RSS and XML

I like to think that I'm always learning about something. Recently, I have been trying to learn about RSS and XML. A while back I switched my favorites over to FavoriteSync. That give me an XML file of my favorites. I haven't figured out how to edit the XSL file that renders it for browsing. You can't browse to this file. You have to "Save as..."

Recently, I've been playing with using RSS to add local news to my DeSotoNet home page. I used Yahoo's news search (and clicked on Advanced Search). I structured the query to give me the results I wanted. I actually found I had to go hack the URL that generated the results to take out the dates. Then on the results page, I saved the link on the "View as RSS" button. You can browse to this and see the raw XML.

Obviously that's not how I wanted that to present. Just as obviously, I don't have a clue (yet) as to how to make it render better. So, as usual, I went looking for someone who had already done it.

I subscribe to Lockergnome's Windows Fanatics newsletter. An article in July 2004 described how to "RSS-ize my web site." Ever the link pack-rat, I saved that away for future reference.

One of the links on that page was to RSS-to-JavaScript.com. They have a free service that will take RSS and format it into JavaScript that can be embedded in html!

Here's the result. Looks pretty good if I do say so myself.