For those the care to feed, I have been doing more minor tweaks to Feed2JS, and inside you will find I use the very same to display the latest updates to that site, since it now has its own feed.
The main thing to look for (beyond coverups for my typos) was Seb Paquet’s suggestion to populate the hypertext links attached tp the feed item titles with the title= attribute set to a part of the item’s description. This is done, see the example below, so feeds could be generated with title only displays, but mouse overs on the links will reveal the first 150 chars of the item description (if your browser does that for title attributes on href links).
I do need some help as I have a request from someone who is asking that the output be able to support UTF-8 character encoding. My first attempt was merely to update this server as well as the default php.ini to use utf-8 as the default character set. I am CharSetIgnorarant– will that have adverse affects on other people? Also, it did not seem to help his site, which is all utf-8 encoded. So now I am thinking this is something in Magpie.. the 0.71 update is supposed to support different character encodings.
I’ll be diving in later.
Below is the rss feed for the updates I have been posting to the Feed2JS web site– see if the mouse over links will reveal anything!
Wow, that was some reading on Unicode, great resource!
The Magpie Blog had some relevant items on this, and it is an issue of PHP default character encoding and the MLX parser.
http://laughingmeme.org/magpie_blog/
The new version of Magpie (0.7) supports a script wide output character encoding, and I just updated our site to use UTF-8. The new Magpie code also has a great new unix timestamp from various published date items– see the latest Feed2JS news:
http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/feed/
Hey Alan, thanks for working this feature into feed2js! But let me reiterate my length extension request… Instead of 150, I’d love to have the same 255-character limit as del.icio.us to ensure that my extended entries are never cut.
Forgot to mention it was done, Seb. It may have been a cached feed if you did not see the 255 characters, or there is some limit as to what the browser displays.
Ah! Firefox cuts it off after 80 chars or so . 🙁