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Berylium Displays RSS/RDF Newsfeeds

Thanks to the inclusion of fase4's RDF Parser, Berylium users can now insert an RSS newsfeed into any BML capable text field, using the syntax [rss:newsfeedURL;optionlist]. Additional options may be specified to control the number of items displayed, the size of descriptions, and whether or not to display channel information.

Read on for a few examples...

You may already know that any Berylium folder can be rendered as a newsfeed by clicking the XML icon at the bottom of the folder listing. But now you can use the new [rss:] tag to render these newsfeeds on your own or other Berylium sites, as well as to render newsfeeds from non-Berylium sites.

Here's an example: [rss:http://slashdot.org/slashdot.rdf;maxItems=5] produces:


Obviously, Slashdot.org is an example of a non-Berylium newsfeed. But let's say you want to see the latest Berylium News on your site. You would create a new document, and in the description write [rss:http://berylium.org/berylium/news/index.rdf?description=1;
maxItems=5^descriptionSize=64]:


The options that can be specified include:
  • maxItems=number of entries to show
  • descriptionSize=max number of characters in descriptions
  • channel=hidden (to hide channel information)
  • refresh=number of seconds to keep a local cache of the newsfeed
The fase4 RDF Parser is a caching newsfeed parser written in PHP by Stefan Saasen and others. It is released under the Mozilla Public License. Portions of the original code have been modified for Berylium by Chris Snyder.

By Chris Snyder on January 13, 2003 at 1:38pm

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