Was asked the other day by a librarian if it was possible to pull an RSS newsfeed in from some other site for a web page she was working on. I said, sure, we run a package on one of our servers that can do it for you (MagpieRSS). Of course, the limtation is that her page needed to be on the server running the MagpieRSS software.
Then on Friday I had a really informative discussion with Jim Robertson (of New Jersey Institute of Technology), talking about some really interesting things he’s doing with his Voyager OPAC. Just to digress a moment, one neat feature he’s implemented is a real-time check on the circulation activity for a particular title in the OPAC.
Anyway, while we were talking he told me about Feed2JS that’s run by Alan Levine out at Maricopa Community College. Feed2JS runs a service which takes an URL to an RSS feed and sends back a stream of Javascript that enables the user to incorporate the RSS content into their web page.
Alan makes his Feed2JS service freely available on a server at Maricopa but he also distributes the source code under a GNU General Public License. He asks that if you install the service on a local machine, you advertise availability (to help share the workload).
I’ve installed a Feed2JS service on timesync…and spent a bit of time this morning reworking the Library Systems Office webpage to demo a couple of feeds (retiring my “native” magpierss in the process). With the great support on the Feed2JS home page for things like CSS stylings for feeds, it’s a much richer service than my earlier MagpieRSS software performed.
Incidentally, Feed2JS requires PHP on the server and includes a copy of MagpieRSS in the install package. Installation is pretty trivial.
On timesync, it’s running at:
http://timesync.gmu.edu/feed/feed2js.php
To understand how you incorporate this service into your webpage, start on the “Build A Feed” page. When your finished, just substitute timesync.gmu.edu for the marciopa server’s name…the rest of the URL remains the same.