I am a very lazy person and I dont miss chance to prove it again and again.I am subscribed to many feeds as well as keep my own blogs as well.There is a links section on my blog which i normally visit or wish to visit.But its very tiring job for me to visit each link one by one to check updates.Blogrolling provided feature to append some text with the link as intimation of updation in that particular blog/site.Itis very cool but how sure you are that its intresting for you too and its kinda frustration when you find nothing intresting on that blog.

So for sake of people like me ,I have developed a little application which I would name as Fetch da feed(FdF) for time being.What it does that it fetches the 5 top feed(RSS/ATOM) of that blog/site link,parse and show on your website in HTML format,if there is something intresting you visit,or view on your own site.No need to open RSS client or visiting blog.See the following screen shot of my other blog. For demo go to main page of my blog

As you,it fetched the latest feed from blog and displayed in window ,on top it shows blog title then last modified date then posts with title .This window popedup when i clicked icon associated with links on right pane.

I have tried my best to make it presentable for both IE and FireFox but it was not an easy task,specially XML parsing which i have discussed here

I have just targetted RSS2.0 and Atom(0.3/1.0),atom parsing was not so difficult but yes there were issues with different versions of RSS ,specially date tag,since the the script is BETA so bear with me.It would set be up for public use soon along with instructions as i did for AJAX based feedback form. By the way this application is also another ajax based script.Here are insrtuctions to insall on your site/blog.

1)Add the following code between

<script language=”javascript” src=”http://adnansiddiqi.com/api/feeds/feeds.js”></script>

<script language=”javascript” src=”http://adnansiddiqi.com/api/feeds/xmlhttp.js”></script>

<link href=”http://adnansiddiqi.com/api/feeds/feeds.css” rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css”>

2)Add following code within body tag

<!– DIV for RssFED Begins –>

<div id=”divFeeds” style=”position:absolute; width:297px; height:417px; z-index:1; left: 350px; top:581px; border-width:thin; border-style:solid; display:none; background-color:#FFFFFF;”></div>

<!– DIV for RssFED Ends –>

3) In order to invoke the popup window for any feed,call following javascript function:

<a href=”javascript:getFeed(’feedUrl’)”><br>

Click RSS</a>

example is given below:

<a href=”javascript:getFeed(’http://weblogs.com.pk/kadnan/rss.aspx’)” ><img src=”recent4.jpg” alt=”Check Recent Posts” width=”10″ height=”10″ border=”0″></a>

You can change div position which suits you better but nothing else like color,style content etc,this is something which is different than feedback form. Why is it like that?well no particular reason,its just I didn’t want to *shrug*.

There are few things which you should remember before installing it on your website.

1)Supports RSS2.0 and Atom only-I have tried my best to make it compatible with previous versions but there are many optional tags in both kind of feeds which i could not check alone.Apply it on your site,test it and let me know and I will make changes accordingly.

2)Tried my best to make it compatible with both IE and FF.There are few issues in XML parsing for FireFox so bear with it and if you know solution too then do mail me

3) It is Beta

Credits

Without help of these guys,it was not easy at all

1)Alex Serebryakov of ajaxextended -Cross domain AJAX library.

2)Martin Honnen of http://JavaScript.FAQTs.com/ -awesome function for getting innerText.

3)Vedanta Barooah-He helped to find out links to parse <dc:date> tag for FireFox browser.He himself has developed library to convert IMAP/POP mails to RSS .

Last but not least,use it and enjoy.It’s free and open source.Code will be up soon

Tagged:xml,ajax,Rss,feeds,javascript,web2.0,google,cross domain ajax,ajaxextended,
blogger,google blog

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 18th, 2006 at 12:09 pm and is filed under Everything . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.