Member News : How to contribute

In an earlier article, I mentioned that two-thirds of member societies are already represented on the new live member news page, which in turn provides selected articles for our weekly email to the whole membership, allowing members to share their news and knowledge across London. We select stories that we feel are particularly newsworthy, or of benefit by way of information sharing to a significant part of our membership, and we assume you think this is a good idea too. Our aggregated membership is over 50,000 Londoners, so this could be significant.

How can your society join in?

We just need to know the address of your RSS feed so that we can include it. A ‘feed’ automatically produces a computer-readable version of your website’s latest articles or news, and most modern websites already have an automatic one.

One-third of societies are not represented, for the following possible reasons:

• No active website
• Website doesn’t provide an RSS feed or we couldn’t detect an existing RSS feed after trying several specialist search tools and services
• The feed we found is empty, not recently updated, or is otherwise broken
• The address we have for your website is out of date – please update us

While setting up the page, I found that a few websites had moved and our details were outdated – those were fixed and updated, but there may be more.

If you think your website has an RSS feed, but isn’t represented on the member news page, please contact us with the RSS feed address, and we’ll test it, and let you know what we find.  It’s worth noting that if you haven’t added news recently, it’s quite possible that you are on the list, but that your news has dropped off the bottom of the items we show. A new posting will automatically go to the top of the list if we’re properly connected.

Adding an ‘RSS feed’ to your website

There are many third party websites that will tell you how to do this, but this guide tells you how get the best out of it in our context, in a series of steps:

1. Find out what type of website you have – popular examples are WordPress, WordPress.com (commercially hosted version of WordPress – slightly different), Squarespace, Wix, Joomla, Drupal, Blogger, Weebly and a few others. Some service providers have their own website builders – for those you’d need to enquire with your provider as to what they can do.  If you’re not on one of these popular systems (perhaps a hand-built website from years ago), I congratulate you on your perseverance; it’s probably super-quick these days, but you may be missing out on a few facilities and might consider updating to a modern content management system.
   If you were to ask me, I’d recommend self-hosted WordPress for several reasons, not least the fact that more members use it than any other, it runs over 40% of the world’s websites including this site, and is open-source/free.
2. Knowing the website type should help you check that the RSS feed is enabled.  This site provides a useful how-to guide. RSS is enabled by default on many of the above systems (which is how we started with an encouraging two-thirds participation rate), but some will need configuration and tweaking to get the best out of them.
3. Some systems need a specific module and/or specialist configuration, most notably Joomla and Squarespace. In the case of Squarespace, you also need to determine what content goes into the feed(s) – what pages and categories – to the best of my knowledge – it’s not the catch-all that WordPress typically provides. Some members on Squarespace have more than one feed, but we’d prefer just one obviously.
4. Once you have your feed enabled, you can go to the feed address, and see what it’s providing. In the case of this site, it’s at https://www.londonforum.org.uk/feed, which also serves to show you what a working feed looks like. You can subscribe to this feed too, by the way.
5. In order to feature on the member news page, the feed must have recent stories – you can see the publication dates on the articles by examining the feed.  It’s just text, it won’t bite!  Anything older than couple of months is likely to be drowned out by newer material. We do limit the number of simultaneous stories from each site to two, so that busy sites don’t monopolise the show.
   Here I must note  that we’ve seen a few ‘older’ posts (perhaps a few weeks old) popping up later on – this is the most common problem – or dates in the future – perhaps the date of a future event being announced.
6. To be able to be included in our weekly email, the publication date must be less than a week ago, so when you publish, please check that the publication date is current, not perhaps the date you started drafting an article, which can sometimes happen.  Equivalently, if you update an article, unless the  publication date is updated (which you can usually do manually), it can’t be included in the weekly email. It may be better to write a short update article, highlighting significant developments.
7. Using WordPress – the most popular system – as example, what goes into a feed is typically a ‘post’. ‘pages’ will not feature in your feed normally. So if you create news by adding or updating ‘pages’, including your home page, you might like to reconsider how you work. However, if that’s not possible, there are ways to get pages into a feed, though the ‘how’ is beyond the scope of this write-up. Other systems may vary in what they include too. 
   Sometimes there are peculiarities, if for example you’re using some kind of special grid to display posts on your home page, as at least one member does. In that case their news was contained in ‘custom posts’, which don’t normally appear in the standard feed. They gave us the address of their ‘custom post feed’, and all was well. WordPress actually provides multiple feeds, for example for categories and tags, as well as the catch-all …/feed.
8. Tell us! contact us , include the address of your feed, and tell us anything special about it we might need to know. We have limited ways to manipulate it – it will usually go on the page unfiltered and automatically update itself approximately hourly from then on.
9. Finally, think about legalities and copyright. There are real stories of picture libraries – names such as Getty Images, Shutterstock, and Imagerights come to mind – chasing members for substantial and punitive payments when they’ve used copyrighted images on their websites by mistake. It seems a little mean given the nature of our largely volunteer and non-profit activities, so please don’t get caught out. You can often check the origins of an image using a reverse image search engine, such as Tineye.
   There are several free photo libraries out there with good material, some of which we use and credit.  We disclaim publishing responsibility by the way, as the material was already published elsewhere by definition. We do of course trust that you won’t publish defamatory material also, and obviously we’re monitoring and selecting what goes into member emails.

