[Web4lib] Including RSSon a webpage

[Jonathan Rochkind]

An RSS feed is an XML file in the RSS format.

There's nothing stopping you from writing such a file by hand in the 
editor of your choice, and then hosting it on your web site, and then 
linking to it.  There are certain methods of referencing the RSS file in 
your web page that allow RSS readers to 'auto-discover' it, you would 
want to look into those.  If you did it this way, you'd have to edit the 
RSS by hand every time you wanted to add a new item.  You would probably 
want to make sure and check the RSS you are writing by hand for validity 
before deploying it, because it's easy to accidentally include a typo or 
error.

Of course, this would be a pain to do. Hardly anyone does things this 
way, because it's rather inconvenient. So most people use software to 
automatically generate RSS from some list of something.  But if you 
don't want to use javascript, and you don't want to use PHP or some 
other scripting language hosted locally, then I'm confused about what 
you DO want to do.  I suppose there might exist an application that 
let's you edit RSS files offline on your desktop computer and then 
upload them---like the solution in the first paragraph, but you aren't 
using a text editor, you are using something meant for creating RSS.  
But it doesn't sound like that's what you want either.

What do you want?  What are you trying to do?  The first step is 
identifying what you are actually trying to do.

Jonathan

Mark Costa wrote:
> All,
>
> Has anyone found open code that allows you to include RSS feeds on a web
> page? I cannot use PHP, ASP, etc, nor can I use externally hosted
> javascript.
>
> Am I stuck trying to code something like that myself?
>
> Thanks,
>
> mc
>

-- 
Jonathan Rochkind
Sr. Programmer/Analyst
The Sheridan Libraries
Johns Hopkins University
410.516.8886 
rochkind (at) jhu.edu