RSS Feed Widget
RSS feeds are a great way to bring dynamic ever-changing content into your digital signage. There are RSS feeds available on most topics that can help keep you content dynamic, current and relevant.
When you hover your mouse over the RSS widget on your design you will see two icons in the upper right hand corner of the widget. The gear icon will open up the control panel for this widget. The pencil icon
will allow you to edit the elements inside of the widget. Even though the underlying data source will be live data, you still have the ability to completely customize this widget to fit your design.
RSS feeds are primarily composed of two elements, A TITLE for the feed and a DESCRIPTION for the feed. Sometimes there are addtional elements that are provided such as images.
Configuring the RSS Widget
To configure the RSS widget follow the steps below:
- Clicking on the gear icon will open the control panel for the RSS Widget.
- The first thing you will set is the RSS URL. This is the address on the Web where the RSS feed is located
- Set the REFRESH timing for how often you request new information. For feeds that change often you will want to set this to a short amount of time.
- Select the DURATION for how long each item in the feed will show. Typically a feed consists of multiple item or stories
- You can choose to LIMIT the number of items in your feed. This is usually a good practice if the feeds are not updated often and you don't want old content to be shown
- Determine if you want to show or remove HTML TAGS. Sometime a feed will have extra HTML in the feed that will make the content look odd. There are occassions that you will want to show this content as with some image content.
- The last thing you can configure is the TRANSITION. This will be an animated transition between each article (For Example, Scroll Up)
- When you are done click the APPLY AND CLOSE button
Editing the RSS Widget Layout
You can completely customize the layout of your RSS by modifying the elements inside of the widget. To start this process click on the pencil icon in the upper right of the widget.
You can now arrange all of the elements inside of the widget in the same way you control any of you designs. In the case of RSS this will primarily be customizing the type faces, sizes and position of the TITLE and DESCRIPTION