RSS Widget Upgrade

We recently rolled out an upgrade to our WordPress website (if you’re using the new UF&Shands website theme): The RSS feed widget has now been completely re-engineered.

At this point some of you may be asking, “What is an RSS feed?” An RSS feed is a format for delivering regularly changing web content. Many news-related sites, blogs and other online publishers syndicate (share) their content as an RSS Feed to whoever wants it. Every website in our WordPress service has a dedicated RSS feed for each of their posts, categories, and tags.

Our old RSS widget was very basic, but we received a lot of feedback from our users that you wanted more features from this widget, so we listened!

All existing RSS widget users have been gracefully upgraded and your settings have been transferred over, so there’s nothing for you to do (except maybe check out the new options).

For your convenience we have documented what the new widget can do, so if you’d like to learn more, please visit: http://webservices.ahc.ufl.edu/help-support/how-to/widgets/rss-widget/

The highlights:

  • Display images from an RSS feed as thumbnails (if the RSS feed you are linking to displays images in their feed)
  • Order the items from the RSS feeds in alphabetical order (instead of newest->oldest)
  • Display the RSS widget on only one specific page
  • Control where the user goes when they click on the title of the feed (great for Facebook feeds)
  • Display an RSS icon next to the title so users can subscribe to the feed

About the Author

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Jeffrey Stevens

Jeff Stevens is the Assistant Web Manager for UF Health Web Services. He focuses on user experience, information architecture, content strategy, and usability.

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