An ever-changing view of the most innovative news sites on the Internet.

FAQ

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Scripting News

Frequently Asked Questions

What is My.UserLand.Com?

It's the fastest news page on the Internet! Every hour the home page of My.UserLand.Com is updated with news from hundreds of news sites and weblogs.

It's customizable. You can choose to exclude channels that cover topics that don't interest you.

How does My.UserLand.Com work?

There's a new standard format for dynamic news sites, it's called RSS, it's the result of a collaboration between UserLand and Netscape. This format is being adopted by the industry at a very rapid rate.

Every hour on the hour our server reads each of the registered RSS files and compares it against the previous version. If a new story appears, or an existing story changes, we add it to the list of stories for the hour.

The software is running on two machines. The two machines, one a page renderer and the other a crawler, communicate via XML. Our software runs in Frontier.

Is this legal?

Yes. By publishing an RSS version of a site you are saying that you want your links to be included in My.UserLand.Com, and our sister site, My.Netscape.Com. The sites benefit by having their links viewed by more users, and thereby get more views for the advertisements on their pages.

Which online publishers are compatible?

Examples include The Motley Fool, Robot Wisdom, Internet Alchemy, MacWEEK, ZDNet, Webmonkey, Mozilla.Org and XML.COM. The Channels page lists all the available channels.

Is My.UserLand.Com compatible with My.Netscape.Com?

Yes. Because we use the same XML format as My.Netscape.Com, all channels created for this server will also work with theirs. This is a very powerful compatibility, because Netscape offers a broad reach to millions of web users, and our service brings together a community of web developers working on new syndication and aggregation technologies.

Do I have to become a member?

We don't require that you sign up as a member in order to use this site, but if you do, we will save a list of channels that you have excluded, saving you time when you read the My.UserLand.Com home page.

You must also be a member in order to register a channel. This allows us to contact you if there's a problem with the channel.

How do I exclude a channel?

Jump to the My.UserLand.Com home page.

Find a story from a channel you want to exclude.

Click on the name of the channel in the Source column.

Scroll down to find a called "Exclude Channel".

Click it.

Jump to the home page and refresh if necessary.

The stories from the channel are gone.

What is your privacy policy?

Your choice of channels is private information shared between you and UserLand.Com. We may use the information to develop profile information about our users, but we will not provide your information to others without your permission.

Our channel list is public, so if you register a channel, other people will know where it is. You may not register channels that contain private or proprietary information.

I have a news site, how do I register?

First, study the RSS spec, and produce a file according to their specification and store it on a publicly accessible web server.

Then visit the Register page on this site, and enter the URL for the file into the form, and click on Submit. Our server will read the file, and compile the XML text into our database, and show you what it came up with. You can register a file as many times as you want until it looks the way you want it to.

Then the sysop of this site will review your submission and approve it if it's reasonable. We don't want this service to be used for tasteless commercialism or to foster clearly illegal behavior. We can take your channel off our server at any time for any reason, so play nice!

I am a web developer. How can I participate?

For web developers, My.UserLand.Com is also the hub of a network of sites producing news that can be included in your web site, or it can provide the source of links for a search engine, or you can build services off the story flow. We want the links to go out in as many ways as possible, and the opportunities are only limited by your imagination. Check out the Backend site for a list of features available to web developers.

Is My.UserLand.Com open?

Yes. We publish lots of information dynamically, and we're adding new interfaces all the time. The documentation for these interfaces is on the Backend site.