Atom grabbing Widget

stuart · July 2005

I've just been looking through the apple dashboard developer site. I want to create a dashbaord widget which will grab the last 5,10,whatever posts from a specified forum and display in a widget. There are some out there which do this already, but they use RSS feeds and not Atom, so it's more than a simple case open changing the feed URL to the one of the forum. Anyone else fancying having a crack at this? edit: more info here - http://www.36-degrees.co.uk/vanilla2/comments.php?DiscussionID=75

3stripe · July 2005

Good luck mate! Would help if I could... make sure you have a look at the ole Konfabulator widgets as well to see if anyone has tried it for them...

nifkin · July 2005

There has to be something that will work with Atom feeds out there. Anything I've played with lately (magpieRSS, Bloglines, Google customizable homepage) has been able to take either format.

Alternately: You could make a variation of the file that generates the atom feed to make an RSS one instead.

Worst-case scenario: You could set up a FeedBurner account which will do auto-conversion for your feeds (Atom to RSS, RSS 2 to RSS 0.92, etc.), but they'll need to be publically accessible for their service to read them.

nifkin · July 2005

For shits and giggles I tried piecing together an RSS output feed. If anyone else wants to try this they're welcome to.

RSS Feed Generator source code.

Save that in your feeds directory and try using that. A few caveats:

1- it does not get added automatically to the head of the document so it can't be used automatically for a live-bookmark in firefox/mozilla.

2- it does not get added automatically to the list of feeds on the feeds page.

3- if you want to change the language on it, you'll need to do it by hand by editing the two-letter language code in the <language> tags (line 209).

stuart · July 2005

nice one nifkin, i'll have a look tomorrow and see if i can make a widget from it.

dfareed · July 2005

nice

ichigo · July 2005

arent threre already widgets that can read rss and atom files?

stuart · July 2005

yes, I intend (when I get chance - moving into my flat tomorrow!) to just take one and customize it with new graphics etc.

stuart · August 2005

ref: http://www.flickr.com/photos/36-degrees/32628526/in/photostream/ file: http://www.36-degrees.co.uk/assets/widget.zip Ok guys, got the time ttoday to have a look at doing this, and it reads the RSS feed perfectly, only problem is, once you click to read a thread, it says: A problem was encountered The requested discussion could not be found. actually, having just looked at my RSS feed in my aggregator, it does the same from there too, any ideas as to why? something to do with Sessions maybe?

Minisweeper

needs a mac. Anyone care to sign up to http://minimacgiveaway.co.uk/index.php?referral=143032 and then go onto screen select and open a free trial for a couple of weeks for me? Theres a tenner in it for anyone who can be bothered!

stuart · August 2005

s'ok, panic over - I had the path to vanilla wrong - spank me and call me a newb!

Minisweeper · August 2005

spanks stuart and calls him a noob. then thanks him for signing up. Did you go all the way through?

3stripe · August 2005

signed up. is this shit for real? doesn't seem to like FF much... aw, i have to sign up for a whole free trial.. funny i actually have got screenselect already, nice wee dvd service.. hmm

Minisweeper · August 2005

well it seems unrealistic but its part of the giveaway network and i'm sure they would have been shutdown by now otherwise, even the bbc and people have checked them out. Most people get put off by having to put their credit card details in but aslong as you cancel within 21 days you wont get charged anyway so who cares?

stuart · August 2005

Heres the first release of the widget, more info via the link: http://www.36-degrees.co.uk/vanilla2/comments.php?DiscussionID=75 mini - I didn't complete an offer yet, but I might do in a couple of days.

Mark · August 2005

Oh man - you guys are going to love feeds in the next rev.

stuart · August 2005

Thats what I like to hear, something to satisfy my syndicational needs.

Ghazi · August 2005

You keep teasing us, Mark :P I hope the you-know-what date is approaching...

lech · August 2005

approaching date?

Mark · August 2005

Well, I needed a break from documentation over the weekend, so I started making some big changes to the dev version. Lots of re-arranging going on, and a lot of changes that didn't show up on the wiki because they were just ideas of my own. I'll have to start building that changelog soon. Anyway, yeah, the feeds are going to be pretty neat - they'll include rss2, and they'll come in various flavours - everything from individual categories to individual discussions.

stuart · August 2005

Thats exactly what I was hoping for mark. The other feed suggestion I was going to make a while back was a saved search fed, so a user could do a namewhore search, and get a feed of the results, good for the lazy amongst us, and would have lots of potential uses on bigger forums. I didn't suggest it because at the time it seemed quite specific to my own agenda, but who knows!

Mark · August 2005

No way - that's an awesome idea. +1 stuart

lech · August 2005

Hahaha, Mark you are such a namewhore !

vinay · August 2005

or even ... stuart++;

I second that idea. Actually mark, I'm just waiting for the next revision while I read through the mounds of documentation that's already been finished.

Hoping to see all the improvements that people have suggested and hoping to see what gets in. And waiting for the flurry of extensions that should follow.

Mark · August 2005

I want the next release to be the last one with major changes of any kind before 1.0 I want everything after 0.9.3 to be bugixes. Then release a solid 1.0 with lots of options for extensions.

lech · August 2005

yay!

stuart · August 2005

Cool, looking forward to it :) I may even get time to make a new theme by the time 1.0 rolls along!

schell · August 2005

nifkin: i tried the RSS generator code, but it generates a totally invalid feed, according to FeedValidator.

stuart: could you give me the link of your RSS feed, so i can take a look?

schell · August 2005

okay, now i made a much more primitive RSS implementation, but at least it's 100% valid:

RSS.php

please test it!

schell · August 2005

Stuart, is it OK to reuse your RSS widget (I'll change the graphics), if I give you credit on the back of the widget?

nifkin · August 2005

nifkin: i tried the RSS generator code, but it generates a totally invalid feed, according to FeedValidator.

Weird, i just tried it with the feed for my install of vanilla and it validated okay except for this:

Your feed appears to be encoded as "UTF-8", but your server is reporting "US-ASCII"

But it said that wasn't anything to worry about. That said, I'll still admit that it's an ugly hacky collection of code, and I still haven't tried to really fix the datestamp issue.

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