One of the great things about RSS is that you can display, or "feed" in, headlines and content from other people's websites directly onto your own website. In another article, we've already covered what "syndication" is, and RSS, and how you can use a newsfeed reader to efficiently read and browse through the latest content from your favorite weblogs and news sites. The focus of this article will be on the other main use of RSS - feeding external content into your site. An example of this can be found here on my recipe website. Clicking on a sidebar link opens a new page with several feeds from various food and cooking websites. Check the page at a later time, and if there has been any new entries to any of those sites, those new entries will be reflected on the page.
How do you incorporate RSS feeds into your Movable Type website?
I have found four ways so far of accomplishing this without having to pay a lot of money or write your own code:
Javascript - There is Javascript code available at this site that does pretty much the same thing as Feedroll, but you don't have the feedroll tagline. I currently use this method on my recipe site on the right hand column. It's really easy to set up and use. The downside is that the feeds only refresh once a day or once every several days, whereas Feedroll can refresh every hour.
Using this method, here is an example of the code you would add to your index page if you wanted to add a newsfeed from Learning Movable Type:
If you would like to customize the look of your feed, you can use CSS and adjust the following class style attributes:
.ch_table -- the table for the whole channel
.ch_table tr td -- for feeds on just the items
.ch_head -- the table cell used for the header information
.ch_titl -- the title text
.ch_titleLink -- the title text when linked
.ch_mod -- last modified date and time
.ch_image -- the channel's image tag (new)
.ch_body -- all the stories
.ch_item -- each individual story
.ch_item_link -- each individual story's link(s)
.ch_item_description -- each individual story's descriptive text (if there)
.ch_description -- the description of the channel at the very end
For example, adding .ch_titl {background-color: #00ff00} in between the style tags in the code listed above will give you a green background to the title of the feed.
