My big plan for Guesto.com has been to find a way to keep it fresh and frequently updated, but as low-maintenance as possible. So for posting new content I figured the easiest way would be to use a blog - much like this one - for entering new content and then find a way to get the posts syndicated into my HTML pages.
Initial research on the Web suggested that I would need to install some PHP or CGI scripts onto my webspace, but as it is hosted on a free Pipex package I didn’t want to do that. Initial coffee machine chats with the techies at work suggested that I should build my pages in XSLT and use that to import and format how the feed content is displayed. That probably is indeed the most professional solution, but being as I am of limited time and technical knowledge, I was hoping it would be easier.
Luckily, I then stumbled upon this free javascript generator from an educational site that uses just a couple of form fields to generate feed content from the feed address and few parameters that you give it. Then you just need to play with the CSS on the destination HTML page to make it look as you want. Could hardly be easier.
But how do you ensure that it only displays the posts relevant to the destination, rather than everything? This is exactly what I wanted to do on my Net page on Guesto.com - to only display the posts that I tagged as “Net” when I blogged them.
Well there are a few options I have found so far.
There is the simple to use FeedRinse, to which you give an RSS address and a list of what parameters you do or don’t want to allow posts for. FeedRinse then spits aout a “cleaned” version of the feed as one new RSS file, which you can then subscribe to or syndicate into somewhere else.
There is also the much more feature rich, but also much more complicated Yahoo! Pipes. This gives anyone the ability to completely remix feeds by combining multiple feeds into 1, de-duplicating, searching or just filtering like FeedRinse does. As it happens, this is exactly how the feed into the Net page on my Guesto.com site is working.
More news on cool stuff from Yahoo! Pipes later…. rss
A test for embedding a google video. Needs to work in the same way as YouTube videos in that WordPress provides its own markup instead of allowing embed or javascript tags.
Although here is an interesting learning - it only works if google URL is at google.com. Mine was video.google.co.uk and nothing displayed at all. I just changed the tld in the embed url and it worked. Still found its way to the right video too. Net
This video is a presentation video for Ant’s horse “Phoenix Reach” - the triple group 1 winning stallion that has now retired to stud. I built him a little website at www.phoenixreach.com if horses are your thing….
Here is a video taken at about 5am in Gothenburg city centre. Interesting how such a simple clip of, well, nothing really can be my most viewed video - beating The Kooks, The Arctic Monkeys and Get Cape! That must be either because it has a “how to..” title - or more likely because it is tagged with the words “Swedish” and “Girls”…
This done as a test for embedding YouTube videos straight into the page.
It seems that it is not possible to embed in the usual fashion because the system disables Javascript when running on WordPress.com like this is. (I simply can’t be arsed to setup hosting it myself.) However it is possible to embed YouTube videos using WordPress’s custom mark-up. See http://faq.wordpress.com/2006/07/29/how-do-i-post-a-youtube-video/ for more info.
While the idea of having a blog horrifies me, I thought I’d give it a go as a way of trying out all the new web2.0 technologies such as widgets etc that I’m supposed to know all about. As it turns out, the wordpress.com platform doesn’t let you run much script on their pages, so I’ve put everything onto www.guesto.com instead.
rss
video
syndication
google
YouTube
