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Create Your Own News Feed
Big Medium allows you to build a network of content affiliates to spread your online brand beyond your own website.

With Big Medium, you can plug into the web's innate grassroots marketing power. A content distribution system is built into your Big Medium site, allowing you to let your visitors display automatically updated links to your articles on their own websites or in their own RSS news readers.

To see the Big Medium news feeds generated for this demo site, for example, click the "Subscribe now: RSS news feed, plus free headlines for your site" at the bottom of this page.

Big Medium generates two types of news feeds for any or all sections of your site:

1. RSS feeds for personal reading

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is a format for sharing headlines and other Web content, allowing your site's visitors to browse your headlines and announcements with a "news reader" or "aggregator" program. A kind of hybrid between web browser and e-mail client, a news reader allows users to subscribe to feeds from their favorite sites, automatically fetching the latest headlines for easy browsing. The result is a time-saving and convenient way for your users to keep up with a wide range of content. Many RSS enthusiasts suggest that this format may soon replace e-mail newsletters as a way to keep in touch with customers.

If you would like to learn more about RSS, try the useful overviews from the Lockergnome RSS Resource, Wired News and columnist Dan Gillmore.

2. JavaScript feeds: Share headlines with other websites

Big Medium's JavaScript feeds allow your visitors to become "content affiliates" and display your latest articles, news and tips on their own websites. After your content affiliates add the easy-to-install HTML to their own websites, their sites will automatically display your latest headlines with links back to your site. The result is a dynamic, always-up-to-date display of your site's content on all of your affiliates' sites. The JavaScript feeds also give your affiliates the ability to adjust the appearance of the feed, including font, color, number of articles, and more.

Setting it up

Users with webmaster or administrator accounts can select the news feed content and format by adjusting the settings in the "News Feeds and Content Affiliates" panel of the site's widget settings. To go there, click the "Widget Settings" link in the left-column menu of the Big Medium control panel. To add the link to your site's news-feed page, simply include the ++NEWSFEED++ widget on the templates of pages where you would like to display the link. On this demo site, the ++NEWSFEED++ widget generates the "Subscribe now" link shown below.

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