Recently Mike Love set up a very nice new feature for creating signals from RSS feeds. I've found it immensely useful in creating new signals-- I can do 10 an hour, where previously I was lucky to do 10 a day. Below are instructions about how to set up your own feeds.

SETTING UP YOUR FEED

This is pretty straightforward. Find a source you think is worth drawing on-- an interesting blogger, a scientific journal or society, etc. Look for an RSS feed icon on the site, or a URL (these often end in .xml). Copy that URL.

Now go to http://sciencex2.org/en/node/add/feed. This is the page that will let you create a new feed. Fill in the title of your feed, as many tags as you think will be useful, a brief description, and paste in the URL . You can also set the feed to discard unread items after a certain date, and to update the feed at certain times, but you probably don't need to mess with these.

When you're done, scroll down to the bottom of the page and hit "Submit." You'll then be taken to a new page (URL of http://sciencex2.org/en/node/XXXX) with the title of your new feed.

GETTING THE SIGNALS

This page will show the tags that will show up on signals made from this feed, expiration and refresh information, and at the bottom of the page, three links to

Add new comment View feed items Refresh this feed

Before you can get to work, you still need to fill your brand-new feed with content. Click on "Refresh this feed."

Drupal will then go out and grab a bunch of posts, and load them up for you. It'll also tell you how many points you've earned by creating the signals.

When you're ready to look at the signals, click on "View feed items," and you'll be taken to a new page (http://sciencex2.org/en/feeds/XXXX).

EDITING YOUR SIGNALS

This page will have a list of the signals that were just created, along with a little extract from the RSS feed.

If you do nothing, all these signals will disappear in a week (and you'll lose the points you just made). So when you find a signal that you want to preserve, you need to edit it. Underneath the signal, you'll see a line of commands--

Add new comment Read more [name of feed] Source Edit Delete

if you click on "Edit" (I recommend opening the page in a new tab or window) you'll be taken to the editing page. I recommend opening both the signal itself, and the source document. An RSS feed often just includes the first couple lines of an article, so it's often helpful to do a quick scan of the source document and grab another paragraph or two. However, DO NOT COPY AND PASTE THE ENTIRE DOCUMENT. This is pretty straightforward copyright violation, and when we go public, we don't want to go to jail.

Also, have a look at the tags on your signal-- they're the same signals that your feed has. (To get geeky, this means that that your signal inherited this property from the feed.) Chances are, you could make the signal a LOT more useful by adding more targeted signals. About 80% of the time I've got to kill off the generic signals and add completely new ones. The more tags you put in, the better-- tags are a major way we find content when we create new forecasts.

ONE MORE IMPORTANT THING. When you're finished tweaking the content, you still have to change the "Discard item older than" setting to Never. Otherwise, your signal will be automatically erased later. Now click "Submit," and you're done. Congratulations! You've just added to the future of science!

If you got back and reload your feed page, you'll see that the signals whose expiration dates you've set to "Never" now have Expires: 0 sec. You can quickly run through the page and see if you've forgotten to change the expiration date on any of your edited signals.