Adding a News Tracker to Your Space Using Bing

If you’ve used Windows Live for any period of time, then you’ve probably discovered that there are some things you can customize on your profile. There isn’t much. But there is one place that Windows Live grants you a great deal of creative control and freedom allowing you to express yourself in a plethora of ways. This is your Windows Live Space. And no matter what your opinions are about Spaces, there are many enthusiast that have created some outstanding works of art using the platform as a canvas to express themselves. Many others use their Spaces as a simple way to share their ideas and opinions by expressing themselves in the written word by maintaining a blog there. Others share photos or may do both. Still others fill there Space with gadgets and lists and all sorts of other eye candy. This is what your Space is for and is one aspect that makes Windows Live unique from many other social networks. As such, this post is about another way of expressing yourself on your Space - not about the merits of Spaces in general or where the data lives or who actually visits your Space or who the intended audience happens to be. 

Spaces are used for many things, but the common thread throughout is that your Windows Live Space is a microcosm of you. It’s not just your words or your photos or your music. It’s also your sense of style, your composition, a collection of the things you find interesting in life and want to share with the world - even if you are the only person who ever sees your Space. It may also contain some things that are only for your personal use. It’s your Space. Do with it whatever you want. It can be as ornate as you like or as simple as just a place for you to simply hang a weather gadget of a some place you find interesting.

So, if your Space is dedicated to a topic or theme or you would just like to share news items you find relevant and newsworthy of your specific interests, your Space is a great place to put a news tracker. This post will describe the process of making one using the new search and decision engine Bing from Microsoft.

Creating a news tracker is very easy. The basics, in a nutshell, are that you need a news feed and a module to display it. So, in this example, Bing will provide the feed, and we will add a feed module on your Space to display it.

Before we start, we need to determine the subject or topic of the track. This can be anything really. If you have a Space dedicated to scuba diving then you could track that or if you are into politics or comics or whatever that can be tracked too. You can have more than one, and you can change them whenever you want. I’m currently tracking stories on my blog regarding my new favorite gadget, the new Palm Pre smart phone. I chose this subject, but the stories change frequently based on whatever Bing finds relevant for the terms in the news at the moment you view my Space. The subject is static and only changes if I change the subject in the module, but the contents, links to news articles per se, are dynamic and update as frequently as the stories are published. This results in a running stream of focused news, and it’s all limited to just your topic.

We’ll use a news feed as opposed to a search feed because news feeds change frequently and are chronological in order while a search feed tends to always return the same results until Bing finds a new web page to return. Web searches don’t change nearly as frequently. For the purposes of this exercise I will use a subject or topic of “Windows Live” since it’s a relevant subject and I’m interested in following this news topic.

So, we’ll start by creating the feed using Bing. Begin by opening Bing. The Bing homepage has a place for you to enter your search terms for a basic web search. You can also use advanced options to limit searches to particular sites, countries or languages. And if you’re adept at using a search engine and know advanced syntax, you can do all sorts of creative things to define your search.

So, we will enter “Windows Live” in the search box. Often times, you’re told to not include the quotes, but in this case the quotes are actually part of the search syntax. So KEEP the quotes! The quotes force the search to not only look for news items that contain both words, but that the two words must appear together exactly as they are entered. Without the quotes you’ll may get false hits about Windows 7 or other topics containing either one or both words in any order. Even using the advanced search operator of “AND” will not enforce the order. So, if you’re looking for things that are a phrase, then use quotes.

In our case, a web search (as opposed to a news search) of Windows Live or “Windows Live” will return a lot of relevant items about the subject. There are so many that the search engine determines that the most relevant results are those with the terms on the page appearing exactly as they’re entered for the search, both words together in that order. News searches, however, retrieve results from a much smaller pool and will result in news stories with subjects that are off topic , if you don’t use the quotes. So, again, use the quotes to force what you want. This will force the search to use an “AND” operator for the terms an enforce the order and proximity of the search terms.

Now, after you entered the search terms, click the “News” link on the left to perform the search. The resulting page is a “News” search of this topic.

But this page isn’t any good for our purposes. We actually need the feed for this page. This is easy to get, and there are a couple ways to do it. Since there is a feed associated with the results page, your browser might have a feed button your can use. Internet Explorer has such a button in the upper right area of the browser. On Bing, it’ll show as the web slice icon because you can also save the results as a web slice to your favorites bar and see your updates on demand, but you won’t be sharing them there. So, if you open the drop down menu, you’ll see the RSS feed for the page:

You don’t actually need to subscribe to the feed for this to work. You just need to copy the feed URL. Select the entire feed URL and right click it and copy. Here is what you’ll see in Internet Explorer doing it this way:

If you’re using a browser that doesn’t have a RSS button or just want an easier method, then on the left hand side of the search pane is an area to refine your search. You’ll notice that I have further refined my News Search to include stories from “Sci/Tech sources.”

Now,  the method that’s a little easier, and will work in all browsers, is to right click on the RSS link in the panel on the left hand side and select the option to copy the link URL by selecting “Copy Shortcut” or “Copy Link Location.”

