On a whim I decided to purchase the domain Top 100 vBulletin and put a wsnlinks directory on the site to rank vBulletin forums.
The only requirement is that External Data is turned on giving me access to external.php.
I’m then ranking the forums based on
A quick search on Google came up with this free service to intelligently parse an RSS feed into a javascript feed.
You don’t have full control of the layout but for most of us it will be more than enough.
CaRP is a “Caching RSS Parser“, thus it’s name. It comes in a variety of flavours but I tested the free version.
The only problem I had was that my host had safe mode turned on and that caused some problems in the “installation” – creating the cache folders but the manual instructions did the trick.
The scripts come with an install and example page. To get real value check their online examples which show how you can combine two feeds and take the most recent, for example.
I’ve worked with DOMIT! because it’s part of the Mambo and Joomla CMS systems so I expected this to be a doddle. Sorry, it wasn’t. There were 2 undefined constants and one code defect which all took time to identify.
There is no doubt that the code in DOMIT! is far more exhaustive than that of Magpie but, really, you don’t need it if all you’re planning to do is parse an RSS onto a webpage.
Magpie RSS is an RSS parser available free from SourceForge.
It consists of a handful of scripts which sit on your site and creates a cache file which needs to be chmod’d to 755 or 777 – you may need to use your FTP tool to do that – or Magpie may do it for you.
So, what do you need to do?
This is the main page of a series (yet to be written) of How-To guides for adding RSS feeds to your website.
It’ll cover HTML and PHP scripted sites and all the tools will be free to use.
Why HTML? Well, some blogging systems and the Blogger sites don’t allow the user to add serverside scripts. Poop to them, but until they relax or allow some controlled way around it then those sites need to be treated as pure HTML.
| Method | Type | Cache | 3rd Party? | SEF | Score | Demo |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Magpie RSS | PHP | Yes | No | Yes | 10 | here |
| DOMIT! RSS | PHP | Yes | No | Yes | 5 | here |
| CaRP | PHP | Yes | No | Yes | 4 | here |
| SimplePie | PHP | Yes | No | Yes | 10 | here |
There are plenty who are quick to insult DMOZ and the people who work to make it work. I won’t go into that here, it will acheive nothing.
However, over at DigitalPoint a member (wrmineo) started a DMOZ Scavenger Hunt to find categories that had not been edited in years.