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Kev's Development Toolbox |
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About the RSS News Feed
| What Is this? How does it work? |
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RSS is an XML application that specifies the content of a website, and most commonly news headlines or information on a website. The RSS XML is made available as a form of news syndication - these feeds can be read and then transformed into content on another website. The feed being used on this website is from www.theserverside.com. The XML feed is read using a Jakarta JSP Standard Tag Library (JSTL) tag to read the data, and another is used to read an XSL stylesheet (written by myself) to transform the data. To perform the transformation, a JSTL Transform tag is used, and the results
are output as formatted HTML as dictated by the XSL templates in the stylesheet.
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| Is it Live? How often does it update? |
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Yes its live - it will display whatever information/headlines are contained in the news feed from the selected site; the XML feed is requested as you load the page. Depending on the source of the feed it should be updated at least daily (I think theserverside.com update their
feed daily).
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| Its not working... |
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Sometimes the feed may not be available, in which case you might see and error message like Error - XML RSS source was not found. In which case as it is live, there is no data to display. If you reload the page later the feed might be available (I've noticed theserverside.com XML feed is unavailable sometimes around 7am PST - maybe this is when the feed is being updated?). |
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Last updated: Oct 2007 v2.0 | |||||||||
