Newsdesk is a program built in partnership between Robocommerce, LLC and the Nephron Information Center which allows you to aggregate news from around the web, categorize that news, and publish the new collections via rss.
Getting started:
- You can track new articles on a site by building a "search". That search can be an RSS feed, or a normal HTML page.
- RSS searches are fairly straightforward. However, you can also track news on sites that do not support RSS by using regular expressions to tell Newsdesk how to find new articles on the site.
- You can specify that all citations found from a search can be auto-categorized. You can also have more than one URL in a particular search.
- For example, you might have a search called "Google News". That search would have search-result pages from searches on google news. You could have ten search result pages in that "search".
- After you add a search, you can add "categories". Each category can have win-patterns and lose patterns that can allow it to auto-categorize citations as they are found.
- After you have added categories, you are ready to execute your search. You can browse the "execute" menu to see all of the different options. Executing will grab several citations from the web.
- After retrieving the citations, they are categorized. You can then select which ones you wish to approve, make a "top story" or a "headline." Both are special categories for the most relevant stories on your site.
- After you have approved and categorized citations, you can publish the results as RSS feeds. The pages can be read on conventional websites, on wikis such as wikikidney, or on Zope sites. For examples see nephron.com or wikikidney
- For information about how you can license "newsdesk" for your website, contact Brian Rosenthal at brian@robocommerce.com.