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DirectorWeb sports a new RSS feed

I have just hacked together a script to generate RSS feeds for the items posted to the front of Director Web, our long standing web resource site for users of Macromedia Director.

Although, I have not touched the inside of Director for about a year or two, this site still generates a pile of traffic, largely driven by the posted submissions for announcements to the front page.

It was just a little work (dusting off long forgotten perl) to add some code to create RSS feeds.

All items submitted to this site go to a holding bin where we have a home grown admin system for reviewing, accepting, deleting, modifying content submitted to our 10-15 web resource sites.

Over the next few weeks, I am hoping to add more RSS feeds to our collections (after some dead/old link cleanup) such as Teaching and Learning on the Web, Multimedia Authoring Web, Problem-Based Learning, and more.

This is actually just the beginning of revamps for these sites, eventually moving them away from the archaic indexed flat file search we use now (some old unix code called “glimpse”) to a mySQL database.

These old sites still work amazingly well, consdering some of their scripts were developed in the mid 1990s.

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An early 90s builder of web stuff and blogging Alan Levine barks at CogDogBlog.com on web storytelling (#ds106 #4life), photography, bending WordPress, and serendipity in the infinite internet river. He thinks it's weird to write about himself in the third person. And he is 100% into the Fediverse (or tells himself so) Tooting as @cogdog@cosocial.ca

Comments

  1. Hi, do you know how I could implement a certain RSS-feed in a Director Shockwave file to display the information given in the feed? I’d like to build a screensaver with Director that automatically searches for updates of the RSS-feed of my website and displays it on the screen.

  2. I cannot help much since I have not programmed anything in Director for 2+ years.

    You most likely would use the Macromedia XML parser (it used to be chided for being slow, but maybe it has been boosted), since an RSS feed is just XML, you would use the built in code to pick out the pieces of content you need inside Director. See:

    http://www.macromedia.com/cfusion/search/index.cfm?loc=en_us&term=xml+parser&area=support.director

    A few more leads via Google:

    http://www.google.com/search?q=parse+xml+%2Brss+%2Bmacromedia+%2Bdirector

    And I would be there are some articles at DOUG:

    http://director-online.com/

    Good luck!

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