ARCHIVED: Oncourse News: Overview

This content has been archived, and is no longer maintained by Indiana University. Information here may no longer be accurate, and links may no longer be available or reliable.

Important:

Oncourse is retired. For details, see ARCHIVED: About the Oncourse retirement.

What it does

The News tool uses RSS to bring dynamic news to your worksite. RSS is a data format used to syndicate news on the web. It allows continuously updated content from a remote news site to appear in another website.

Key concepts

RSS: To set up your worksite to display news, you must specify a URL pointing to an RSS news feed. An RSS news feed is a specially formatted list of news articles. You can find RSS feeds by using an Internet search engine (e.g., Google or Yahoo). Sites that distribute news in RSS format are called "news feeds". The News tool is an RSS "news aggregator" (or "news reader") that reads and displays content from RSS news feeds.

Things to consider

You can add more than one News feed either when you set up the site or at a later time.
In addition to news, some websites use the RSS format for information that is updated often, such as blogs (web logs that serve as publicly accessible personal journals), events listings, or the revision history of a book.

Help documentation

For help documentation about the News tool, see ARCHIVED: News.