If you are using 4.5.0 then this is how you set up a newsfeed from an outside RSS feed:
1. Setup a category or more for your newsfeeds from the Components->Newsfeeds->Manage Categories menu entry and then hitting the 'New' button. These are just categories you might want like 'World News', 'Sports' etc. There may already be categories there if you installed the demo data.
2. Make sure the category is published from the category list screen.
3. Add the RSS feed via Components->Newsfeeds->Manage News Feeds menu entry and then hitting the new 'New' button. You will need to select a category (previously made) and type in a name. Next you will need the http:// link to the rss xml file itself like this one from the BBC world news service:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline...rld/rss091.xml
and enter the url into the 'Link' field. I dont know what the 'File' field is used for and have not needed it to get newsfeeds working.
Enter the number of articles you want to display from that feed like 5 or 10 or whatever you want.
Enter the cache time which I think is how often you want to re-fetch the rss feed. 1800 seconds for 1/2 hour and 3600 for an hour etc etc.
4. Save and make sure the newsfeed is published from the newsfeed list screen.
5. Now go to the Modules->Manage Modules menu entry and find the 'Newsfeeds' module and make sure its published. You may also want to edit it to make sure it will appear in the right place on your template like 'left' hand-side or 'user1' which is normally the top part of the middle of the page etc.
6. Preview your site and see it in action. You may want to go back to change the positioning of it and also how many articles to display at once etc.
As for viewing the site while it is offline I'm not sure about that sorry. Hope the RSS stuff helps though
Chad.