, if you have a series of important headings, they automatically become part of your news feed.

<h2>
  <a id="products" name="products">
    Product support information</a>
</h2>
<p>
  Owners of Acme widgets will receive free upgrades ...
</p>
<h2>
  <a id="conference" name="conference">
    Conference preview</a>
</h2>
<p>
  The eminent Jane Raine will be giving the keynote speech at ...
</p>
      

TOC format

The Web Feed Generator can also process specially formatted link lists as news feeds, with links to each item. This is known as TOC mode, for "Table Of Contents", but could list any items. The link text will be used as the item titles and the definition descriptions as the item summary.

<dl class="TOC">
  <dt>
    <a href="../e-procurement.html">E-procurement forum</a>
  </dt>
  <dd>
    Public service purchasers applaud new system ...
  </dd>
  <dt>
    <a href="../minister-appt.html">Ministerial appointment</a>
  </dt>
  <dd>
    Local councillors today welcomed the appointment of ...
  </dd>
</dl>
      

There are many more ways to improve your news feed with further metadata, but the most important thing is to keep your Web page updated as often as possible with current information. Do not update for the sake of it, because frequent trivial changes may become annoying to your readers. Consider what your readers would really want to hear about.

See also:

• What is metadata?
• What is a fragment anchor?
• What is Dublin Core?