Synchronize Website To Rss Feed.

[novartic]

What I am trying to do is the following:1. Get the information from off a website (eg my works one) (The stuff under College News & Events)2. Then automatically, Synchronize the website content that you have specified,... to the RSS Feed.3. RSS Feed has updated information with out you lifting a finger... well apart from adding the information on the website in the first place.Tried searching on Google and also on forums and failed epicly, a bit like my spelling.Updated Website info. + script + RSS feed = Updated Website info on RSS Feed.Could some one please help me out here as im going spare and im wasting allot of time. (2 weeks and counting)

[justsomeguy]

Are you saying that you want the feed on your website to automatically include other information on your website?

[Skemcin]

With most updated browsers, you'll this little icon in the corner of the address bar:That icon represent the presence of an RSS feed. Click on it and it should load the rss feed xml in your browser. In this case, that would be:http://www.oakmead.bournemouth.sch.uk/Content/rss/feed.xmlFrom here, you need to determine how you will pull the content into your site. You can use html and javascript but most commonly developers use a server side scripting language like asp, php, or coldfusion and that is where the fun lies.Does that help?

[novartic]

Are you saying that you want the feed on your website to automatically include other information on your website?

YES.Basically I would like the information in the news section, once added by a member of staff, to automatically be added into the RSS Feed. And if the information was to be removed from the main site, the information which was copyed into the RSS feed also gets removed.Like a clone really but one set of info is on the site, and the other on the RSS feed. (note: the information currently in the feed was in-putted by hand and was not automatically added in.)

[Skemcin]

Ok, so you are saying:

• On this page: http://www.oakmead.bournemouth.sch.uk/Content/Home/index.asp
• You authored the content
• Hard coded it on the left hand side
• Created an RSS feed of that same content: http://www.oakmead.bournemouth.sch.uk/Content/rss/feed.xml
• And now want what you have hard coded to read from the feed you created

If this is, indeed, the situation, then review my post earlier in this thread. Note that since your page is using ASP, all you need to do is learn how to read/render an RSS feed using ASP. That should be to hard to master. I'd make it an include file so you can re-use it wherever you want.

[novartic]

Yer thats right.I need to be able to make a script that looks for updates on my hard coded website, then gets this information, translates it into the feed.xml file automatically.Many websites do it and im surprised that everyone's hidding the code and know how.Thanks for the advice, I will look into "read/render an RSS feed using ASP",.Ill be back

[Ingolme]

Yer thats right.I need to be able to make a script that looks for updates on my hard coded website, then gets this information, translates it into the feed.xml file automatically.Many websites do it and im surprised that everyone's hidding the code and know how.Thanks for the advice, I will look into "read/render an RSS feed using ASP",.Ill be back

I can't help you with ASP, but if you're using PHP, you should study the XML DOM tutorial and then use PHP's DOMDocument class to read and do something with the RSS feed data. RSS is just XML, treat it like an XML file.If what you want is an RSS file that's keeps up to date with the news of the site, I'd actually create a PHP file that gets the information from your news database and generates the XML. On one of my test websites, I made Apache process PHP on files with a .rss extension so that the RSS file would always be up to date with everything that's in the database.

[novartic]

I can't help you with ASP, but if you're using PHP, you should study the XML DOM tutorial and then use PHP's DOMDocument class to read and do something with the RSS feed data. RSS is just XML, treat it like an XML file.If what you want is an RSS file that's keeps up to date with the news of the site, I'd actually create a PHP file that gets the information from your news database and generates the XML. On one of my test websites, I made Apache process PHP on files with a .rss extension so that the RSS file would always be up to date with everything that's in the database.

The only problem is that the servers we have externally only support ASP. As we go via SWGFL (as we are a school). And no.. im not a teacher. This is my first ever job working in a school. Before hand I worked in the world.. :)PS... found this... cant get it to work tho http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa478968.aspx

[justsomeguy]

Many websites do it and im surprised that everyone's hidding the code and know how.

No one's hiding it, most people just do it differently than you. Most people store their content in one place, like a database, and they have one web page script to get the content and put it in an HTML page, and another script to get the same content from the database and build the feed. You're trying to do it without a database it sounds like, it's a lot harder to scrape content from your existing pages and add that to the feed than it is to get content for both things from the same database.Is it an option to move all of your content into a database and then build your pages and feeds from that? People would add content to the database and it would show up on the pages and in the feed.

