(April 2005)
'Chess news! Chess news! Get your red hot chess news!'
Did you know that you can have all recent headlines from your favorite chess news sources on a single web page?
You can even click on the headlines to go straight to the articles without having to click through the front page of that news source.
That's right!
The My Yahoo! service offers a remarkably easy way to do this.
If you have a Yahoo! account that you use for Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Games (like online chess), Yahoo! Groups, or Yahoo! Finance, then you also have access to My Yahoo!.
If you don't have a Yahoo! account, what are you waiting for? It's free.
News Aggregators
What's so special about My Yahoo!?
It's an example of a service called a 'news aggregator'.
You can use news aggregators to display the headlines (and summaries) for many of your favorite news sources -- blogs, forums, and news groups -- that you visit regularly.
That means all of these wonderful resources are available to you from a single page.
If you think you already have this through bookmarks, favorites, and shortcuts, then think again.
You might have links to certain blogs; you might even have links to certain entries in those blogs; but if your links aren't automatically displaying headlines for the latest articles in those resources, then you aren't using an aggregator.
About Chess example
Let's take About Chess as an example.
You have a bookmark to chess.about.com and, once in a while (at least once a week?), you click on it to see the latest About Chess articles.
If you had the About Chess news feed in My Yahoo!, then every time you opened that page, you would see the headlines for our latest articles.
At the same time you would see headlines from your other news sources.
The easiest way to add About Chess to My Yahoo! is to have us do it.
Our 'Stay Up-to-Date!' feature (see the link box in the upper right corner of this article) has a
button that does all the dirty work for you. Just click that button on the 'Stay Up-to-Date!' page and follow the instructions.
Of course, you don't have to go to our 'Stay Up-to-Date!' page to add About Chess to My Yahoo!.
You can do something similar from My Yahoo! itself.
We're going to explain this in some detail, because we think you'll enjoy accessing your chess news this way.
Getting Started from My Yahoo!
Here's another easy way to add About Chess to your own My Yahoo!.
It's also a way to add many other news resources to your My Yahoo!.
- Sign in to your Yahoo! account and switch to your My Yahoo! page.
- Look for an Add Content button and click it.
- Type chess in the box called 'Find Content', and click 'Find'. This will search for all news feeds that have something to do with chess.
- Look for About Chess and click the '+ADD' button to the left of the entry.
- Return to your My Yahoo! page, where you'll see the latest About Chess headlines.
- Use other My Yahoo! functions to change the number and age of our that headlines you see.
That's all there is to it!
Like so many other computer based resources, explanations of news feeds have their own peculiar jargon.
Two acronyms that you're likely to encounter are
RSS (known as both 'Rich Site Summary' and 'Really Simple Syndication') and XML ('Extensible Markup Language').
For more information on these, see the My Yahoo! RSS FAQ (link box again).
Our Starter Set
You're probably interested in more news feeds than My Yahoo! offers via its search box.
There's an easy way to add almost any news feed you can find.
Here's how to do it.
- Sign in to your Yahoo! account, switch to your My Yahoo! page, and click the Add Content button.
- Click on Add RSS by URL in the Find Content box, ('Add RSS by URL' is jargon for 'add a news source by entering its web address').
On the next page, you'll see instructions for 'Add RSS by URL' with a box titled 'URL:'.
The instructions mention a 'little orange button'.
Here's an orange button for About Chess.
About Chess
If you position your mouse over the little orange button (go ahead, try it), you'll see that it's marking a shortcut to a web resource. (In fact, if you click on the button, you'll see what the news feed looks like; you'll also see that it's for computers, not people.)
- Follow the My Yahoo! instructions to copy the orange button's shortcut and to paste it into the 'URL:' box.
- Click the 'Add' button. My Yahoo! will show you the latest news from About Chess with a second '+ADD' button.
- Click that second '+ADD' button. The About Chess news is available on your My Yahoo! page.
Here are a few more chess news feeds that we think are worth adding to your My Yahoo! page.
Follow the steps that we just outlined to add each of these resources in turn.
- rec.games.chess.misc Google Group
- rec.games.chess.computer Google Group
- Daily Dirt Chess Blog
- Boylston Chess Club Weblog
- Chess by Lubomir Kavalek from WashingtonPost.com
There's one small extra step with these news sources.
Because About.com adds a frame to all non-About links, you'll need to remove that frame before you copy the address.
Here's how to do it.
- Click on the little orange button. This will open the news feed (not the home page of the news source!) in your browser.
- Look for the phrase 'Turn off this Top Frame' in the top frame. The link under this phrase is the address of the feed that you need to paste into My Yahoo!.
- Copy the address and paste it into the 'Add RSS by URL' box.
If you're a chess news hound, like we are, you might have noticed the two rec.games.chess news feeds.
In a moment we'll tell you how to get the feeds for other news groups, chess or otherwise.
Before we do that, we'd like to mention two other About Chess news feeds that might interest you.
- About Chess : Top Moving Articles
- About Chess : Most Popular Articles
The 'Most Popular Articles' feed is especially interesting if you're new to chess.
Add to the Starter Set
As we write this article, there are hundreds of sources that offer chess news of all types.
We expect that there will soon be thousands of sources.
How can you find these? We know three ways.
First, whenever you see the little orange button, it means that there is a news feed hiding behind it.
If it looks like a news feed when you click it, then you should be able to paste it into My Yahoo! using the 'Add RSS by URL' feature.
Second, there are services to help you find news feeds on the web.
We've given you direct links to the chess searches on a few of the more popular services (see the link box again).
Follow those links and go to the home pages to find out more about what's offered.
Finally, if you're interested in other Google Groups like rec.games.chess.misc, you can get the feed from Google.
Here's how.
- Find the home page of the group that interests you. (If you search on 'Groups' from any Google search page, you'll see the group home page for every message returned by the search.)
- Click 'About this group'.
- Look for 'Atom feeds' and click on any one of the choices. 'About Atom feeds' will give you a little more explanation. For our Starter Set, we used 'Available feeds: Topic summaries'.
The Rest is Up to You
We've only covered the basics here.
There is more to My Yahoo! than adding news sources.
There are more news aggregators than My Yahoo!, which is a web based service.
You can also find software that runs on your computer instead of on the Web.
There are many popular chess news sources that don't have RSS feeds.
Don't wait for them. Get started now. When they are ready to offer feeds, you'll be ready to use them.
Happy aggregating!
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