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Atom grabbing Widget

stuartstuart
edited September 2005 in Vanilla 1.0 Help
I've just been looking through the apple dashboard developer site. I want to create a dashbaord widget which will grab the last 5,10,whatever posts from a specified forum and display in a widget. There are some out there which do this already, but they use RSS feeds and not Atom, so it's more than a simple case open changing the feed URL to the one of the forum. Anyone else fancying having a crack at this? edit: more info here - http://www.36-degrees.co.uk/vanilla2/comments.php?DiscussionID=75
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Comments

  • 3stripe3stripe ✭✭
    Good luck mate! Would help if I could... make sure you have a look at the ole Konfabulator widgets as well to see if anyone has tried it for them...
  • nifkinnifkin
    There has to be something that will work with Atom feeds out there. Anything I've played with lately (magpieRSS, Bloglines, Google customizable homepage) has been able to take either format.

    Alternately: You could make a variation of the file that generates the atom feed to make an RSS one instead.

    Worst-case scenario: You could set up a FeedBurner account which will do auto-conversion for your feeds (Atom to RSS, RSS 2 to RSS 0.92, etc.), but they'll need to be publically accessible for their service to read them.
  • nifkinnifkin
    For shits and giggles I tried piecing together an RSS output feed. If anyone else wants to try this they're welcome to.

    RSS Feed Generator source code.

    Save that in your feeds directory and try using that. A few caveats:

    1- it does not get added automatically to the head of the document so it can't be used automatically for a live-bookmark in firefox/mozilla.

    2- it does not get added automatically to the list of feeds on the feeds page.

    3- if you want to change the language on it, you'll need to do it by hand by editing the two-letter language code in the <language> tags (line 209).
  • stuartstuart
    nice one nifkin, i'll have a look tomorrow and see if i can make a widget from it.
  • dfareeddfareed New
    edited July 2005
    nice
  • ichigoichigo
    arent threre already widgets that can read rss and atom files?
  • stuartstuart
    yes, I intend (when I get chance - moving into my flat tomorrow!) to just take one and customize it with new graphics etc.
  • stuartstuart
    edited August 2005
    ref: http://www.flickr.com/photos/36-degrees/32628526/in/photostream/ file: http://www.36-degrees.co.uk/assets/widget.zip Ok guys, got the time ttoday to have a look at doing this, and it reads the RSS feed perfectly, only problem is, once you click to read a thread, it says: A problem was encountered The requested discussion could not be found. actually, having just looked at my RSS feed in my aggregator, it does the same from there too, any ideas as to why? something to do with Sessions maybe?
  • MinisweeperMinisweeper New
    /me needs a mac. Anyone care to sign up to http://minimacgiveaway.co.uk/index.php?referral=143032 and then go onto screen select and open a free trial for a couple of weeks for me? Theres a tenner in it for anyone who can be bothered!
  • stuartstuart
    s'ok, panic over - I had the path to vanilla wrong - spank me and call me a newb!
  • MinisweeperMinisweeper New
    /me spanks stuart and calls him a noob. then thanks him for signing up. Did you go all the way through?
  • 3stripe3stripe ✭✭
    edited August 2005
    signed up. is this shit for real? doesn't seem to like FF much... aw, i have to sign up for a whole free trial.. funny i actually have got screenselect already, nice wee dvd service.. hmm
  • MinisweeperMinisweeper New
    well it seems unrealistic but its part of the giveaway network and i'm sure they would have been shutdown by now otherwise, even the bbc and people have checked them out. Most people get put off by having to put their credit card details in but aslong as you cancel within 21 days you wont get charged anyway so who cares?
  • stuartstuart
    Heres the first release of the widget, more info via the link: http://www.36-degrees.co.uk/vanilla2/comments.php?DiscussionID=75 mini - I didn't complete an offer yet, but I might do in a couple of days.
  • MarkMark Vanilla Staff
    Oh man - you guys are going to love feeds in the next rev.
  • stuartstuart
    Thats what I like to hear, something to satisfy my syndicational needs.
  • GhaziGhazi
    You keep teasing us, Mark :P I hope the you-know-what date is approaching...
  • lechlech ✭
    approaching date?
  • MarkMark Vanilla Staff
    Well, I needed a break from documentation over the weekend, so I started making some big changes to the dev version. Lots of re-arranging going on, and a lot of changes that didn't show up on the wiki because they were just ideas of my own. I'll have to start building that changelog soon. Anyway, yeah, the feeds are going to be pretty neat - they'll include rss2, and they'll come in various flavours - everything from individual categories to individual discussions.
  • stuartstuart
    Thats exactly what I was hoping for mark. The other feed suggestion I was going to make a while back was a saved search fed, so a user could do a namewhore search, and get a feed of the results, good for the lazy amongst us, and would have lots of potential uses on bigger forums. I didn't suggest it because at the time it seemed quite specific to my own agenda, but who knows!
This discussion has been closed.