When I was in Tucson last month, JWalk and I set up this little IFrame on his website that would show the last five entries on Daily Dose of Excel (it’s near the bottom). He had already done if for his blog, so it was it was just a challenge to see if we could hack enough php together to make it work. I didn’t expect the results I’m seeing.
On this website statistics page, it shows http://dicks-blog.com/headlines.php as the 2nd highest website referrer. I’m pretty sure John’s is the only site that uses that particular php file. And these stats aren’t just for the month, their all-time (all-time being since I started using extreme tracking back in late February). If you looked at just April, which I don’t know how to do, it would surely be the highest referrer.
I put an IFrame at the bottom of the sidebar so I can send half-a-dozen referrals his way every month. I don’t know if he’ll be able to tell they came from me, or if there’s anyway to change it so he can.
Maybe we should start an Excel RSS ring. Any Excel site with a feed can join and they all will have this IFrame showing the last five posts. Every time the user refreshes, they’d see a different sites “headlines”. Somebody set that up so I can join. :)
P.S. How do we make the background color customizable? Can I use an IFrame thingamajigger in my style sheet to override the color?
I can only see the last four posts from J-walkblog. The font is too big and so the last one is cut off. I can see something and the link is active, so I know its there, I just can’t see what it is.
IE 6.0.2800
Text size Medium.
Just some thoughts….
1. Use Magpie to parse your RSS feeds (as Jwalk discovered)
2. Write the parsed feeds to your MySQL
Use a CronJob on your server to run the script every hour or two, or however often you desire the consolidated feed to update.
I’m not sure about using IFRAMES, but I’ve done it using good old fashion PHP MySQL SELECT on the DB.
As for handing out the script, I’m guessing you can just set up a USER as Read Only so you can pass out the script to multiple websites and not worry about security.
I was planning on working on the same project for a non excel site this weekend (central KY blog aggregator) so I’m curious to see what somebody comes up with here.
Jason: Yeah, shows how much I know about IFrames. I was under the impression I had to set a height, which is the source of the problem.
With Mark’s suggestions, I think I can avoid IFrames altogether, which is nice. Thanks.