If that doesn’t make sense to you, then just go ahead and click the link. The page that opens should show the news feed allowing you to subscribe to the it. But we don’t need to actually do that. We just need the URL of this page. So, again, select the URL and copy it.

So now we have a copy of the RSS feed URL in hand we can proceed to the next step of adding a feed module to our Space and configuring it for this feed.

Remember, we will need the URL you just copied. So don’t copy anything else or you’ll lose it. If you do, just go back and copy it again or you could paste it into a notepad document or a Sticky Notes so you can easily get it back later.

OK, for the next step, we need to go to our Space. You should already know how to do that, so I won’t detail that out. Make sure you’re logged in as yourself because we are going to edit the Space.

You should see “Customize” over on the top right hand side of your of your Space. Click it to open the drop down menu. Then click on “Add modules” and wait for the page to open in Customize mode.

Once it opens in Customize mode, you should see the “Modules” menu open. It’s a scrollable menu. So, scroll it down to the the “Feeds” entry. We’re going to add a new feeds module to the page.

Click the “Add” across from the heading “Feed”. This will place a new module towards the top of your Space. We will move it later so don’t worry about the placement for now.

Click “Close tab” at the bottom of the menu and then click the “Save” button in the yellow Customize band. You’ve just added a feed module.

But the module has no idea of what the feed is yet. We’ll enter that information next. Your Space should have returned to it’s normal appearance and not be in Customize mode any longer.

There should be a new “Feed” module toward the top of your Space, and we are now ready to set it up.  Your new module will have an “Edit” link in it. Click it to open up the Feed parameters page. It’ll be preconfigured with a “Feed name:” of “Feed”. Change that to something you like representing the topic or subject of your news track. I changed mine to “Windows Live in the news…” Now, hopefully you still have that URL you copied earlier. If you don’t, then you’ll have to get it again. I make a habit of pasting these types of things into a Notepad session for easy retrieval later.

The “Feed web address:” should have “Http://” in there. Click in this field at the end. Then delete all that by repeatedly clicking the backspace. Once it’s cleared out paste the URL into this field.

The “Show this many items:” is preset to just one. Change that to what you would like. I set it to the maximum of ten.  I wish there were more, but I suppose there has to be a limit. So, why not 100? I know the feeds on Windows Live don’t return more than 20 or so, but really, we could use more both on Spaces and on the http://my.live.com page where I believe the limit is just five. Anyway…

Then click “Save” and you’ve just added and configured your new news feed for your news tracker. The new module is probably not placed where you want it. So, you’ll have to click the “Customize” button at the top again and select “Rearrange or hide modules” to fix this.

When the “Customize” mode page opens you’ll be able to drag the module to the final position you want. Once you’re done moving it click “Save” to save and exit the “Customize” mode and you’re done!

Now, when a visitor clicks one of the articles in the tracker, it’ll open the story in a new browser window where they can read it. I noticed in this example that the very first item “Windows Live – Softpedia” actually is opening a dead page. This is neither Bing’s fault nor mine. Softpedia has published something then possibly retracted it. I don’t know. It looks like it was an article on Messenger. But not to worry. Eventually, as the feed updates over time, this link will go away all by itself.

The techniques shown in this post can be applied to many other things. I  am using it to publish my recent twitter comments, and my recent blog posts, but I have used it in the past to show items in my Friendfeed feed, my Netflix feed, and updates from the Windows Live Taskforce.

Now, before someone points this out, I would like to say that the ability to do this is not limited to Bing nor to Spaces. This is one of the really nice things about feeds. You can so some really creative things with them. Some examples might be to add a feed to a friends blog on your Space instead of just a cross link. This allows your visitor to see what’s on your friend’s blog has posted without leaving your blog, and should they see something interesting, they can click it and go read it. Or you can try adding a FaceBook feed or one for digg stories. Some of you will laugh, but you can even add an RSS feed of your local weather. And we know, with the weather, there is always something to talk about.

Anyway, we used to have ready access to http://my.live.com where we could add all kinds of personal feeds. We can still add them there, but that’s a personal page and isn’t shared. So, if the feed is just something for you to track, you could also add it there. Unfortunately, that page has not been updated to the Wave 3 motif and, while still there, one could wonder for how long. I would like it if this page was updated and put back into the Windows Live fold. It has a lot of features I miss and that Windows Live needs. As it stands, if you don’t know about it, then you would never use it. There are no direct access links to it.

In closing I would like to mention that some people are not fond of feeds. But, I think, the primary issues they have with it are mostly that of being on the source end rather than the sink end of the feed. That is to say, they want to consume the feeds, but they don’t want to provide them. The idea is that with feeds you don’t actually need to go to the Space and see the work that was put into it.  But in this case, the module feed provides only a link and nothing more. Unfortunately, there isn’t even a description available as with most feeds. Clicking it will take you directly to the destination. And if that is your blog, then it’ll be your post. Another argument is that no one seems to know exactly how feeds affect your Space statistics. But feeds are not going away any time soon. And since they’re here we should use them and not turn them off. They provide a valuable service.

-Jeff