Staying True to the Feed
Posted on | April 11, 2009 | 1 Comment | by Kristen
Web feed – “The kinds of content delivered by a web feed are typically HTML (webpage content) or links to webpages and other kinds of digital media. Often when websites provide web feeds to notify users of content updates, they only include summaries in the web feed rather than the full content itself.”
Newsiversse has shifted gears to get back to basics. Sandbox violations have gotten the better of us, so we’re trimming down the code and keeping things simple (oh, and legal). Sure, we got a taste of a full article load and it was GLORIOUS, but we understand that we are to create a web feed, not an information-stealing monster (that looks ridiculously good!).
Since week 4, we have changed up our code to steer clear of sandbox violations (dreadful). We tried many methods of opening urls (php – simplexml, openfile, readfile, load, etc.) and continued code within Flash, yet nothing seemed to work. Instead of senselessly wasting our time to read full articles (wrongfully), team IV will be presenting a ‘true-to-the-name’ feed. We will use the descriptions within the feed URLs as well as the titles and potentially some images.
Given the shorter length of the feed descriptions, we plan to emphasize the Tweets alongside our nodes and maintain our goal of having an extremely well designed site. We’ll see how this new route treats us, but I think we fully understand what we are to do (and what we CAN do) so we’re good to go! We’ll keep running the updates…
~Kristen
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One Response to “Staying True to the Feed”
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April 11th, 2009 @ 5:51 pm
How often are you refreshing your remote feeds?
One of the reason our servers disable remote URL access is because it becomes very easy to create a script that can use the web server as a denial of service weapon.
Instead of getting the feeds via php and the webserver I would use a periodic cron script via the Linux shell and grab all your feeds once every X minutes. Just my two cents. In this case I would use wget to get the remote feed, then use php on the webserver to read and parse the downloaded files.