How to Manage a Manual Feed in Mercury

Some units have manual feeds in Mercury, which as the name should imply, have to be managed manually.  Below are the instructions for maintaining manual feeds:

  1. In Mercury, when looking at your group, Group feeds are listed in the middle of the page, under the Group Content section and above the Group media section.  Select the feed name ("Front Page News") to view it, and then select the Edit tab.

  2. To remove a story from the feed, just select the round 'X' icon to the right of the story in the right-hand Your chose feed items list.

  3. To add a new story, you'll need to find it in the left-hand Available items list and either select the round '+' icon to the right of the story, or drag it over to the Your chosen feed items section.

  4. If you just added the story to Mercury, it should be easy to find in the Available items list.  However, that list by default shows the twenty most recent items from all of Mercury, so if the story you need was added a few hours or especially days ago, it may not be in the list. In this case, you'll need to add a Group filter

    1. Look above the Available items list and select the "-- Add a filter --" dropdown

    2. From the list of filters, select "Group".

    3. In the new Item belongs to the following group(s)... list, select your group's name (or other group, if you want to borrow a story from someone else)

    4. Select APPLY FILTERS.  You should now see just items from the selected group(s), and be able to locate the story you want to add to the feed.

  5. Don't forget to scroll to the bottom of the page and select "SAVE"!  Just moving things into or out of the right-hand list doesn't change anything until you've saved those changes. (This is easy to forget since "SAVE" is way down below the area where you're moving stories around.

  6. One note: Because of the way the news integration system for our websites works, ordering of stories in the Mercury manual feed doesn't matter. The website will always show the six most recent stories in reverse chronological order. Thus, it's a good idea to remove old stories as you add new ones and always keep just six in the manual feed. That way, you don't have any confusion about what's going to show on the website.