Feed The Web
By Rob Safuto on Sep 13, 2006 in RSS, Reviews, Social Media, Tools | Tags: Open Source , RSS , Tools
I’ve come to think of RSS as the grease for the social web. If that’s true then I think it’s fair to say that a tool called Feed2JS is the grease gun, easily allowing users to insert the grease where it needs to go.
Feed2JS is short for “Feed To Javascript”. The tool allows you to convert an RSS feed into a bit of javascript code that will display the contents of a feed when included in a web page.
Take my simple implementation as an example. I use Feed2JS to include the latest five blog posts on the Awakened Voice home page. The bookmark service BlinkList uses Feed2JS to allow users of the service to republish their lists of links on any web page. This functionality powers my Latest Links section in the right sidebar of this blog. I’ve also used the BlinkList implementation to power the Social Media Directory section of the Awakened Voice website.
But you don’t need a BlinkList account to implement this tool on your site. Feed2JS is an Open Source tool that runs on any PHP enabled web server. So you can run the tool on your domain for your own publishing purposes or for the purpose of allowing others to build their own Feed2JS enabled feeds.
I understand that this may not be the most exciting tool that you’ve ever heard of. But if you’ve ever racked your brain trying to figure out how to integrate content from one site into another then you are sure to appreciate the simplicity of Feed2JS.
Feed2JS was developed by Alan Levine for a site at Maricopa Community Colleges. All you need to do now is start thinking of where you want to place feed content around your site.
[tags]Social Media, Tools, Open Source, RSS[/tags]
