RSS feeds are neat, if you can use them. I have had desktop RSS aggregators before and loved them. It was especially useful during hurricane season since I would get regular updates as soon as NOAA published them.
The problem though that I had was finding a way to keep the feeds on the net and put them on a webpage. I am sure they were right under my nose and I didn’t see them. Geeks and nerds speak in code because they write so much code and forget there are others that don’t speak their language. We writers do the same thing, flying words around like genre, submission (and not giggle), and various ways to dispose of bodies, how to design a planet with three suns, and how to get our characters to behave.
Anyway, I was surfing again, still, whatever, and came across a headline on my Dashboard about a listing of Del.icio.us tools. Clicking on a link there led me to Quick Online Tips site. That led me to Jeffrey Veen’s page on how to integrate a feed onto your site. Yay! This was what I wanted!!
His suggestion was to go to RSS Digest, enter in the URL of the feed, and the program would generate the code you needed to display the feed wherever you put that code. Wow.
Okay. So I tried it on my Del.icio.us collection which aren’t RSS feeds themselves, but my listing is. So its like each of my entries is a different news story or weather alert. Went through the thing (two steps with mini-steps in between) and there it was. Not only did I get the code, but it came in HTML and as a javascript and with instructions on how to modify the way it looks.
Veen’s instructions were more for putting it on a webpage instead of on a blog. I took the code and put it in the left hand column, the lowest thing on that ladder. Hit ‘update’ then refreshed the main page. There it was! That’s how freakin’ easy it was! The only modification I made from the default was to make the time at 360 rather than 90. Way cool. I realized though that it was going to be all jumbled up in such a narrow space so I now have it all in its own page.
Peter from RSS Digest here. Thanks for the kind words! Also make sure to drop by our forum if you have any questions, comments, etc, or wish to see the latest news.