Displaying RSS feeds
activeRenderer tutorial - part 8
Display RSS newsfeeds inside your weblog pages using the rssBox macro.
Check out the Howard Dean Outlined demo, which includes 2 calls to rssBox.
Step 1: Choose the feed, find its web address (or URL).
It may be one of your own RSS feeds, published through a Radio category.
The URL you are looking for comes from your own machine and looks like
http://127.0.0.1:5335/categories/your_category_name/rss.xml
For instance, I publish the RSS feed for the activeRenderer latest news page from the activerenderer category of one of my Radio installations. Its local URL would be:
http://127.0.0.1:5335/categories/activerenderer/rss.xml
Or it may be one of the thousands RSS feeds available on the Web.
activeRenderer's browser is a good place to find RSS feeds URLs. They appear in the input field at the top of the browser when you load them from any of the news, world or search tabs of the selector.
On regular web site pages, RSS urls are usually signalled by the now ubiquitous white on orange XML logo.
Right-click (or control-click) on the logo and copy the link's location, for future pasting in step 2.
Step 2: Insert an rssBox macro call in your main template.
Open the #homeTemplate.txt file located in Radio's www folder with a text editor.
A text editor can be as simple as Notepad on Windows (or MS Word saving in plain text for that matter).
On MacOS machine, no editor comes close to Bare Bones Software's BBEdit.
Find a good place to insert the rssBox macro.
A good place is usually within the left or the right sidebar of your template.
Insert an rssBox call like the one inside the DIV tag in the screenshot attached to this node, substituting the URL for the feed you've chosen at step 1.
Important: if you are not currently publishing your weblog's home page with any of aR's 2 outline styles.
And have never done so at some point in the past.
Then, there's a good chance that your #homeTemplate.txt file is missing links to aR's Javascript code and CSS stylesheet in its header.
So, insert an activeRendererHeader macro call in the HEAD section of the template - check the attached screenshot.
Step 3: Re-publish your home page and check the result.
Use the Radio / Publish / Weblog Home Page menu in Radio.
Then check your Event Log after a minute or so, and click on the index.html link in the latest Upstream event, it should be listed as one of the most recent events.
Step 4: Customize your boxe's style.
All elements of the RSS box are defined by CSS classes in the activerenderer.css stylesheet.
You will find activerenderer.css in the activeRenderer sub-folder of www.
To learn more about CSS stylesheets, try the O'Reilly Salmon book, and the W3C specification.
rssBoxTitle defines the style for the title element.
rssBox defines the style for the 'box' itself - an HTML div - in which the CSS feed is encased.
rssBox1 to rssBox3 define the style for each indentation level in the outline rendering the RSS feed.
rssBoxHigh2 and rssBoxHigh3 define the style for children paragraphs when you position the mouse cursor over the expanded wedge of the parent paragraph.
rssBoxHelp defines the style for the 'how this works' link.
You can override those classes by inserting new definitions for them in the header section of your template file, inside a STYLE tag.
Step 5: Use rssBox optional parameters.
In the previous step, you've learned that the default style for your box is defined by CSS classes with names all starting with rssBox.
You can specify another name when calling rssBox from a template.
In the attached example, Dave Winer's Scripting News will be displayed with its title styled as scriptingTitle, its encasing box will be defined in scripting, and indentation levels will start at scripting1.
You need to define the matching CSS classes in the template file or a linked stylesheet of course. This way, you may have several boxes with different styles on the same page.
Other parameters specify that 'how this works' will not appear, and that only the first 8 items of Scripting News will be displayed.
For a complete list of rssBox parameters, check the macros reference page.
Starting with activeRenderer vs 2.5, you can create transcluding links in your outlines that reference part of the outline's content. Very useful when linking to search engine requests. To learn more about link macros, check out part 9.
