BuzzBoost your Feedburner Feed via Javascript

Well, it was pointed out to me that there was an easier way to get RSS feeds onto your site. Feedburner. Guess what. It is also a Google product. Sheesh! Basicly, you need to get your feed registered with Feedburner. Then you can use their BuzzBoost to create a piece of Javascript that will get your feed for you. It is pretty similar to what the GoogleApi is doing that I talked about earlier. The difference here is that Feedburner has a control panel where you set up how  your feed looks. No need to figure out any Javascript at all.

So this is my feed via WordPress.

This is my feed via Feedburner.

This is a snipit of my feed from the BuzzBoost.

Subscribe to RSS headline updates from:
Powered by FeedBurner


And this is the code that was generated that I pasted in. Pretty simple. I had a hard time getting feedburner to recognize my feed, but I am not sure that is feedburners fault. WordPress appears to take a really long time to respond with the feed.

RSS Feeds via Javascript

I set about recently to try to get a RSS feed parsed using only Javascript. Not as easy as I had thought it would be. I had figured that there would be several Javascript library’s around, and I thought for sure that someone would have a jQuery plugin for it. Well, I did find jFeed, but it suffers from a rather large issue. It can’t access sites from a different domain from where it is running. This is really a Javascript security feature. I did a simple AJAX test, and sure enough, Javascript stops us from directly accessing another domain (to prevent cross site scripting attacks).

How do you get around this issue? Well, a php based proxy is one solution. You call via AJAX, this php file that then makes the request to the real feed, and sends it back. That didn’t seem like a simple or elegant enough solution.

I found RssToHtml, which is a PHP script that you can use the parse the RSS feed. Using this, you can even use an server side¬†include to get the feed. This¬†didn’t work on my machine¬†that would only¬†run cgi scripts from the include.¬†

I had just about given up when I stumbled upon the Google AJAX Feed Api. Google to the rescue again.
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