• Anonymous
  • Login
  • Register



BlogSphere - Feature Request: "RSS" Block type allowing display of RSS feed headlines


A similar request was already submitted back in June 2005, but I thought I'd enter a new request to both raise the visibility and also expand upon the original idea. (original - http://www.openntf.org/Projects/pmt.nsf/0/1F05546E50666C218625702F0043330B ).

It would be incredibly useful if Blogsphere had a block type of "RSS" that would display the last X number of headlines from an RSS feed. Given that so much information is now available via RSS feeds, this would be a wonderful way to be able to pull in sidebar content.

My own interest is to be able to display in one blog a sidebar box with recent headlines from another companion blog. Similarly, I would like to display in a sidebar, the titles of recent episodes of a companion podcast. However, I could see it also being useful to bring in recent news headlines, company news releases, product release notices, or virtually anything else provided via RSS.

In my ideal world, when I switched the type of a block to RSS, I would see the following entry fields:
- Feed URL
- Number of entries to display (perhaps with a default set to 10)
- yes/no checkbox (defaulting to unchecked) to display "abstracts" or the first few lines, with perhaps an additional field to indicate the max number of lines to display

On this last point, the default behavior I would like is just to see the headlines of an RSS feed and then be able to click on the headline to open the item in a new window, but I could see a case where you might want abstracts of the feed item to appear... maybe just the first line or so. (or X number of characters since XML doesn't really have a concept of "lines")

Taking it a bit farther, a block type of this sort would allow you to use Blogsphere to create a "planet" type of page that displays an aggregation of several different blogs. In the center column, you could have multiple RSS blocks each pointing to different feeds and then showing the first X number of characters of each feed. (Granted, true "planet" type of pages typically display an aggregation of all the RSS feeds into a single stream... but that's really a separate feature request, and might be a natural extension of the RSS block for a future release.)

For an (perhaps extreme) example of the use of this, visit http://www.hackermedia.org/ where whomever is behind the site has basically created a portal for security-related podcasts and has populated both the left and right side with blocks displaying the RSS feeds of various podcasts. (Their "Latest Additions" center block also seems to be an aggregation of the various RSS feeds.)

Thanks for creating a great product!



Taken Actions by Owners

No actions have been taken yet.


In this field you can enter the actual request.

You can use the rich text editor for rich text formating. You can also enter HTML to embed objects, e.g. to embed a YouTube video or a screenshot of the project. In this case use '[' and ']' to mark the passthrough HTML as such.

Please note that the first time you use the new UI your description is converted from rich text to MIME. You might want to copy and paste the raw plain text from the old UI in the new UI so that you don't loose information.
In this field owners can describe what they have done or want to do.

You can use the rich text editor for rich text formating. You can also enter HTML to embed objects, e.g. to embed a YouTube video or a screenshot of the project. In this case use '[' and ']' to mark the passthrough HTML as such.

Please note that the first time you use the new UI your description is converted from rich text to MIME. You might want to copy and paste the raw plain text from the old UI in the new UI so that you don't loose information.