How to Add a News Ticker to a Web Site

Video Transcript

"Did you know the first news ticker was used in nineteen fifty one? Hi I'm Dan Afonso of Enfold IT and Afonso Consulting. And this is how to add a news ticker to your website. Now a news ticker can be used for a lot of reasons and the easiest to which is just to display some news from another source and that's what we are going to be doing here today. Now finding the right news ticker for you is a bit of a challenge. Depends on how your data is coming in and you know what format you have it in, where it's coming from. For this example I'm going to use data coming in off an RSS feed from CNN. Popular website. In this case I've found a dynamic drive dhtml news ticker to be the easiest to install and comes preloaded with a lot of this already, plus it looks pretty good. So to start off with I'm going to set up my webpage. So dynamic drive, over here we can go grab the rss ticker which looks a lot like this. So we are going to go to the downloads link and grab a copy of it. I've already downloaded my copy, uploaded it to the server after uncompressing. So what we have here is the ticker java script file and the directory underneath it. Now what we want to do is edit, is edit our home page to include the stuff we need for the files. So I'm going to take a look at the file first. And as you can see there's really nothing to this file so I'm going to add what I need to add in order to get it to work. First off we are going to have to edit the file in order to include the ticker elements in it. Now you are going to have to do this however way you plan on doing this. In my case I'm shelling in to the box. You may have to edit the file in your machine then ftp it up. So first we'll edit the head elements. We go over here, we are going to add them and then I'm going to grab the elements I need which is just a script resource. Alright. Now we are going to need to add a cascading style sheet so that it displays properly. That also goes in the head. Don't worry about finding this, this is all included in the documentation for whatever ticker you want. Now we want to put this in our body. Now one of the things I want to do is I just want to put it under the hi there, so I am going to pop it in as a dib so it has it's own place. Now this is just copy and paste it out of the manual so you can use whatever you want. And when I save this we can now open up our website and take a look that we now have a news ticker. And once it actually grabs the data from CNN it will start displaying it. I'm Dan Afonso and this is how you install a website news ticker."