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Automatic News Headline Services

By Dr Greg Mulhauser

Encouraging visitors to return to your site more than once requires giving them something of value -- such as interesting content -- and an automatic news feed provides one easy way to refresh your content on a daily basis. Please note that we're no longer taking new customers for our in-house RSS parsing service. However, we've left this page in place in hopes that information about the benefits of RSS feeds will still be useful.

Article Contents

The Problem of Interesting Content for a Private Practice
- The Technological 'Solution': Interesting News Content, Refreshed Automatically With RSS
- The Problem with the RSS Technological 'Solution'
The Real Solution to the Problem of Fresh Counselling and Psychotherapy Content
Frequently-Asked Questions About RSS News Feeds

The Problem of Interesting Content for a Private Practice

So you have your web site up and running, and you've provided all your practice information in one easy-to-find place. You're pleased to find that people from all over the country or all over the world are now stopping by to have a look. But you're disappointed that in most cases, you never see them again...

How many times are they going to come back to read your bio or check out your office hours? Will they want to read your latest conference paper more than once? If you'd like to have repeat visitors, the problem is how do you provide interesting content? If you're a counsellor or psychotherapist, chances are you don't want to spend all your time cooking up fascinating new web pages.

If you're impatient for a shortcut to the easy solution, just visit the Start Me Up! page now...otherwise, please keep reading!

The Technological 'Solution': Interesting News Content, Refreshed Automatically With RSS

One solution to the problem of how to give your visitors a selection of interesting content is to apply the magic of modern technology to provide automatically updated links to news headlines of interest. (As an example, if you've visited the CounsellingResource.com front page or the Daily Psychology and Mental Health News page, you know that we carry a selection of the latest news headlines in the field from around the world.)

Increasingly, major content providing organizations around the world -- including CounsellingResource.com -- are now delivering their news headlines or other content for free via a web technology called RSS (for 'Rich Site Summary'). RSS news feeds, written in XML (for 'eXtensible Markup Language'), make it possible for other sites to carry that content. It is these RSS news feeds which make it possible for sites to provide continually-updated content -- without having to generate that content themselves.

The Problem With the RSS Technological 'Solution'

The problem, however, is that XML is not HTML. (Have a look. The stream will either open in a separate browser window, complete with XML gobbledygook, or -- if you have a newsreader installed -- it will open in a separate application). For the web developer who already has expertise in XML and experience with Perl or PHP, this is not a problem, because they can write programs in Perl or PHP to transform the XML into the form they want to use in their web pages. For everyone else, however, exploiting the magic of RSS XML news feeds has until now required either inflexible blog-based content repetition or a substantial investment in programming skills -- either their own or someone else's.

The Real Solution to the Problem of Fresh Counselling and Psychotherapy Content

Until recently, we CounsellingResource.com provided a subscription-based service of automatic, custom translation of the XML of RSS into HTML, with all your preferred formatting and styling, ready for insertion into your own web pages. You could just tell us which news source you would like and how you want the content to look, and all the translation and formatting is done for you.

We're no longer taking new customers for this service, but many other businesses still provide this type of service, either for a recurring fee, or in some form that is supported by advertising (e.g., they insert their own ads into the output).

Hint: at CounsellingResource.com, we believe the assortment of free technological tools for performing this job has advanced enough that most webmasters will be able to accomplish it themselves, without paying someone else for it. We like to stay ahead of the curve, which is why we've closed our own service to new customers -- and and transitioned existing ones to other technologies -- but there are still plenty of companies out there willing to charge you for it...

Frequently-Asked Questions About RSS News Feeds

Q. Why not just use Javascript services?

A few content providers have introduced Javascript-based headlines and are promoting them heavily. These just require the web developer to insert a small snippet of code into their pages, and when a visitor loads that page, the Javascript reaches out to the content-provider's server to return the headlines. This is very convenient, for content providers who offer it, but it carries a couple of serious gotchas... First, you have limited control over how the news headlines are displayed, even with extensive programming of the Javascript interface to the content server. Second -- and this is the real killer -- you have no choice over whether users leave your site when they click on a headline; the actual news stories do not typically open in a new window, they go directly to the content provider in the same window. You can see why it would be advantageous for content providers to syndicate widely using Javascript! By using Javascript solutions, you are not providing a reason for visitors to return to your site, you are providing a reason for them to leave your site and visit the content provider. It's wonderful free advertising for the content provider.

By contrast, HTML news headlines can be displayed however you like, and if you'd like stories to open in a new window -- so visitors can return to your site just by closing that window when they've finished reading -- you can do it easily.

Q. Is this legal? Is it ethical?

Content providers are generally very happy for you to syndicate their headlines: that is why they make RSS feeds freely available in the first place! Provided you work within their terms of use (by, for instance, always crediting them appropriately and not re-posting the full content of their stories without permission), you will remain within the law.

Q. Are these services selling other people's news?

Absolutely not! Most of these services do not provide any original news content: they provide translation and custom formatting services so that you can easily make use of what is already being provided by others. They provide the expertise to make use of what is already freely available, so you don't have to invest time and money in learning how to write, maintain and customize the required scripts yourself.

Q. I know a bit about XML and Perl or PHP -- can I do this myself?

Absolutely yes! If you are already comfortable parsing XML with either Perl or PHP, you definitely do not need this service: go to it, and make use of the magic of modern technology to deliver a better service to your visitors!

Q. What are the system requirements?

Our own former service worked with Unix and Linux-based servers (which power the majority of the world's websites), and with modification on Windows-based servers. The system requirements for other companies' services depend from service to service.

Q. OK, I'm convinced -- how much does it cost?

Some charge upwards of several hundred dollars or even thousands of dollars per month, but many are now realizing that their customers are smarter than that and have begun offering the services at much more reasonable prices. In our view, you shouldn't have to pay more than £35 or so per month for an entirely customizable, ad-free RSS parsing and formatting service.

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