Step4

Ref Pod Blog and Active Desktop

Step 4. Add some .RSS feeds to your web page to call the blog postings
RSS is a web feed format used for web syndication. It lets you pull portions of another website into your own web page in real time. Here we will use RSS feeds to pull your blog posting into your web page.
Maricopa Community College makes a Feed2JS "Feed to Javascript" RSS Feeder freely available on their website. There is excellent information at this site that explains a lot about RSS feeds. They even have an RSS feed builder page that will generate the java script based on the information you plug into the form.
You can run Feed2JS off your own web server, or use one of the mirror sites listed on the Feed2JS site. Potsdam opted to have the Feed2JS software installed on our webserver. This required the assistance our our IT staff but was not difficult for them to do. NOTE: The Maricopa mirror site caches feeds on its site for 60 minutes, so if you want your blog upates to take instantly, you should consider downloading and running Feed2JS locally.

1.	Use the Feed2JS "Build a Feed" site to create the java script, or create your own using the example below but plug in your own values. It seems complicated, but it is just one line of code:

The purple text is the location of the java service on the Potsdam web site.
The red text is the site feed url of our blog on blogspot (i.e. Site Feed URL from Step 3)
- Use ascii characters "%3A%2F%2F" instead of "://" at the start of your URL
The green text includes the parameters that tell the feed which blog elements we want included in the web page and how we want them to display. See the Feed2JS site for more details.
- chan=title Title and description of the blog will display
- num=5 Five blog postings will display
- desc=1 Contents of the blog posting will display
- date=y Date/time stamp will display
- target=y Link will open in a new window
- html=a You can create hyperlinks in the body of your blog posting

Here are some sample template pages showing different display formats: Five postings: no blog title, posting contents and dates &chan=n&num=5&desc=1&date=y&targ=y&html=a Five postings: blog title and posting titles display, no contents &chan=title&num=5&date=n&targ=n Three postings: blog title, posting contents, no dates &chan=title&num=3&desc=1&date=n&targ=y&html=a Three postings: blog title and description of blog, posting contents and dates *chan=y&num=3&desc=1&date=y&targ=y&html=a Three postings: blog title and description of blog, no posting contents, dates &chan=y&num=3&date=y&targ=y You get the idea.
2.	Copy and paste your java script into your web page where you want your blog entries to appear.
Congratulations! You're DONE!