How to Incorporate the STC RSS Feed in a Website

How to Incorporate the STC RSS Feed in a Website by Jodie Gilmore, Webmaster, Consulting and Independent Contracting SIG Hi. I’m Jodie Gilmore, the webmaster for the Consulting and Independent Contracting SIG (CIC SIG), and therefore I received the message about the new STC RSS feed being available. I posted the feed on the Consulting and Independent Contracting SIG site at http://www.stcsig.org/cic/pages/newsFeedReader.asp. Ann Wiley, manager of the Online SIG, asked me to summarize the steps involved in incorporating the STC RSS feed into a website. Let me begin by stating unequivocally that I’m NOT an expert on any of this – I just “messed around” with the RSS-related files and the HTML file from the STC website until I got it to work. I don’t pretend to understand XML, ASP.NET, or even advanced Cascading Style Sheet programming. Nonetheless, I’m willing to share my minimal experience on the chance that it can help someone else. Not everyone may know what RSS is – it stands for Really Simple Syndication, and is a method by which a website or organization (in this case, the STC main site) can “feed” or “push” news stories to other websites. That way, instead of a SIG webmaster having to visit the STC site, see what’s new, then manually update the SIG site, now the SIG site can serve up the latest STC news automatically, without much effort on the SIG webmaster’s part – and that’s a good thing!! The bad part is that the instructions from STC were pretty minimal, and hence this article. I’ll walk through the basic steps – and remember, there’s probably much more you can do – this is just the way I did it, not necessarily the best way to do it. Getting Started: Step 1: Determine what sort of server your website is hosted on, Windows or UNIX. This affects which files you use from the STC RSS download site. We contacted Merrick Bechini (Merrick@stc.org), who is the IT guy at STC, and it turned out the CIC SIG website is hosted on a Windows server (stcsig.org). Step 2: Get the Right File. Visit the STC RSS download page (www.stc.org/RSS/files.html) and download the appropriate file your server type. Step 2a: If your site is on a Windows server, you’ll download a file named asp.zip, which contains two files: newsFeedReader.asp and newsFeedStyle.xsl. After you download the zip file, extract the two files into your website directory. For instructions on using this file, see the Windows Instructions below. How to Incorporate the STC RSS Feed in a Website July 2005 Page 1 Step 2b: If your site is on a UNIX server, download the php.zip file instead. This zip file contains only one file, rss.php. Extract the .php file into your website directory. For instructions on using this file, see the UNIX Instructions. Windows Instructions: Step 1: Put the RSS link on your web page. On whatever page(s) you want the RSS feed available from, you need to put a link there that calls the newsFeedReader.asp file. Here is the link I put on the CIC SIG home page:   View the STC's RSS feed for the latest society
news and information The link looks like this: View the STC's RSS feed for the latest society news and information Of course, you can use whatever anchor text you want, or you could even make the RSS graphic part of the link. And, the path to the newsFeedReader.asp file will differ from what is shown in the above code, depending on the structure of your website files and directories. Step 2: Edit the newsFeedReader.asp file. This is probably the trickiest part, at least it was for me. I wanted the news feed to open in a window that looked like the rest of the CIC SIG website, not in a blank window that didn’t even say “CIC SIG” in it. I recommend making a copy of the newsFeedReader.asp file, and naming it something like newsFeedReader_original.asp, so you can go back and look at the original code if something you change doesn’t work quite the way you expected. Open the newsFeedReader.asp file in your HTML editor. Add any CSS code that you need to the