Category: RSS Tools

Yale Group Linklog — tags for blogs

Links (beta) is a group linklog — bringing the tagging power of Flickr and Furl to the world of the blog.
From links’ about page:

links is a group linklog; you can post the links you are reading and look at what other people and groups of people are reading on the web here. Anyone at Yale (valid netid required) can get an account simply by signing in through the Yale Authentication Service (use the link at right). Once you have an account, use the bookmarklet to add your own links.
Once you’re set up and saving your links here, you can syndicate your own recent links or your group links using RSS, or export your whole set of personal links to a number of formats for use in other systems.

If you poke through the site, you can find all sorts of blog entries that Yale users have found useful — nicely tagged and organized.
RSS4Lib has been linked in the WAG [Yale Medical Web Advisory Group] group with the tags rss, libraries, and blogs. It’s not just a respository — anyone (not just registered users) can also subscribe to the RSS feed for any page in the site — so you can subscribe to the RSS feed for the WAG group, or for the “libraries” tag.
The Yale Center for Medical Informatics is developing this software — unalog — under an open source license. This might be very handy way for a public library to maintain a virtual vertical file — rather than collecting pamphlets and ephemera by subject or organization, why not use unalog to indicate web sites and assign subject tags? It would also be a handy way to organize information from community groups or local organizations.

It’s Not Stealing — It’s Syndicating

There are a number of tools out there that allow you to easily take someone’s RSS feed and plug it in to your web page. The little-known secret is that at least one of them requires no programming knowledge beyond basic HTML and — for the adventurous — a bit of CSS.
Feed2JS, created and maintained by some clever people at the Maricopa Community Colleges, is a free service that takes an RSS feed you specify, wraps it in some CSS, and delivers it through a one-line JavaScript tag in your HTML document. Wait, it’s really not even that complicated.
For an example of how this handy application works, go to my library’s home page. Notice the headlines under the heading “The Ginn Weblog.” Those headlines are drawn dynamically from the Ginn Library’s weblog, the GinnBlog. Whenever we publish something new to the blog, the newest article appears at the top of the list on the library home page, and the oldest one goes away. Automatically. The code to it, provided through a web form at the Feed2JS site where you simply paste in the URL of the RSS feed, is simple:

<script language="JavaScript" src="http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/feed/feed2js.php?src=http%3A%2F%2Fwww322.pair.com%2F
ginnblog%2Fmt%2Findex.rdf&num=3&date=n" type="text/javascript">

(I also had to play a little bit with a CSS style sheet to make the headlines fit into the space on the library home page and to match the font, size, and color of type on the page -- but that was just as easy as adding a few elements to my site's style sheet using the directions kindly provided.
Maricopa is feeling the pain of lots of people using this script, downloading reformatted feeds from their site. If you plan to use it heavily, they'd appreciate it if you downloaded and installed the PHP scripts to your own server...
Feed2JS is a very easy way to take advantage of RSS feeds -- news, weather, your library's blog, you name it.
Let me know if you're using this tool on your library's site by leaving a comment with your page's URL.