Monday, January 31, 2005

RSS in a web page

RSS (Really Simply Syndication) is a great way to share info, but unless you're into parsing XML can be a pain to display on another web page. If you're got the ability to install scripts and hack around it's no big deal, but there are some places where you're just a user and can't do that - Blogger for instance !

RSS Digest solves the problem very neatly... tell it the URL of the RSS feed you want to poll, how long you want to cache it for (very important if you want to be considerate about load on the supplying server) and then you get some formatting options (display style, list items, which fields in the RSS feed to use, how many items etc)... then the site presents you with a JavaScript fragment you can include in just about any page (without needing any clever server-side scripting, even if you have access to it) and your feed is delivered - cached and beautiful !

I use RSS Digest here to display the del.icio.us and AudioScrobbler feeds on the right hand side, and have also used it to great effect on a couple of client sites.

It's everything a good solution should be - simple, slick and reliable.

I'd like to be able to create a single account and manage all my feeds from the one place (like I can do with No-IP.com) but it's not really a big issue.

No comments: