why reinvent the wheel?

May 5, 2011 9:02 AM

[Not-wanting-to-reinvent-the-wheel web filter] looking for a particular way of implementing blog posts onto static site. Please hope me save time. RSS question inside.

Basically I have a site and a blog. What I am trying to do is find an rss feed of my blog on blogger to display on my site. I can do that, but it is ugly as sin and too basic. What I would like to do is have a horizontal scrolling rss feed at the bottom of my website which would display the blog posts in a tile like fashion.

So far the things I've found are either php based (which I don't want to use, cost server money) or flash.
I don't mind hacking together one if I had to, but I know there are great mefis out there who might be able to point me in the right direction of what I need to look for. I would like it to be rather polished, but that's something I can do if necessary.

Thank you!

posted by handbanana to computers & internet (4 answers total)

The RSS feed is not designed to be displayed elegantly as part of a web page. I think you are going to have to manipulate the incoming data to make it look nice, and that means php, or Python, or javascript, or whatever. The real answer may be that you need to change hosts. Running a simple php script should not cost extra in 2011.
posted by COD at 9:32 AM on May 5, 2011

Yeah, doing this in PHP shouldn't really be a problem, but if it is, you'd best to do it through Javascript. Just googling "javascript rss reader" yields a bunch of results. Here's one. Another.

You'll probably need to do a little hacking on the html emitted by these parsers and some CSS work.
posted by adamrice at 10:11 AM on May 5, 2011

Adamrice,

This is true, and what I've started to do, but if there is something out there that is close enough, I have to do less tweaking (not that I can't do it, but changing the behaviors of scrolling horizontal, making a style of tile like appearance is time consuming).
thanks and keep any suggestions or resources coming!
posted by handbanana at 10:57 AM on May 5, 2011

If you're on a static site, you're going to have to use javascript. The resources above are good. I didn't get the 'horizontal' scrolling... is this some kind of ticker ? in this case, this might help.
posted by motdiem2 at 1:49 PM on May 5, 2011