[Web4lib] Including RSSon a webpage

[Mark Costa]

RefWorks has an option that generates an RSS feed from resources entered
into your personal database. What I would like to do is display the 5-10
most recent additions on our department's web page. In essence, it would be
a running bibliography, with the most recent, hand selected items displayed.

This is easy to accomplish if I had access to PHP, or probably even ASP. I
know it can be done with 3rd party web sites that will generate the
javascript and host it for you. Unfortunately, the externally hosted
javascript would not fly at my institution (Army War College). I am looking
for a solution that I can host on my internal site, so that if need be, the
information security officers could review the code for security issues.


On 12/12/06, Jonathan Rochkind <rochkind at jhu.edu> wrote:
>
> 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
>
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>



-- 
Mark R. Costa, MLS

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man
persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress
depends on the unreasonable man."
--- George Bernard Shaw