* A collection of PHP scripts from NotePage for setting up RSS feed services
I’ve covered several RSS feed creation and management products in this newsletter. In this issue we have some server side scripts that could be very useful if you are tasked with setting up RSS feed services for your company.
Published by NotePage, the collection of PHP scripts covers a huge range of functions from format translation and editing to scheduling.
RSS2HTML is a free script for displaying RSS feeds as HTML Web pages using HTML templates for the conversion. You can run it on any PHP enabled server or if you don’t have such a thing you can use (for free!) NotePage’s own server.
Note that the example URL to do this given in the script documentation (i.e. http://scripts.rss2html.com/public/rss2html.php?XMLFILE=http://www.feedforall.com/blog-feed.xml&TEMPLATE=http://www.feedforall.com/sample-template.html) doesn’t work because the template argument is invalid.
Moreover, the default template used when you don’t specify a template (e.g. http://scripts.rss2html.com/public/rss2html.php?XMLFILE=http://www.networkworld.com/community/?q=blog/96/feed) produces (cunningly) an output that includes your blog in a page advertising their products!
RSS2HTML is the only freebie, all of the other scripts can be purchased for $30.
FutureRSS is a script for scheduling the display of RSS feed items. The publisher explains that this addresses a common problem, “Many people have tried to set the PubDate field on their RSS feed Items to a future date and time, in an attempt to have that particular item become ‘visible’ to their feed’s subscribers on that particular date and time. Unfortunately, they will soon find out that many RSS readers and aggregators don’t honor future PubDates, and immediately show all their feed’s items.”
The RSS2HTML Cache module saves a feed locally on the server for a specified period of time. This speeds up feed retrieval by the rss2html.php script while the rssMesh script allows the latest items from multiple feeds to be merged into a single feed.
The SQL2RSS script allows data to be extracted from SQL databases (currently only MySQL is supported) and converted to RSS feeds.
The RSS2HTML Pro script expands on the operations of RSS2HTML by creating an index of feed items as a Web page as well as a separate Web page for each item in the RSS feed. As feed items change, the generated Web pages are updated.
A very useful product is the RSS2HTML Templates that provide lots of examples for controlling HTML layout for RSS items and include special layouts for using images in converted feeds and linking to podcasts and videocasts. Access to the template library is priced at $30.
For desktop RSS creation the company also offers a Windows program FeedForAll and FeedForAll Mac – each priced at $40.
See NotePage’s product pricing page.
