Adding a News Feed to your personal site

Many of our staff have found it useful to add news feeds (RSS Feed) to their personal site or 'My Site'. This is very simple to do:

It is possible to add an ‘RSS News Feed’ to you personal site on sharepoint (the ‘My Home’ tab within ‘My Site’).

News feeds can be added from any external website where you see the red/orange RSS logo.


To add a feed, firstly you need to browse to the website you want to take the news from, and then click on their RSS logo, this takes you to their news feed. See the example of the BBC News site below:

http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/sportonline_uk_edition/front_page/rss.xml


Once you have clicked on the logo, you’ll be taken to the page containing their news feed, the address of it should end in ‘.xml’.

The BBC News one for example is ‘http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_uk_edition/front_page/rss.xml’

You need to highlight this address in your browser, then right-click on it and copy it.

Browse back to your ‘My Site’ and navigate to the ‘My Home’ tab.


This page is your personal space and can contain whatever you want. To add the feed, you need to click on ‘Site Actions’ which is in the top right corner, then ‘Edit Page’.

From here, you need to select which area or ‘zone’ on the page you want to the news feed to display, the top zone for example. Click on ‘Add a Webpart’.

This brings up a window in which you can select which webpart you want to add. You need to expand ‘All WebParts’, then scroll down to ‘Default’ and tick ‘RSS Viewer’.


Click on the ‘Add’ button.

The RSS Viewer webpart will appear on your page and display the following text:

Web part is not bound to a feed. Open the tool pane to set the feed Url.

Click on the ‘Open the tool pane’ hyperlink.

This opens the properties of the webpart on the right of the page, in the box labelled ‘RSS Feed URL’, you need to right-click and paste in the address you copied from your chosen website (BBC News for example).


If you expand the ‘Appearance’ section, you can also give your webpart a name, this can be anything you like e.g. ‘BBC News Feed’.

Finally, you can click on the ‘OK’ button at the bottom of the webpart properties pane, then click on ‘Exit Edit Mode’ at the top right of your page, below ‘Site Actions’:

You should now see your news feed each time you access your page.