Blog Tips

The past few weeks, I have been quite busy working with RSS feeds. I continue to be surprised about the possibilities RSS gives us, bloggers and web developers alike.

Here is an overview of the tools I discovered:

From RSS feed to Javascript: Feed2JS

If you want to spice up a page on your website, or integrate a feed into a blog widget, then have a look at Feed2JS. They offer an easy, fast and gratis way to convert any RSS feed into a simple Javascript. Each time the page with that Javascript is run, it displays the contents of the feed as if it were content on your page.

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If you are a serious blogger, you will not only write blog posts, but also tweak your blog layout. You will add widgets, fine-tune the layout, add navigation features, icons etc…

This takes up a significant amount of time and effort. As an example of “The Life of a Blog Master”, take a look at change log for my personal blog, The Road To the Horizon.

That blog, running on Blogger, is two and a half years old, has about 1,500 blog posts and gets +-15,000 visitors a month, so it is very dear to my heart.

Came a time though, I got tired of the limitations imposed my old Blogger template. A narrow and two column layout had become outdated and I wanted to swap it for something more appealing. That time was last weekend.

The Road's old template

From the moment I decided to take “the big step”, until the new site was up, I spent about 50 hours, often with cold sweat on my forehead as no matter how well I prepared the migration, things still went wrong.

In this post, I want to share how I swapped my template and what typical problems one should be prepared for.

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We all use RSS mostly to read updates from different sites. What if we could reverse this, and use RSS to actually populate a site?
Here is a story of RSS, in reverse. Maybe we should call it SSR instead of RSS…

Both for work, and in my spare time, I scan the news (and the Internet as a whole) for humanitarian, aid and development articles.

1. Using RSS the conventional way

Up till recently I exclusively used PageFlakes, a simple tool allowing you to display a multitude of RSS feeds from different websites on one page.

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click for a high res view.

In a previous post I explained in laymen’s terms what RSS feeds are, and what they can do for you as a reader, and as a blogger.

A more technical post, described some of the technical tools I use to “transform” RSS feeds to different platforms.

As my “network” grew to 20+ blogs and aggregation sites, 40+ bookmarking sites and link collectors, I lost track, and it was time to map it all out.

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