cogdogblog

Note: CogDogBlog has a new WordPress powered home at http://cogdogblog.com/. All entries from this version have been moved there, so as a guide dog service try finding this article in its new home by title search.

Feed2JS Updates: Has Its Own Feed (published via MT)

Thanks to some good feedback from suers, I've been able to make some needed corrections to our Feed2JS (RSS Feeds rendered via JavaScript). Like a Homer Simpson Doh! slap across the forehead, I realized that while I was faithfully adding to the main page's history, it certainly could use an RSS Feed to publish news of its updates.

Now it is there: http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/feed/content/feed2js.xml

But a story behind the story.

I could have sat down and hand edited an XML file. I've done it before. But that is a pain, and getting the dates in the right format is a double pain. So my conniving scheme was to use MovableType as a cheap tool for posting new history links as well as auto generating the feed. It is a simple blog with no web site itself, and no archives- in fact it exists to publish 3 things- the content file used for the main page (s text file with merely everything on the page that is not header, navigation, and footer). This entire site is one PHP file and a directory of content files that are popped into the template. Just for grins, my updates now have comments available (keep those cards and spam coming).

The "blog entries" are the 3 most recent items that are listed as bullets at the bottom under "Updates". The rest of the "blog" entries are spit itnot another content file for the "history" page (all entries after the 3 most recent), and the RSS feed.

So now, when I make an update to my code, I merely publish a new entry to the mini blog, and it updates the necessary parts of the site. This is even faster then the older method of manual editing of the content files.

Using ecto took me about 30 minutes to post the 20 or so entries needed to fill it out.

If you can grasp what blog software can publish, if you can wrestle and mostly master the templates, then you can exploit it to do all kinds of web publishing tasks- not your average blog.