See important notice about this Feed2JS site
So What is "Feed to JavaScript"?
An RSS Feed is a dynamically generated summary (in XML format) of information or news published on other web sites- so when the published RSS changes, your web site will be automatically changed too.
It is a rather simple technology that allows you, the humble web page designer, to have this content displayed in your own web page, without having to know a lick about XML!
Think of it as a box you define on your web page that is able to update itself, whenever the source of the information changes, your web page does too, without you having to do a single thing to it. Check out some of the examples where ordinary people are already using this.
This Feed2JS web site provides you a free service that can do all the hard work for you-- in 3 easy steps:
- Find the RSS source, the web address for the feed.
- Use our simple tool to build the JavaScript command that will display it
- Optionally style it up to look pretty.
You are welcome to run your feeds via our server here, but note wqe have now an expanding list of mirror Feed2JS server sites.
Please keep in mind that feeds are cached on our site for 60 minutes, so if you add content to your RSS feed, the updates will take at least an hour to appear in any other web site using Feed2JS to display that feed.
Run Your Own Version
This service runs from a reliable web server at the Maricopa Community Colleges that has been at it since April of 2003. If you host your own web site and can download, configure, and install a few PHP files, then you are welcome to set up your own instance of Feed2JS. Check out the details...
Sites running their own version shoudl see our helpful hints as well as a collection of modifications others have done to enhance their own Feed2JS service.
Become a Feed2JS Mirror!
People are pounding our little old server pretty hard... as of April 2005, we are looking for other sites willing to become public Feed2JS mirror sites. We install a copy of the entire Feed2JS site, and you become a public host listed on the mirrors page.
You do not need to be a mirror site to run your own Feed2JS- the standard download gives you everything you need, and you can wrap the functionality as needed into your own web site. A mirror is a more complete clone of this original Feed2JS site.
Why Are You Doing This?
A very good question! We developed this as an experiment, largely for our own use. RSS was just starting to get popular in 2003, and it seemed like people could use an easier method for incorporating RSS into their own web sites. See our footer for the legal verbiage as far as the open source license for this software.
Latest Changes and History
Latest version: 1.7 as of 30.May.2006
Stay up to date with Feed2JS changes-- now available as an RSS 2.0 feed.
- July 13, 2006 :
Feed2JS Has Left the Building
For what its worth, since I no longer work at Maricopa and soon likely cannot even access this server, I have moved the primary Feed2JS site to its own domain, thanks to some hosting offered for free by Modevia Web Services. You can find this very same site, and source code now at http://feed2js.org/. What does this mean for current users? I thought of automatically redirecting the script, but what the heck, this is a mirror that new serves 10000+ feeds per day. So if this site works fine, leave your code as is, but if it were me, I'd swap out each http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/feed/ for the new url http://feed2js.org/ in your pasted feed strings, or go to the new site and build your feeds all over again.
Sometime later this year, the ode will appear on an open source forge site, and work begins on a whole new architecture that will smell liek squeaky clean AJAX. Feed and Conquer!
posted by alan at 11:32 PM | Link | Comments (0) - May 30, 2006 :
Download Support for Podcast Enclosure
We've yet to hear any reports of problems using the May 7 update that allows support for RSS 2.0 media enclosures, so we've rolled the code into the current downloads (mirrors have yet to be updated, this will be done by end of the week). All style sheets available from this site contain basic styles for formatting the buttons to link to the media files; some crude instructions are provided from that same link.
Users are left to their own resources to augment their style sheets to format the links. All media links open in a new browser window, and rely on suer settings to deal with .mp3, .m4a files.
Until I have some more time later in June, no new mirror sites can be set up-- the future scenario will make registering a mirror site a self-service operation.
posted by alan at 10:38 PM | Link | Comments (3) - May 7, 2006 :
Beta For RSS Enclosures
I have a preliminary version of Feed2JS running on this server only that is aiming to support access to RSS enclosure media for podcast feeds. I hope I can get a few testers to try it out before it gets rolled into the download versions. There is a new option on the Feed Builder form to indicate whether enclosure media should be displayed (default is "no" just so we do not present any surprises to current users). If you have a current Feed2JS code embedded into your page, you can activate this merely by adding&pc=yto your JavaScript string, or rebuild the feed completely with our new form.
As is, this new feature will display a "Play MP3" or "Plat M4A" link for every enclosure found which will appear before the item description. Links go to the media (in a new window). It is set up for output with a new CSS class (div="pod-play-box") and some classes for the links so they can be nicely formatted. Currently only the basic1.css style (used on the preview pages) has these classes.
If the functionality tests okay, it can be distributed into all code in a week or two.
posted by alan at 06:32 PM | Link | Comments (2) - see the full the story...
