Feeds in Mercury

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What is a Feed?

A feed is a list of content items from Mercury. Feeds let you organize any content from Mercury — your own and others' — and then display it on other web sites. The two most common types of content you will find in feeds are events and news.

Manual versus Automated Feeds

Content can be organized into two types of feeds in Mercury:

  • As an arbitrary Manual Feed, where you have complete control but must make every change yourself
  • Via a selection of rules in an Automated Feed that you set up once and don't have to touch again (unless you want to adjust those rules)

Examples of Automated Feed Usage

Commonly, people use relative dates, limit them to just one type of content (such as events only), and then connect these to hg_reader blocks and pages on their web site.

However, you can also use these to find related content, without connecting the feed to a website (thanks to Kathleen Moore for this idea!). For example, you could make an automated feed that helps you curate content you might add to a manual feed. It could search by keywords, or show content from other people's groups.

Examples of Manual Feed Usage

Commonly, people use this to control which news stories or events show up on the homepage of their website.

The only drawback to a manual feed is that nothing is added or removed from them, without someone's intervention.

Feed Readers

Readers allow your web site to pull in the feeds you create and display them on your site. Georgia Tech's Institute Communications offers a Drupal module, HG Reader, for getting this set up.

Feed Item Limits

As of the September/October 2017 Mercury refresh, all feeds can now contain a maximum of 200 items.

  • For an automated feed, any items beyond 200 items will not be displayed.  
  • For a manual feed, any new items beyond 200 will not be added.

Mercury Feeds Sub-Topics