[Web4lib] IT-free RSS-based What's New page solutions

[Steve Lawson]

I am late to this thread, but I wanted to say that at Colorado
College, we have just started syndicating our new "Library News"
weblog to our home page. See

http://www.coloradocollege.edu/library/

and 

http://library.coloradocollege.edu/news/

I am using the "BuzzBoost" feature of FeedBurner. You need to set up a
FeedBurner account, get them to re-syndicate your feed, and then use
the BuzzBoost feature under their options for publicity. See:

http://www.feedburner.com/

and 

http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/buzzboost/howto

Over at Library Clips there is a list of resyndication tools:
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2005/05/20/re-syndication-sidebar-updates-and-more/

I did some unscientific testing of this service and the
previously-mentioned Feed Digest, and FeedBurner seemed quicker to
load and quicker to reflect the updates when I added a new item. I
hope that holds true when the students come back and all our lab
computers are hitting our home page repeatedly.

For the terminally curious, we are using Movable Type for the weblog,
and are not syndicating all the most recent headlines to the front
page, but only those with the category "Front Page News."  I'd like to
dump all our news and announcements in that one blog, and then
syndicate stories that are useful to certain populations to pages
where they will see them (e.g., items that affect English faculty and
students could appear on the English article databases page, etc.).
For information on creating a feed for a specific MT category, see
this post from the "Learning Movable Type" blog:

http://www.elise.com/mt/archives/000458simple_rss_customizations.php

-Steve Lawson, Humanities Librarian
 Colorado College, Colorado Springs
 slawson at coloradocollege
 AIM: tuttlawson