Simple Rss Widgets

By: Chris Greacen - 03/24/2008
I love to browse off-the-shelf tools and doodads floating around the net. Recently I was looking for a widget to publish our corporate news titles on the gofish.com homepage. Sure, I'd love have time to write this from scratch, I don't... but I have about enough time to try 5 and see what works the best.

Quick summary of the features I'd like to shoot for:

• MUST: browser compatible
• MUST: pull corp feed
• MUST: be easy to implement
• SHOULD: customize colors
• SHOULD: customize dimensions
• SHOULD: be quick to load (<3secs)
• SHOULD: not give up too much info to a 3rd party
• SHOULD: serve it in a 300x250 RECT size.(why not?)
  • 305x215 Whole corner
  • 305x40 The heading
  • 305x175 List area
• NICE: pull & mix several feeds
• NICE: sort multiple feeds
• NICE: Re-syndicate the widget

These are old

I'm writing this paragraph in 2023 to mention that all of these things are old and dead. Nothing survived. It's kind of a bummer because RSS as a tool for users and publishers was handy and almost even exciting when there was interest and energy thrown at it. I've cleaned off the old scripts from this page but left the old dead urls. YMMV.

Our Raw Feed
Looks like I can grab a feed of each category. This might make for some handy intermingling of headlines. The downside is that it looks like I'm pulling a whole-article feed. I'll see if I can get this to just pull the titles. I'll set up a feedburner feed at http://feeds.feedburner.com/GoFishCorp before using one of these doodads.

Yourminis

www.yourminis.com seems like a neat platform for building and syndicating a flash widget. They allegedly have some relationship with brightcove, I'll see if there's anything worth exploring there.

WidgetBox widget
This looks like a javascript/xhtml implementation. Kinda nice, but let me check it out in a pile of browsers first. Seems like the widgetbox is chock full of other presentations. Would be nice to find one that can handle a few feeds at once.

Some javascript doodad
It's a freebie, kinda simple: http://itde.vccs.edu/rss2js/build.php. Kinda simple, but it looks like I can style the output pretty easly.

Another javascript doodad

Nice javascript-only implementation, doesn't seem like it's working though.

Feed Sweep
Feedsweep is free for noncommercial use, handles a bunch of feeds at once, and is super-simple to put together. Creates a nice dhtml presentation of the title list. I think this

rss-to-javascript
Another freebie, not sure I can get this into the dimensions of the content area on the homepage.

What do you like? The other folks on the team here seem to like the yourminis the best. I'll put a POC together soon.