Advanced Set Up For RSS Feeds - full content or RSS feed content

RSS Feeds

RSS feeds are a common way of publishing information, often used by newspapers, blogs, companies, etc. to share information on a regular basis.

Digimind Intelligence can easily track RSS feeds directly using Smart Tracker.  To find out more about working with Smart Tracker to add an RSS feed you can rea this post.

On some rare occassions Digimind may not be able to read the RSS feed.  This is either because the RSS has not been formatted correctly by its owners or possibly because it is connected to a consumer forum and

corresponding updates. 

Fortunately it is still possible to track this kind of source, using the advanced configuration for sources. 

The standard treatment of RSS feeds is for Digimind to go to the RSS feed and check for the latest stories.  It follows the links in the feed and downloads the content it finds.  Digimind identifies which of the articles match your query based on the whole downloaded information.  Using our clever algorithms it then presents a summary of the article that contains your keywords, making it that bit easier to see if the alert is useful for your needs.  The new option will allow Digimind to work only with the information presented on the feed itself: the title and the RSS summary.  This will enable Digimind to work with RSS feeds that have not been correctly formatted by their owners, or special types of RSS feeds that link to forums with consumer comments.

Step 1: Open advanced configuration of sources

Inside the agent, click on more actions and then select advanced configuration:

Step 2: Add an RSS feed

In the RSS section of advanced configuration, select to add an RSS feed.

Then paste in the URL of the feed in question:

Click on Next.

Step 3: Select how to treat the RSS feed

On the next page you will be able to select how Digimind should manage this feed.

If you would like Digimind to download the entire article and apply the query to the complete text (standard behavior), you can add your feeds directly in the Smart Tracker.  On this page, you should leave the option to download the entire article as checked.

If you would like Digimind to work with the RSS feed itself, and not click on the links inside (new option) you will need to check the option to download only the RSS summary of the article. 

After you have made your choices, click on OK to see the success message.

On the dashboard, what will I see?

 In this example I have used the same RSS in two different agents.  The one on the left uses the entire article or the full contents of the RSS feed, the one on the right only uses the RSS summaries.  The alerts have been sorted by relevance.  You will notice that the order of the alerts is different, due to the different ways of treating the RSS feed.

What happens when I store articles?

When working with the full RSS download, you will be able to store the whole article:

Using the RSS summary, you will only see the summary from the RSS feed on the validation page: