In eLink 2008, and after, we now have a facility to generate RSS feeds from any data held in eLink. For example you can monitor your Link Notifications by RSS rather than by email, or you could have a feed publishing relevant entries from your Agenda (i.e. list all diary entries where the action mode = publish) such as seminars and exhibitions. These feeds can either be subscribed to in your feed reader of choice (e.g. google reader, feed demon, etc) or pushed out to a service such as google’s feedburner and made publicly subscribable, and you can then add a widget to your website to display the feed results.
The key stages to set up an eLink RSS feed are:
1) Create an eLink query to report the data you want.
2a) Subscribe to the feed in your feed reader;
2b) Add the feed to a feed burner and use it in other places.
I’m going to walk through an example for you now. I’m going to set up a feed that lists new eLink clients when they are added to my eLink database. I’m going to test it by subscribing to it in my feed reader (I use feeddemon). I’m then going to add it as a feed to my feedburner account. This gives me a more userfriendly (without giving away my username and password to all and sundry) way to let other people subscribe to my feed, and the ability to add a widget to a website (or even an email signature) easily.
Creating an eLink query:
Importantly, these 4 fields are required in this order to be used for RSS.
Date (needs to be a date field)
Title or subject (could be any limited length string)
Resume (the memo field or text to be displayed)
A key (recommend you use the built in eLink key fields)
And all other fields you need, to do your request or querying, after those required fields.
Here I’m using the Company area of eLink and selecting the Created On date (when the record was added to the database), the company’s name, their website address as the Resume (as I’m pretty sure most of these have this data in) and the company ID Key to identify the record. I then select two custom fields that have been added to my database in order to limit the list to just the records I want.
Then I select only those companies where they are a customer and they are a customer for eLink:
Then give the query a name and TICK ‘View this query in RSS’ and save the query.
Subscribing to the RSS feed:
Now, in the query list, we can see the orange RSS icon next to our query.
Click on the RSS icon to open the RSS feed. This shows the neat data that gets produced. The key bit we need here is to copy the highlighted url ready to paste it as our feed url.
Now open your feed reader, in this case FeedDemon and click the Subscribe button:
and paste the url into the box and click Next:
Then enter your eLink username/login code and password, and click OK.
Give your feed a title and click Next and then Finish:
Then your new RSS Feed should show up in your reader (give it a few seconds to go and get the feed results), like thus:
Adding your feed to FeedBurner:
Search for FeedBurner on google and add an account for yourself. Then from the My Feeds page, paste the RSS feed url (we took earlier from the icon next to the query in the query list) into the ‘Burn a feed right this instant’ box. We then need to edit this feed url (as it is password protected by eLink).
The url you’ve pasted will look something like this:
and we need to add your username and password to the beginning of the url, like this:
so we’ve inserted this ‘username:password@’ to enable the feed to be read by feedburner.
Then edit the feed title and address to something customer/user friendly and click Next:
Now Feedburner gives you your feed url, and this you can share with anyone you want, internally, externally, in your own feedreader, on your website:
Feeddemon then gives you some easy tools for adding your feed results to various popular blogging and social media sites:
Many sites even have built in RSS widgets available to use.
