MyHeadlines User Guide

MyHeadlines By Mike Agar - http://www.jmagar.com

User Guide By Hilary E. House Jr. - http://mystery.words.com/

Table of Contents. 1

Getting Started. 2

Adding A New Stock Symbol 2

Removing a Stock. 3

Stock Indicators & Other Items of Interest. 4

Adding Headlines (Subscribing) 4

Edit Subscriptions (Move & Delete) 9

Other Options. 11

Search. 11

Getting Started

MyHeadlines is a Content Syndication Engine with advanced search capabilities. This module allows each user to subscribe to as many news sources as they want from a large database of sources. MyHeadlines consolidates and caches the selected news items and offers one stop shopping for all the news you could ever want.

The power of this service becomes obvious only through its use. The purpose of this guide is to make it easy to set up your MyHeadlines Page and to begin to enjoy the personalized information. If you like you can use this as a tutorial and follow along to configure your own MyHeadlines page.

Click on “MyHeadlines” displayed in the Main Menu of most sites with this feature. It might also be displayed in other prominent places, but look on the main menu first. It should bring up a screen similar to this:

Adding A New Stock Symbol

You will find this on the right side of your MyHeadlines screen.

Clicking on the underlined words will bring up this screen:

As an example, we entered AT&T in the Company Name and T for the stock symbol for AT&T.

If you do not know the symbol for a stock or index, click on the “Help” option in the upper right hand corner of this screen. It has suggested popular stocks and market indicators and a link to look up stock symbols for your personal ticker.

Now click on submit. The entry is made and the screen is cleared and ready for another Company and Stock Symbol to be entered if desired.

When you have completed your entries click on the “Done” button. In our example your screen should look something like this:

Lets look more closely:

Clicking on the Underlined Name of the Company (in our case AT&T) will pop open a new window and take you to a Yahoo Finance screen with detailed information about the stock and all recent headlines concerning the company. That screen shot is not included in this documentation.

Removing a Stock

To demonstrate, we have added a second stock to our display. That stock is Qwest. The symbol for Qwest is Q if you want to add it so that you may follow along on a live site.

Now we want to remove it. We start out looking like this.

There are several ways to accomplish the removal of a stock quote. I believe this is the easiest. Click on the Subscribe option in the left hand menu and get this screen. Notice the Subscribe link on the left menu has opened up.

Now, click on Edit Subscriptions.. You should then have this screen. Clicking on Edit Subscriptions displays, in the center, all news feeds and stock quotes to which you are subscribed. See the Screen Below

Notice it lists the currently active stock quotes and provides a delete option following each one.

Lets click the [ Delete ] beside the listing for Qwest.

When the screen updates it looks like this. Qwest is gone and only AT&T remains.

When you have completed deleting stocks, you click on the Done button and it returns you to the main MyHeadlines screen.

Stock Indicators & Other Items of Interest.

The Add a new Stock Symbol is there for adding more stocks as desired.

If you went to the Help option in the Add a new Stock Symbol section and got the symbols for the DOW, NASDAQ, etc and then added these items to Stock Quotes, you would have the following

Except for the Canadian Dollar, it was a down day.

Adding Headlines (Subscribing)

Go to your MyHeadlines page.

Here is a closer look at the menu on the left side of the page.

Click on the Subscribe entry.

The menu opens up and presents something like the picture that follows. The list of categories to the right of the menu may be longer or shorter depending on how the Admin has set it up and whether the site is commercial or not. (some news listings are restricted from use on commercial sites).

We click on Science & Technology and get the following:

Then, because we are interested in space news we click on Space (14). The 14 tells us how many entries are in that folder.

Now we get something like the following:

And finally we select NASA Daily News. Then we get the following:

This shows the headline list from the source we have just selected. Now we have to decide where on our MyHeadlines page this source will be placed.

We have six choices as shown in the picture above. We will choose Top Left and then click on subscribe. Be sure to complete the location selection as you add more sources, so MyHeadlines will know where to place it. If you have errors after subscribing to a news topic, it is likely that you placed a category on top of another category. Then you would have to use the Edit Subscriptions option and move one of the two to another location. This function is covered in the next section of the guide

Now we will choose another news feed to add so you can see how it works.

Let’s pick Recreation. And then in Recreation let’s choose Humor. Your screens should look something like the following ones.

We choose SatireWire and get the following screen. Note: In choosing where to place your choice, the center column is wider and if the source supplies a description of the headline it will also be shown in the center column. The Left and Right columns only contain the headlines, and descriptions are normally hidden from view.

We choose a location for the headlines (making sure it is NOT Top Left because we already have headlines there. We choose Top Center and click on the Subscribe button.

Scroll to the bottom of your screen and find something like the above. Click on the Done button and you should return to the main MyHeadlines screen with your Subscriptions and Stock Quotes.

Congratulations. Just repeat this exercise with other categories to add to your page placing each category in an empty area (Top Right, Bottom Left, etc).

Edit Subscriptions (Move & Delete)

At the end of the previous exercise our MyHeadlines screen looked like this..

If you have been following along through the entire guide you have already used the Edit Subscriptions to remove a stock. Now we will use it to work on Headline Subscriptions. Click on the Subscribe option on the left menu.

and it opens up to give us this:

Now we click on the Edit Subscriptions option and get this:

This screen shows all of our subscriptions for both stock and headlines. It also shows where each headline has been placed within the MyHeadlines screen (Top Left, Top Center, etc.) We could remove any subscription of headlines or stock quotes by clicking on delete for the appropriate entry. But we are going to use the Move option to adjust our screen. We want to move the SatireWire Headlines to the Top Right location on our MyHeadlines Screen.

Find SatireWire. Notice it is under the Top Center Location. Click on Move. This brings SatireWire into the subscription mode and permits us to act on it.

As shown above we choose another location for the headlines (Top Right), and click on Subscribe. The result is shown below.

As with all MyHeadlines actions, we are not done until we click the Done Button, so we click the Done button.

We have moved SatireWire and now look like the following

You have mastered the most important parts of the MyHeadlines module and may now enjoy customized news and stock information along with all the other features of your favorite site. The next section will cover the use of the Search, Latest News, Top Ten, Suggest New Feed, and Documentation options on the main menu. You probably have mastered the Documentation option since you are reading this.

Other Options

Search

Search searches all of the cached headlines and descriptions in the MyHeadlines database.

Here is an example: Clicking on the Search option on the Menu gives the following screen.

We type in the word queen hoping, I guess, to get something about the Queen of England.

Clicking on the Search button brings back the headlines with the word “queen” in them. In our case, only one..

Clicking on this headline will take you to the story. Clicking on the words “SatireWire” will bring that all headlines from that source to the top screen as shown below.

In addition, a Base Category should be suggested for the New News Feed. Clicking the dialog arrow on Category opens up a list of possible categories and sub-categories.

Trouble Shooting Tips

No Headlines show up for a Source: Not all news feed sites are up all the time. It is a fact of life that internet sites come and go. There are built in mechanisms to detect sources that have gone “bad” and old feeds that are no longer valid will over time be filtered out.
Stock info is missing or funny looking: Double check the Stock or Index Symbol. Sometimes there is an up-carat ^ in front of a symbol. If it is missing the quote won’t work.