Three Ways to Knead RSS

As someone who cannot make bread, I have no right to toss this metaphor in the air, but who’s gonna stop me?

Yet I feel that using RSS, is simple in terms of ingredients (flour, water, yeast, and something to give it taste), and if you do know what you are doing, you can roll it, fold it, blend it into whatever shape you may need.

In this post, I’ll try and bake three ways to make the feeds rise, all wrapped in one web page.

The big piece of bread is a page I have kept going for some time that tries to track my presentations done each year, or as the dog barks, Best of Show, where the data for each year comes from RSS.

It has a simple menu that allows you to flip through by years, but as of today, I am using three different forms of RSS to power this (all the pages display using my own Feed2JS).

From 2003 to 2007 I did this the worst way possible; I wrote out RSS by hand, e.g. http://cogdogblog.com/wp-content/show/2006.xml.

I surely do not recommend this method. Blecchh. I did not mind it, but I kind of like raw RSS like some people like chewing on raw garlic.

For 2009, I’m getting wise, and have started tagging my stuff (since all of my presentations have some tracks on the web) in delicious using a double tag approach a tag of presentation for (doh) presentations and 2009 for the year, giving me a link and RSS.

This works well if I tag them as I go, which would get the dates right. Unfortunately, I started doing this in February, so my tagged sites are out of order (would be nice if delicious let me edit the date the tag was done). This is in the vein of the brilliant concept that John Udell outlines as using delicious as a database. It’s very simple, but by stacking tags you can organize and use web content in interesting ways.

I started to go back and do my presos for 2008, but caught myself before venturing down a un-necessary road. In my exploration of using different spaces to do blog-like things, I remembered that I had done as an example my 2008 presentations on a Google Map that nicely enough has an RSS feed, which I could just drop through Feed2JS.

In summary, I have rolled three different flavors of RSS- raw hand coded, Google Map generated, and delicious tag generated, into one whole loaf (or has it fallen?).

To make the dough mix into the final product, I have to use some special PHP bakeware. This page fits in with my blog, and does a simple, but magic trick to use the WordPress header, sidebar, and footer, in my custom PHP page.

It’s a matter of gutting a template to get to the basic parts:

<?php
/* Set up WordPress stuff */
define('WP_USE_THEMES', false);
require('./wp-blog-header.php');
?>

<?php get_header(); ?>

<em>... then all the stuff you need on your page, 
making sure to  use divs like your template
does.</em>
<?php get_sidebar(); ?>

<?php get_footer(); ?>

<?php

/* Set up WordPress stuff */

define('WP_USE_THEMES', false);

require('./wp-blog-header.php');

<?php get_header(); ?>

<em>... then all the stuff you need on your page,

making sure to use divs like your template

does.</em>

<?php get_sidebar(); ?>

<?php get_footer(); ?>

To make it work, we have to do some stuff in the opening PHp section to sort out the variables we get via the web URL:

<?php
// array of all years data to display, with most recent first
$all_years = array('2009', '2008','2007', '2006','2005','2004','2003');

// check that we got a year as a parameter
$year = ( !($_REQUEST['year']) ) ? $all_years[0] : $_REQUEST['year'];

// safety check in case someone tries t0 push junk in my variables
if (!in_array($year, $all_years)) $year = $all_years[0];
?>

<?php

// array of all years data to display, with most recent first

$all_years = array('2009', '2008','2007', '2006','2005','2004','2003');

// check that we got a year as a parameter

$year = ( !($_REQUEST['year']) ) ? $all_years[0] : $_REQUEST['year'];

// safety check in case someone tries t0 push junk in my variables

if (!in_array($year, $all_years)) $year = $all_years[0];

We need some logic in the main content to build a menu, and set the selection to a current value:

<form action="<?php echo $_SERVER['PHP_SELF']?>">
	see the shows for 
		<select name="year" onChange="submit()">
		<?php
		
		foreach ($all_years as $key) {
		  $selected = ($key == $year) ? 'selected' : '';
		  echo "<option value="$key" $selected>$key</option>";
		}
		
		?>
		</select>
		<input type="submit" name="enter" value="go" />
</form>

see the shows for

<?php

foreach ($all_years as $key) {

$selected = ($key == $year) ? 'selected' : '';

echo "<option value="$key" $selected>$key</option>";

}

</select>

</form>

And then we have three different logic blocks to handle the three varieties of RSS.

<?php if ($year >= 2009) :?>
<!-- Use feeds from delicious -->
..... stuff to insert Feed2JS code .....

<?php elseif ($year == 2008) :?>
<!-- Use feeds from google maps -->
..... stuff to insert Feed2JS code .....

<?php else :?>
<!-- Use feeds written by hand -->
..... stuff to insert Feed2JS code .....
<?php endif?>