[Pro] RSS feed help and advice

Freeway
1

Hi all,

I have had a request by a client to introduce an RSS feed to their website, but I don’t know anything about it.

I know Freeway has RSS actions, but where does the feed come from? My client will want to update the information themselves, with the feed containing information about their company and ongoing projects, so will that involve them signing up for a blog-like service to generate the feed which the Freeway RSS actions then link to?

Also, can I link into other RSS feeds which would be based around the sites subject matter?

Thanks in advance

Jonathan

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2

I haven’t used the current iteration of the RSS Feed Action, but I wrote one years ago called SimpleRSS. The way that one works is you create an HTML box on your Freeway page, populate it with a structured set of data:

Headline with link to the full story

Description to appear below the headline.

[repeat]

As long as you a) don’t style this text at all using inline styles, and b) always have equal pairs of a linked “headline” paragraph (line of text concluding in a full Return) followed by a description paragraph, then applying the Action to this donor HTML box will create a nice RSS feed for you and link it to the page with an auto-discovery link tag. You can either leave the HTML box visible in your page (and use external CSS styles to make its content look the way you want) or the Action will remove it from the page (so you could leave it on the pasteboard, and update it whenever you need to change your feed, independent from the visible content on your page. My understanding of the new RSS Feed Action is that it does some similar text-munging based on a page element.

So that’s one way to build this. Another is to use a blogging software of some stripe, and that has other benefits. For one thing, usually you can update the content of a blog using a browser from anywhere in the world. Unless your client is using a Mac and owns Freeway, the former technique will be a non-starter.

Once you have a feed established somewhere, it’s trivial to add the auto-discovery link to your pages: open the Page / HTML Markup dialog, choose a slot inside the HEAD (either After HEAD or Before /HEAD) and paste in the following:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Your Site Name" href="http://example.com/rss.xml">

If you do this on a Master Page, you will get the link everywhere in your site. Naturally update the link to point to YOUR feed file. If you’re using one of the Actions or a blog application to build this, you will get the same result.

Walter

On May 10, 2012, at 8:14 AM, Jonathan Riddle wrote:

Hi all,

I have had a request by a client to introduce an RSS feed to their website, but I don’t know anything about it.

I know Freeway has RSS actions, but where does the feed come from? My client will want to update the information themselves, with the feed containing information about their company and ongoing projects, so will that involve them signing up for a blog-like service to generate the feed which the Freeway RSS actions then link to?

Also, can I link into other RSS feeds which would be based around the sites subject matter?

Thanks in advance

Jonathan

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3

Thanks Walter. The main issue is that the client doesn’t have Freeway (fortunately) and is PC based and all the methods I had found were quite scary in that they relied on him formatting the xml feed files correctly using something like TextEdit.

However, I have found a nifty little application at http://www.feedforall.com/index.htm - a front end application which then generates compliant xml files, which I can get them to upload to the server via ftp and then hopefully point the Freeway actions to that file.

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4

Hi Jonathan
I have had the same request from a client who wants me to add a third party RSS feed. The creator of that has sent a set of instructions assuming that the site is created in PHP. Did you manage to make your solution work as above?

If you can offer any advice I would be grateful.

Thanks

Tim

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5

Your whole site wouldn’t have to be PHP - unless you wanted it on every page.

Or are you wishing to output the RSS feed rather than display it?

David

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6

Hi David

I think the client wants to display it. What has been sold to the client by the third party company is having his feed displaying in each of their monthly newsletters although when I have looked at the feed I think this will reduce the newsletter to the secondary item on the page. I don’t think they appreciate that and the page will become really busy.

I don’t have any experience of PHP and don’t have the budget to spend loads of time of this. I hoped to be able to incorporate it within Freeway and the existing layouts but not sure if this is possible.

Regards

Tim

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is having his feed displaying in each of their monthly newsletters

Your client creating a feed to display in 3rd parties newsletter?

Or do I have that a*** from elbow?

D

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8

If your client is trying to create a feed from their Web site, then they need to make a few choices. First, do they want you to update the news in Freeway and have that generate the RSS? If so, then there are a couple of Actions (one from Softpress, bundled since v6 of Freeway, and one from me, written in the year dot and probably not working as expected any more). If they want to be the ones to add new stories and have the list auto-generate in both HTML and RSS formats, then any of the various blogging applications can do that. That means Blogger or Perch or Pulse or (g*d help you) Wordpress.

Finally, there are ways to gin up an RSS feed using a Google Doc, I think, if you don’t want it to track the Web site exactly.

Walter

On Aug 6, 2014, at 4:39 PM, Tim Jackson wrote:

Hi David

I think the client wants to display it. What has been sold to the client by the third party company is having his feed displaying in each of their monthly newsletters although when I have looked at the feed I think this will reduce the newsletter to the secondary item on the page. I don’t think they appreciate that and the page will become really busy.

I don’t have any experience of PHP and don’t have the budget to spend loads of time of this. I hoped to be able to incorporate it within Freeway and the existing layouts but not sure if this is possible.

Regards

Tim

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