narcogen's picture

The News feed page is one of the truly new features of the site compared to the earlier system.

The script that runs Rampancy has the ability to take almost any kind of content in it-- news stories, FAQ entries, forum posts-- and format them into an XML document that can be read easily by scripts on other site, regardless of the specific HTML formatting used on the site.

In addition, it can read such XML feeds as well. Several are currently being imported into Rampancy and displayed in boxes: Xbox.IGN.com, MythVillage, Halo.bungie.org, etc.

This XML news feed system also powers the boxes that display the latest R.net headlines and forum posts on different parts of the site.

If you are a registered user and logged in, a small icon will appear next to each newsfeed item, allowing you to add it to your blog. See the User blogs section for more information.

In addition to displaying in boxes on the main page, you can view all the news feed content on a single page using the news feed link in the main menu.

This page offers four options: Latest news, news by source, news by topic, and news sources.

Latest news displays in chronological order the headline and summary (if available) of items in the currently updated news feeds. (Because these feeds are updated on a set schedule during the day, they often appear grouped by source on this page as well, since items are tagged as new if they appear when the feed is updated.)

News by source will group the current news items by source site, displaying summaries only in box format. (On this page, the recent forum threads will appear in multiple places, since there are separate copies of these feeds required by the Classic template, which displays them differently.)

Perhaps the most useful display is News by topic. Each news feed is associated with a keyword or set of keywords, similar to the topics displayed in Rampancy news stories. On this page, items from news feeds are arranged by keyword. (Currently this feature requires some manual updating; while all stories from TeamXbox are assigned the Xbox keyword automatically, it requires an editor to manually assign the Halo keyword if it is appropriate. A solution is being devised for this limitation).

The News source page shows all the sites that export news feeds into the Rampancy site with a description provided by the site.

Some of the news feeds on the site are provided by the syndication service, NewsIsFree, at http://www.newsisfree.com.