RSS feeds. Howto...

I want to put an rss feed from the bbc news website to the right
column on my site. They allow, nay, encourage this.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/rss/3223484.stm

This page is great if you are using a dedicated reader, but there's no
text to cut n paste to allow a feed. Unlike this site...

http://www.hse.gov.uk/new/rss.htm

....where they provide all I need.

So, has anyone ever done this? I have emailed aunty beeb about it but
don't expect a reply before midweek. I've looked for sites that might
already do this sto look at thier code but my google mojo seems to be
on holiday. Lucky mojo, it's cold here.

FYI I can rss to specific search terms on the beeb, so I can get a
feed consisting of just the latest fire reports. Got to scare them
into wanting my services! :)

Re: RSS feeds. Howto...

Mike Barnard wrote:

> I want to put an rss feed from the bbc news website to the right
> column on my site. They allow, nay, encourage this.
> ... but there's no text to cut n paste to allow a feed.

Generally, you just pump the URL into a server side script that parses it
and generates the HTML.

I do it with a couple of different scripts on various sites. One uses a
combination of Perl's RSS modules and Template-Toolkit, another uses
Rawdog. I'm sure there are prewritten ones out there too.

> Unlike this site...
>
> http://www.hse.gov.uk/new/rss.htm
>
> ...where they provide all I need.

Except that "all you need" isn't RSS, it is JavaScript (with the usual
drawbacks of that approach). You can do that to most feeds using this
method: http://kentbrewster.com/badger/

--
David Dorward
http://dorward.me.uk/
http://blog.dorward.me.uk/

Re: RSS feeds. Howto...

On Sat, 05 Apr 2008 22:50:36 +0100, David Dorward
wrote:

>Mike Barnard wrote:
>
>> I want to put an rss feed from the bbc news website to the right
>> column on my site. They allow, nay, encourage this.
>> ... but there's no text to cut n paste to allow a feed.

>Generally, you just pump the URL into a server side script that parses it
>and generates the HTML.

Hi.

Thats fine when you know HOW to do that. I don't, yet.

>I do it with a couple of different scripts on various sites. One uses a
>combination of Perl's RSS modules and Template-Toolkit, another uses
>Rawdog. I'm sure there are prewritten ones out there too.

>> Unlike this site...
>>
>> http://www.hse.gov.uk/new/rss.htm
>>
>> ...where they provide all I need.

>Except that "all you need" isn't RSS, it is JavaScript (with the usual
>drawbacks of that approach). You can do that to most feeds using this
>method: http://kentbrewster.com/badger/

It's now gone 11pm so I'm going to bed but I will read that in depth
tomorrow. Thanks.

Re: RSS feeds. Howto...

On 5 Apr, 22:28, Mike Barnard
wrote:
> I want to put an rss feed from the bbc news website to the right
> column on my site. They allow, nay, encourage this.
>
> http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/rss/3223484.stm

I generally discourage this, for most sites.

If I want to read news, I'll go to the BBC and read it. More likely
I'll use my pocket-sized RSS reader to download and rad RSS directly.

It's likely that adding the BBC's RSS to your site makes your site
look snazzier. It's most unlikely that embedding it into another
website make the consumption use case of the BBC's newsfeed any
better.


For your site (which has a strong theme, and a theme that has some
relation to news), this might not be entirely the case. _If_ you
filter the feed, and _if_ you aggregated feeds from multiple sources,
then it's likely you could synthesise an overall feed that's unique to
your site and especially relevant to your site's context. A news-feed
of fire-related news stories, fire-related regulatory changes, and
fire-related editorial (which you blog yourself) could be a valuable
newsfeed in its own right.

To embed RSS onto web sites, you must do it server-side, or else you
do it badly. Cache the content (otherwise your site fails when other
sites fail), disambiguate duplicate items, filter irrelevant items,
aggregate related feeds. Then offer the results of this feed as a feed
yourself. Only then take your composite feed and use that to drive
your RSS -> HTML converter (a relatively easy taks with a few snippets
of XSLT). Build this as a layered architecture: RSS assembly from
inbound and internal sources, then format translation.

To make RSS of a website worth doing, then you must "add value" to it.
No-one cares about merely hosting another well-known feed like the
BBC's. "Value" can obviously be new content that you author, but the
assembly and filtering task is valuable too.

If you search these ng., there's a lot of past content about RSS
aggregation (I've posted enough of it myself).

Re: RSS feeds. Howto...

Gazing into my crystal ball I observed Mike Barnard
writing in
news:0utfv35pcr2mgbk7drj0e82c0kvjdfepv6@4ax.com:

> On Sat, 05 Apr 2008 22:50:36 +0100, David Dorward
> wrote:
>
>>Mike Barnard wrote:
>>
>>> I want to put an rss feed from the bbc news website to the right
>>> column on my site. They allow, nay, encourage this.
>>> ... but there's no text to cut n paste to allow a feed.
>
>>Generally, you just pump the URL into a server side script that parses
it
>>and generates the HTML.
>
> Hi.
>
> Thats fine when you know HOW to do that. I don't, yet.
>
>

First find out what you have available server side. There are plenty of
example scripts out there depending on what language is available.

--
Adrienne Boswell at Home
Arbpen Web Site Design Services
http://www.cavalcade-of-coding.info
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