Better food and best practices

By default, many systems produce quite plain feeds, often just plain text, with no headings – WordPress included. But the evidence from the member news page shows that many members have already found that they can add rich content to improve their feeds, and are already doing so. Here’s a bullet-point guide:

• Add pictures or photos – make your story stand out. WordPress for example doesn’t include pictures in feeds by default, but there are plugins to automatically add images to a feed.  I need to mention the importance of the featured image. If you share stories on social media, you’ll already know that those systems usually pick up the ‘featured image’ from a post (this may depend on your SEO choices), making it an important way to get your message across. 
• What length of text?  More is better – right? Not when it comes to feeds. You have limited space to get your message across, around 75 words. So writing in Newspaper style helps, with key points in the first paragraph. We truncate feeds, so readers will see an ellipsis and link to your website after that limit is reached. 
  Some sites provide whole articles in a feed, that’s not best practice – there’s usually an option (in WordPress: ‘settings’ – ‘reading’) to put either the ‘content’ or ‘excerpt’ in the feed.  An excerpt is best, but you need to check the feed to see what it actually produces, which can depend on your theme.
• PDF files won’t show in a feed. If you use a pdf – preferably not – then please wrap it in a short textual summary – newspaper style – and perhaps include a snapshot of the front page as the featured image. Here’s one I made earlier. We also see examples such as “Autumn Newsletter 2024 (link to pdf)” without explanation, or indeed a completely blank post, relying on an image on the website, but perhaps missing the image in the feed. Without that, it’s unlikely to catch anyone’s attention, and won’t make it into our weekly email.
• Check that your feed has an appropriate identifier. You’ll see that we identify each Source: on our Member news page – these come directly from your feed’s “title” – setup for your website (in the case of WordPress it’s the ‘Site Title’ in General Settings).  If it’s just a series letters, a local acronym, default “My Blog” or worse  – completely blank – while your members may recognise it, others probably won’t.
• Check accessibility – particularly font colours and captions + ALT text on your images. When people follow a link to your site, they need to be able easily read your story.
• Unusual or leftover text to check.  Does your feed accidentally include odd characters, ‘shortcodes’ or other extraneous clutter?  We’ve seen things like this in a feed:

  [themify_icon icon="exclamation-triangle"  style="large"]

  This is a so-called ‘shortcode’ that’s not been expanded because, without extra code, systems typically don’t processes them for RSS feeds. Please check and remove, or workaround this issue.

• Test your feed on a feed reader – please not on me!  There are many free RSS readers out there, RSS having been around over 25 years.  We’d love to receive your completed work, but there are only so many hours in the day to invest in debugging at our end.

Feed your members!

As I mentioned in the earlier article, this longstanding technology works both ways, and London Forum has an RSS feed in the usual place: https://www.londonforum.org.uk/feed, to which you can subscribe for automatic updates, as I do at Hammersmith. You don’t even need to add a plugin if you’re using WordPress – it has a built-in RSS widget.  Using this technique, we carry selected Forum news both on our website, and in our member email updates.

One for the road – Calendars

I said in the previous write up that we’d provide details of our shared Google calendars.

We run two, both are public, and read-only. Their content is combined and shown in the website Diary page.  If you have a Gmail account, you can easily subscribe to one or both, and then dates will be in your own diary on a huge range of machines, in familiar London Forum green livery, updated automatically if we add or move things around.

The first is easy to subscribe to, since Google simplified access. This contains our meetings and one or two other things that members may be interested in:

ID : londonforum2@gmail.com

The second is for London Forum events. This uses the older, longer format:

ID:  70bh86o639ehg0imbvnc7n38h8gkosu6@import.calendar.google.com

This help page will guide you as to how to add these calendars on Android, iPhone and iPad. Though the example refers to the Google App there are many other calendar apps and desktop programs, such as Outlook and Thunderbird, that can subscribe to Google calendars using the above ID’s.

Richard Farthing
Trustee