I’m not sure that everyone knows that their posts when published to their ourlocality site are also reproduced over at : http://news.ourlocality.org
This news site contains a complete and searchable archive of all the historic articles ever published by you. We occasionally prune duplicate postings (we know who you are, so if you are reading this – please don’t publish the same content on different sites!). More rarely we redact / edit them (to correct typos, missing headlines, shove a read-more link in, that sort of thing etc).
Click on a news item title or the read more link and you will be propelled instantly to the publishers website, for more scintillating stuff.
You can subscribe to all the ourlocality news in a number of ways using rss or ‘really simple syndication’. An rss means you can read the news in an rss reader or using a webservice, bringing together all your favourite news, blogs, comments or facebook feeds to stay ahead.
Alternatively – and this is a widely used feature – you can paste the rss link into an ourlocality website – see examples in the footer area of this site. For that matter you can stick rss in almost anything from wordpress.com, posterous.com, blogger.com or tumblr.com. What do these website services have in common? They are all free publishing platforms and alternatives that we are very happy to recommend.
Remember that only posts are reproduced, so if you create a page (a contact page say, or mugshots of the team) you don’t have to worry that it will be broadcast to all and sundry (your team will not forgive you for posting, so now you know.)
Here’s some extra handy features.
- if you unpublish the post, it is automatically removed from the news
- if you schedule the post, it will appear at the scheduled date and time – but not before
- if you make the post password protected, only the title will show
- private posts and posts from sites that have been created or switched to Stealth Mode, Member only or simply hidden from Google do not show either
- if you use categories skilfully you could get your ‘Events’ to feature in the ‘Events’ category
So if you are looking for ourlocality updates you now know where to go?
EDIT: We also push stories automatically to twitter and facebook. This is not instant, so you have about 15-30 minutes to make edits / delete it before re-publication. If you subsequently unpublish the story the twitter or facebook link will will obviously return a page not found. The snippet of the story will however persist on both social networks. Ask nicely and we will remove it.
