• November 26, 2003 • Website • 3 comments
After being envious of Todd Dominey’s “Enjoying” sidebar for quite some time, I decided to do some messing around to get my own as well. I find that I often come across cool things on the ‘Net, but they aren’t worth actually writing about. This will solve that problem.
You can pull the RSS feed into your news reader, if you’d like.
Ryan Parman is an entrepreneur, open source evangelist and passionate usability advocate currently living in Seattle. He is the founder and visionary behind SimplePie and CloudFusion, co-founder of WarpShare, member of the RSS Advisory Board, and creator of the AWS SDK for PHP. Ryan's aptly-named blog, Flailing Wildly, is where he writes about ideas longer than 140 characters.
I agree that it would be better. However, the problem isn’t with the feed, it’s with the newsreader. The newsreader (I use FeedDemon myself) will read the title, stripping out the HTML, and bind it with the other data.
I can’t control how the newsreader reads it, only how it’s displayed on my site. If you check out http://www.whatdoiknow.org , and pull in his “Enjoying” RSS feed, it’s the exact same issue. I think that it’s just one of the limits of using Movable Type to do it instead of doing it all by hand (I never thought I’d ever say that…).
Ah, good point…I had overlooked his “Enjoying” feed, but now I see what you mean.
Theoretically, I would think you could set up the feed template in MT, and set it to display only a “sidebar” category? Since they would be normal entries in all aspects except length, the full entries, links and all, might then show up.
And to keep the sidebar entries out of your regular feed, if you were inclined, you could specify the main feed to display all categories except sidebar.
I’ve been tossing this around for my sidebar, but I haven’t actually buckled down and tried it yet..;-)
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Sharif
November 28, 2003
The sidebar looks great, but in a newsreader, the sidebar entries don’t have the same active links that your regular entries have…it seems like it would be more convenient to be able to click to the content from the feed itself, rather than navigating back to your site to click on something of interest.