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On the nice-to-have list For workgroups, it would be nice to be able to link to a local file on a shared drive. Best if you could browse to find the file. Biggest advantage may be for publishers Here's what I think is the neat thing about using something like feed2js, which takes an RSS feed and makes a Javascript include out of it. It's a win-win for big and little websites. At first you think "what a great thing for the little guy -- webmasters or bloggers who want some news headlines to keep the site up to date with no ongoing effort on their part," and that's how Alan bills it on the Maricopa site, where the Arizona community college collective generously runs a free service to process the feeds. This has been operational for a couple of years or more now. So it's nice for small sites to be able get current content. It may be even nicer for publishers. Lots of news organizations are providing RSS feeds now, but not that many have made any kind of marketing push to bloggers and webmasters, encouraging them to use the feeds on their sites to drive traffic from inbound links. The outreach has all been to end-users. To offer the service to small sites, the provider needs to have an easy method, and a Javascript include is a great way. Works pretty well for AdSense! So you use something like feed2js to generate and process the feed. (Don't be greedy; install feed2js on your own site.) Then make a marketing page to tell non-technical webmasters and bloggers how to paste in the Javascript. Output the HTML using ISO character entities so the brackets will show up and not disappear. Like this. Uh-oh, looks like somebody needs to update that page (not me anymore). They need to put the background color back in the sidebar include, too. New Orleans Times-Picayune feed Looking at different display options for feed2js. Watch it crap out completely later today, the last day of the month as I'm gambling I don't go over my bandwidth limit for the domain through which the feeds are served. I have it on a reseller hosting account so I could adjust it, but it always ends up taking me several tries to get the ratio right between domains so that they all stay within the overall bandwidth limit. So I'll let it ride and hope for the best. That kind of thinking is what got people in trouble when they decided not to evacuate New Orleans. "I'm invincible" or "I'll get lucky" thinking. Right.
National Hurricane Center feed Red Cross disaster feed Dave gave a link to the Red Cross RSS feeds. I'll try outputting the disaster news feed with Alan Levine's handy dandy feed2js contraption. You want the news but it makes you feel so helpless, doesn't it? My sis-in-law went to haul sandbags when the levee at St. Louis broke several years ago. She said it made her feel more useful than giving money. But this is way beyond sandbags. New passage with guest star I made passage #66 in my literature game podcast. Hil does the reading this time. Very pretty voice she's got on her. Listen. She comes in at around 1:55. |
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