Using news headlines

Once you have a site with more than a handful of pages, a major problem is making-sure that people revisting the site can discover new content – New visitors can find what they need through search engines in combination with standard internal navigation devices such as inline-links, the sidebar and top menu navigation.

MKDoc has some clever features especially for users who just want to see the latest information:

Email Newsletters

When email newsletters are enabled, visitors with accounts can indicate their interests and be automatically sent relevant headlines daily, weekly or monthly – Allowing them to follow the site without constantly revisiting.

RSS Headlines

News aggregators can be configured to fetch the latest RSS headlines from any part of an MKDoc site and present this information as part of a users daily routine.

Headlines Components

MKDoc documents can themselves list headlines from a variety of sources; a common use is for the front page to consist entirely of all the latest documents added to the site in a news or blog format.

Headlines are individually customised for all logged-in visitors – Only documents that match the users interests are shown.

Adding headlines

To put headlines in any MKDoc document, simply create a headlines component and fill in the Base Headlines Path – This is the address of the section of the site you want to use to get your headlines.

For example to list the most recent documents from the entire site, enter /, to list all the most recent HowTo documents, enter /help/howtos/ or to list all the most recent news articles in the News section of a site, enter /news/ to get a list of headlines like so:

Importing RSS Headlines

RSS is a standard for syndicating news and links between web-sites. An RSS feed is just a list of document addresses with some extra metadata information – An example is a news organisation such as the BBC which regularly updates all their latest news headlines.

A quick search of the BBC News web-site shows that the URI for their news RSS is http://news.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_uk_edition/front_page/rss091.xml – So to embed these headlines in any MKDoc document, simply create an RSS Component and fill-in the URI field; save the page, wait a few minutes for the RSS to be fetched and see the result:

You can choose to have either a bulleted-list of linked-titles or a definition-list of titles and descriptions. Depending on the template, RSS lists may appear in a side-bar box instead of the body of the document.

Exporting RSS headlines

Every MKDoc page with child documents automatically has its own RSS feed that lists the most recent documents for that section of the site. This means that many people can access your latest documents in a variety of different ways through news aggregators, blogs and other MKDoc sites.

Figuring-out the location of any RSS feed is simple, simply take the URI of the section you want and add .headlines.rss onto the end.

Examples of MKDoc RSS feeds from this site are http://mkdoc.com/help/howtos/.headlines.rss listing all the most recent howto documents, http://mkdoc.com/news/.headlines.rss listing all the latest news documents and http://mkdoc.com/.headlines.rss listing all the latest documents from the entire site.