Feed Collections

Introduction

Feeds are the sources where ContentGems draws articles from. Strictly speaking, a feed is either an RSS source or a Twitter user’s home timeline. ContentGems indexes hundreds of thousands of articles daily, which we call the “ContentGems Firehose”. 

Under the Feed Collections tab, you can pull up specific RSS feeds you’re interested in and add any that aren’t covered by ContentGems. You can even have ContentGems go through your Twitter feed to pull out the articles that are being shared by your community. In ContentGems, you can create a collection of sources that we call a “Feed Collection” and use that in your Filters.

Navigation

Feed Collections appear on the left column of the screen, organized alphabetically. 

Creating a new Feed Collection

You can create a new Feed Collection through the left column, or in the main section when you click on Feed Collections at the top navigation bar.

You can create Collections in three ways: 

1. through RSS feeds, 
2. through your Twitter timeline, 
3. or through an OPML import. 

Please note, Collections cannot be blended together: so, you cannot combine RSS feeds and articles from your Twitter timeline.

Adding to Feed Collections Via RSS Feeds

An online news publication, a blog, or any website can publish a chronological timeline of published articles in the form of an RSS feed. An RSS feed contains a data structure with the URL, title, description, and some other data of the most recently published articles. Some websites contain a single RSS feed, and others offer large numbers of feeds, e.g., an online newspaper could have a dedicated RSS feed for each section of the newspaper.

RSS feeds are a great way to stay up to date with a given news site or blog. Instead of having to visit each website to check if there is anything new, you can just subscribe to each site's RSS feed and get automated notifications in your RSS feed reader software any time there is a new article.

Add an RSS feed to a Feed Collection and ContentGems will monitor it for new articles. (Through Filters, you can then further distill the articles you want by searching through keywords.)

When you click on the "Add RSS Feeds" button, a window will appear when you paste URLs of RSS feeds into the form, one per line. Then you can add those same RSS feeds to multiple Feed Collections.

Adding to Feed Collections Via Twitter Home Timeline

Twitter is a great tool to promote ideas and newly published articles. You can follow the people you trust and keep up to date with the newest developments. However, it's easy to get overwhelmed with all the tweets that are posted each day. Adding a Feed through the Twitter Home Timeline helps save you time. You carefully choose the thought leaders and influencers to follow, and rather than trying to skim your entire Twitter timeline, ContentGems can surface all the articles being shared by accounts you follow. It’s a great way to also keep track of what your community is sharing.

ContentGems treats your Twitter feed as an RSS feed: It follows your Twitter feed and checks each Tweet for links to web pages. It follows each link and indexes the linked article. If it is relevant to your interests (based on your Filter settings), then ContentGems will include it in your recommended articles. Please note that retweets of articles will not show up.

You will be asked to connect with Twitter and then you will be taken to Twitter and asked for authorization. 

Security is always of utmost importance, so read through the different access that ContentGems will be allowed before agreeing. We do not use or track any additional information beyond what is needed to pull articles from your Twitter stream. If you have any questions you can contact us for clarifications.

Also, ensure that you are connecting the correct Twitter account by looking at the upper right corner. Once you authorize the app you will be brought back to ContentGems, and your Twitter handle will be included as a Feed Collection in the left navigation column.

Via OPML Import

Click the “Choose File” button to find the OPML file on your computer and then click Import Feeds.

Looking at an Existing Feed Collection

When you open the Feed Collection, you’ll find a chronologically sorted list of links to recent online content. Clicking on the image or the headline will allow you to view the article on the original site. 

Changing the Feed Collection View

Changing the Feed Collection view will affect how you see the articles.

In the Grid view, you see a preview image, the web domain, when ContentGems found the article, an excerpt of the copy, a select box on the lower-left corner to select the article, and in the lower-right corner the option to share the article to a Destination.

In List view, you get the exact same options as in Grid view. 

Lastly, in the Compact view, you can skim more articles at once, but you receive less information: there is only the headline, when the article was retrieved, a shorter excerpt, and the ability to select articles.

No matter the view you choose, you can select some or all of the articles to then share with your Destinations.

Use the "Edit" button in the upper right corner in order to view, add, or remove the RSS feeds in your Collection, and also to rename or delete your Feed Collection.

Changing Feed Collection name or Deleting Feed Collection

Click on the pencil icon to have the option to change the Feed Collection name or to delete the Feed Collection.

Adding more RSS Feeds

Click the "Add RSS Feeds" button and add URLs like when you first started a Feed Collection.

Removing RSS Feeds

Select the RSS feeds you’d like to remove and then hit the garbage can button.