Filtering RSS feed news items
An RSS feeds feed may contain dozens of individual news items. In some cases the older items my be days or weeks old and you may decide that you would only like to see current ones. One example of this is with a traffic news feed giving details of traffic delays in your area. News items over 6 hours old (possibly even 2 hours) are pretty much useless to people looking a digital signage screen. Our filtering screen gives you a number of options where you can filter out news items. The options are:
NO FILTERING - No filtering occurs.
FILTERING BY AGE - When you select this option you will see a Date filter drop down with your options on:
| TODAY - Any news items dated today. |
|
| TODAY AND YESTERDAY - Any news items dated today or
yesterday's date. |
|
| THIS WEEK - Any news items created this week. We
are treating Monday as the beginning of the working week. |
|
| LAST 7 DAYS - Any news items created dated in last 7
days. |
|
| THIS MONTH - Any news items created this month. |
|
| LAST 30 DAYS - Any news items created dated in last 30
days. |
|
| ENTER HOURS - You can specify a
number of hours that items are show for. For example, 24 hours
would show today's news items but some of ones from yesterday
depending on the current time. |
One issue that is created by FILTERING BY AGE is that is it quite possible to filter out all of the news items. There are two boxes called 'Title if no news items' and 'Description if no news items' because of this. If there are no items, then we add an automatic one with the Title and Description from these boxes. If you are using 'RSS SCROLLER 01' then you just need to put in a title for this box, and with 'RSS SCROLLER 02' you need to also add a description. In our traffic news feed example, a good title to put in our 'Title if no news items' box would be something like 'There are no traffic alerts in the last 4 hours'.
SHOW LATEST X NEWS ITEMS - You may want to only show the last few news items in a feed, especially if there are dozens of items dating back a long time. For example, select this option in the dropdown, then put a number 5 in the 'Show newest X items' box, and it will just show the last 5 news items.
Updating news feeds
By default, our RSS feed control checks for new news items every 15 minutes. If you use the FITLERING BY DATE ENTER HOURS options and set this to only show news items for a few hours, then our control only updates this when the feed changes. So if you set to just show items up to 2 hour old, but there are no new news items for 4 hours, then these will still be on screen. You can get this RSS control to do a timed refresh, say every 2 hours, by looking at the main 'Refresh' tab.
Support
Feel free to email us at suport@repeatsoftware.com if you need any help. We are very customer focused and the filtering on this tab was added based on customer feedback. If you have any suggestions for improving our system we are happy to hear from you.