Yale University

YaleINFO: Portal style and interface guidelines

Help Desk
432-9000
785-3200

ITS Office
Yale University
25 Science Park
P.O. Box 208276
New Haven, CT
06520-8276
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News and weather portlets

My News Reader Portlet: Gathering news and other RSS sources to customize your portal

You can use the "My News Reader" portlet to display RSS news feeds in your portal pages. RSS is a popular means to share headline news and links to information sources like the New York Times. A number of portlets offer updates from offices on campus, including ITS, STEP, and the Yale Library system. For general Yale University news, try the Yale News portlet, which will display news from the Office of Public Affairs, the Law School, or Yale Global.

To use the "My News Reader" portlet, select "Add Content to This Tab" from the top right of of any portal page, and click "News" and "My News Reader." Click "Add to my page" to complete the addition:

Adding the My News Reader portlet to a page.

The "My News Reader" portlet will now appear at the top of your curent portal page. Click the "Edit" button at the top of the portlet to customize your news source. Enter a title for your portlet into the "Portlet title" field. Then paste a valid RSS feed into the "RSS Feed URL" field. For example, you could use this feed URL to see home page headlines from the New York Times site: http://feeds.nytimes.com/nyt/rss/HomePage

The My News Reader portlet.

Click "Update" to complete your editing, and the news or other RSS content will now appear in your portlet:

the "My News Reader" portlet showing New York Times headlines.

If your new headlines do not appear in the "My News Reader" page, this means that for some reason the feed URL is not valid or working properly. Make sure you do not have any typographic errors in your URL, and that you have a valid, up-to-date feed URL from your news source. The best practice is to go directly to a news site, find their RSS feed source page (often listed near the bottom of the home page), and cut-and-paste a feed URL directly into your "My News Reader" portlet. Note that you feed URL must start with "http://"


Weather portlets

There are two weather portlets available for your personal YaleInfo page: one displays current weather for New Haven; the other you can use to display the weather at home or elsewhere. Just click on the “Edit” button in the upper right hand corner of the portlet and select a location from the menu.

Examples of two weather portlets.
Top of page.

Last modified: Monday, 28-Sep-2009 07:11:57 EDT. (pl)