Wednesday, July 27, 2011

A Great RSS Feed Republisher Tool

Let's face it, most of us involved with web work these days are probably working within content management systems (CMS), a packaged product like Dreamweaver, or at the very least an IDE complete with a library of scripts.

These modern web building products afford the user all sorts of pre-configured modules and add-ons that can handle all sorts of content integration and aggregation.  Some of these built in tools work well, but often have limitations in terms of customization, especially when pulling in content and links from outside your website.

One really easy RSS Feed Publisher tool that I have used for a few years now is Feed2JS.

Feed2JS is just that, RSS Feed to Javascript that enables you to publish off site links, which is fully customizable.  Within the recently simplified site, is a field to paste a RSS url ( feed address) that you want to publish on your site and a few options for display.  Once you like the way your links and previews look you can copy and paste the snippet of js and paste it on your site where you want it displayed.

This tool works great for publishing RSS feeds on blogs, static websites, and websites that are running Drupal or Wordpress (create a block and paste the js script from Feed2JS right in, don't forget to turn on "Full HTML" on your block for Drupal users).

This open source software tool is totally customizable and is handy for any web application.

Kudos to Landmark-Project.com and creator Alan Levine for continually making this simple yet effective RSS publishing tool available to the web developer community.

Feed2JS can also be found at http://feed2js.org/, which I believe is the original website for the tool (correct me if I am wrong in the comments of this article.

*Information contained within these pages do not necessarily reflect the opinions or views of Schreiner University.

3 comments:

  1. I agree that tools like this are really handy! One problem I've had with free services like this is that sometimes they are unreliable or will slow down the page load of my web sites. Because of that a colleague and I decided to create a reliable service that blends multiple feeds and outputs javascript or PHP. We cache feeds, so that if one of the source sites is slow, it won't affect your page load time. We are almost ready for private beta. Sign up here to be notified when we're live: http://feedwelder.com.

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  2. Thanks for the comment Nicole. Let me know when your RSS Feed tool goes live and I will give it a shot and perhaps write a review on it. Feed2JS has been bulletproof for me for the last couple of years and it is open source (great for us poor librarians with limited budgets). Good luck with your product.

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  3. Thanks for the offer to review it! I'll put your name on the list to be notified.

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