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.