In my everquest to make things better in the hip-hop blog world I put together a service called "Hip-hop News Wire." For readers, it's an easy way to keep up with the latest rap music news without having to visit half-a-dozen sites a day. For bloggers, it's an easy way to keep their sites auto-fresh with the latest hip-hop headlines. Now all of us can be as up to date as Ian or Nick without all the work!
First, I'll offer up the proper links and codes, then I'll explain what I did. Walk with me.
For readers:
If you know how to use webfeeds, subscribe to the hip-hop topix rss feed (using MyYahoo!, Bloglines, or whatever). If you have no idea what I'm talking about then just subscribe to the email newsletter below. Every day you'll receive an email listing hip-hop news from the best sites out there.
For bloggers/webmasters:
Feel free to display the news wire on the sidebar of your site. I have an example of this on the right of the front page of Hip Hop Blogs. Copy and paste the javascript below:
To make it fit in with the style of your site, you may need to fiddle with some stylesheets.
UPDATE: It's working now. I switched from Feedster's unstable services to Topix.
How I created this:
I won't go into all the details because I'm lazy. But here's a list of the services that make this possble and how I used them.
1. Feedster's Feedpapers to roll each news site's webfeed into one. I switched to the Topix category page for hip-hop.
2. Gnews2RSS to create a webfeed for sites that didn't have one, or one specific to hip-hop.
3. Bloglet to create the email subscription part.
4. Google to figure out things I didn't know
5. BMCC's computer lounge for free access to the net, cuz I don't own a computer.
So yeah...use it, have fun, hip-hop, one love.
I like what you did and it looks very professional. I am considering using your news on my website. I am still constructing it, but I just wanted to express gratitude for your contributions to the culture. Thank you.
Posted by: Brian Offiah | 2008.10.26 at 11:06 PM