Reply To: My own news feed

[Beverleyh]

You may be able to jigsaw something together using Fast Feed and some free online services.

Here’s Fast Feed http://fast-apps.co.uk/fast_feed.php
Think of it like an admin panel where you add/edit/save news entries, and the output will be either an RSS (xml) feed file, or customisable HTML. Installing this would be the first step. Once that’s setup and working on your server, you can integrate the news content back in to your “latest news” web page. You can do this in two ways;

1. From news entry text files: Fast Feed stores news entries in individual text files on the server. There’s an example of a basic HTML output file included in the installation pack (also in the installation instructions) which collates all the news entry text files into HTML.

2. From the RSS feed file: Alternatively, here’s how to turn the generated Fast Feed XML file into HTML output for a web page http://blog.fofwebdesign.co.uk/26-display-excerpts-from-an-rss-feed-with-pagination

The last thing to deal with is the subscriber email thing. I haven’t personally looked in to this but a quick Google search brings up Mail Chimp, which offers an “RSS to Email” feature https://mailchimp.com/features/rss-to-email/
I don’t know if they offer a form where you can direct your readers to subscribe, or if you have to compile a subscriber email list yourself though. As a minimum, you could just provide a link to the RSS/XML file and let your users deal with it however they like (there are free online services where you can plum in your own selection of RSS feeds and get email updates that way).

Another option could be to use another type of online service that pushes your RSS updates automatically to Facebook, Twitter, and other social media channels. You could just invite your visitors to subscribe to your Twitter or Facebook and your latest new updates would automatically be posted there. One example of this kind of service is dlvr.it, but there are others listed at the bottom of the Fast Feed web page (first link).