The more you click around the web, the more you see information rich sites that could do a little bit more good by adding RSS feeds to their content. It’s even worse when you scan the URLs and sense that the content is idling away in a database. Like Clara Peller’s inquiry for beef, we are wondering, “Where’s the Feed?”

Both myself and D’Arcy Norman implemented it into our learning object collection sites in a matter of a few hours. Here is just a scoop of sites that should be adding the little orange link box..

Judging from the content structure and top links. I think these are all from the same folks, the Arts & Letters Daily, Business Daily Review, SciTech Daily – all of these sites feature RSS like headinlines on the fron page- a blurb a link that lead to a full story. Where’s the feed?

“I could have had class. I could have been a contender. Instead of what I am, a bum”

In the July/August 2003 Technology Source, Mary Harrsch makes a claim (#623?) for RSS – The Next Killer App For Education.

As blogged by David and George, the slapping of “kller app” may be over the top, but it helps to spread the word a bit.. even if the author has completely neglected the RSS work happening right around here somewhere and up in the northern hintelands of Canada 😉

Thanks to Randy B for noticing that the Onyx RSS parser we use in the RSS to JS demo has been updated. Something about cache-ing issues and line breaks (shrug). Keep up to date. It is a full time job and a half.

Okay, this should do it for a while. D’Arcy Norman suggested adding an output option to allow insertion of item date to the list. While in the code, I also made it possible to have an option on the channel display to list the title only (as well as title and description of channel, or no channel information).

That makes four options to twiddle with.

See the latest demo for details and source code .

A quick update to the PHP script for the RSS to Javascript demo posted here May 7.

For a reminder, this is a strategy for incorporating RSS feeds into ANY web page (HTML, Blackboard, WebCT) via a reference to a single line of JavaScript code.

To follow up on the RSS in Blackboard piece, I have posted a new page that documents and demos RSS to JS along with the source PHP code.

Not to be outdone by Brian (Displaying RSS Feeds in WebCT), I found a niche of time to do the same proof of concept in Blackboard.