[Skemcin]

Yeah, there are so many ways to do this. For instance, I've built an app using ColdFusion that creates, maintains, and displays an RSS feed with using a database. So, I have a ColdFusion page that reads the XML file and displays it and then I wrote a couple ColdFusion pages that literally edit the physical xml file - eliminating the need for a database. Its not as sexy, but its possible.From what I am understanding about your situation, I'd have to agree with justsomeguy. I think you are trying to create your RSS feed by reading your ASP page when you should be creating your ASP by by having it read your RSS - then you only need to maintain the RSS XML and not worry about updating the ASP code and messing that up in someway that breaks your page scraper.I would focus on learning two things:a.) learn how to code an ASP page to read and display an RSS feed.b.) learn how to code an ASP page to edit a physical file on the serverAlternately you could go in the direction, again, suggested by justsomeguy which is the more popular approach:a.) learn how to code an ASP page to query a database to display content on a page.b.) learn how to code an ASP page to query a database to display content in an RSS format and therefore returned to the browser as and application/xml mime type.That should hook you up.

[novartic]

Interesting posts there. I will investigate in these, esp this one..

I would focus on learning two things:a.) learn how to code an ASP page to read and display an RSS feed.b.) learn how to code an ASP page to edit a physical file on the server

Though the database one would be a good idea.... but externally we do not have access to this on our SWGFL server. This totally sucks.One more quick question tho.. How come on many sites that teach you to do RSS feeds explain them in a way that make you think that they just automatically update themselves according to the tags you give your text on your site.PS. Only used ASP in the site to include the main navigation bar in all the pages. Other then that no other asp is used. (due to the servers externally not supporting php. )

[Synook]

One more quick question tho.. How come on many sites that teach you to do RSS feeds explain them in a way that make you think that they just automatically update themselves according to the tags you give your text on your site.

My RSS feed "automatically" updates itself, because it stores information in a database, a model which can then be viewed in multiple ways - for example, on a webpage, or within an RSS feed. It is quite unusual to find someone hard-coding regularly updated content, and then hard-coding an RSS feed for it - this would be unmaintainable on any reasonable scale.Are you sure your web server does not have a database server, and you can't connect to any remote ones?Also, I don't see why the lack of PHP is preventing you from expanding your site's ASP codebase.

[Skemcin]

To expand on Synook's comments, and RSS feed might be described as "automatically updating" because, as he states, it is created on the fly from a database but also because if a web site is reading an RSS feed and the author updates it, the web site doesn't have to do anything becuase it is reading the RSS.Here is a site/service I am working on:http://www.rsssource.net/It allows someone like you to create a feed on my site but then gives you HTML code to copy-n-paste into your site to display it. So, if you have any issues figuring out your solution, let me know as I am almost to the point where I need a few people to test the application.

[novartic]

As said before. This is a school we are talking about here that has there site internally and externally.The external servers are only ISS and ASP with no front end. All I have assess to is the web space. Internally, we can do what ever we want to do, from php/asp/databases etc... but this does not help the matter.If I were doing this for my own site, then doing a database would be trying to do as we speak via the front end. If this all makes scence.

[novartic]

To expand on Synook's comments, and RSS feed might be described as "automatically updating" because, as he states, it is created on the fly from a database but also because if a web site is reading an RSS feed and the author updates it, the web site doesn't have to do anything becuase it is reading the RSS.Here is a site/service I am working on:http://www.rsssource.net/It allows someone like you to create a feed on my site but then gives you HTML code to copy-n-paste into your site to display it. So, if you have any issues figuring out your solution, let me know as I am almost to the point where I need a few people to test the application.

Will look into when I get some more time.

[justsomeguy]

You understand that ASP can essentially do anything that PHP can, correct? You don't need PHP to interact with a database.

[Synook]

You can use ASP to connect to a database that is hosted elsewhere, if so necessary.

[Skemcin]

You can use ASP to connect to a database that is hosted elsewhere, if so necessary.

Only if the hosting service allows remote connections. Years ago I had some stuff hosted on a lost cost provider that didn't allow DBs or remote connections. Suffice to say, the site was moved.