Put this in your bag of Blackboard tricks; expand on it and share your discoveries with all of us; use it as a launching point for a frontal assault on RSS; or just chalk it up to YAWTFM (yet another weird thing from Michael). It’s up to you.
Laura Steffen was looking to incorporate an RSS feed from flickr into a course and asked me how to run an RSS feed inside a Blackboard course. Here are the basics, although I haven’t confirmed that this works with flickr’s RSS feed since there are several flavors of RSS.
RSS (RDF Site Summary mistakenly called Really Simple Syndication by folks who ought to know better) is a method for passing the data of XML-formatted documents to external applications. To make an RSS feed from one server appear in a page on a different server requires some code because the JavaScript security model will not allow JavaScript to retrieve external data from a server in a different domain. As a result, if you want an RSS feed to appear in a page on the UTTC Blackboard server, and if Blackboard isn’t hosting the RSS feed, you must use a program (PERL or PHP or Ruby or…) to convert the RSS to HTML.
In this particular case, let’s bring an RSS feed from an external server (WordPress where this blog is hosted; however, I’ve used this technique on multiple feeds at different servers successfully) into Blackboard. Since UT System doesn’t run PHP applications, we have to make use of an open source program originally written by Alan Levine at Maricopa Tech Community College District in Phoenix. When Alan left Maricopa (for the New Media Consortium in San Francisco), the school removed the program–but fortunately for us, the Virginia Community College District picked up the code and continue to run it.
So, create a content item in Blackboard (if you have the Blackboard VBE turned on, toggle to source mode) and place the following snippet of code in the page and save the item. In the code below, substitute the actual feed address you want to use instead of our CourseDev blog. I realize the following code snippets are ugly–but it’s the only way I could figure out how to format this code (because WordPress uses curly quotation marks) and still allow you to cut and paste directly into Blackboard.
<script language='JavaScript' src='http://itde.vccs.edu/rss2js/feed2js.php?src=http://coursedev.wordpress.com/feed/&chan=y&num=3&desc=100&date=y&targ=y' type='text/javascript'></script>
You should also add the following for browsers with no JavaScript.
<noscript> You must have JavaScript enabled to access this RSS feed </noscript>
Options that follow the URLs are:
&chan=n Don't show the channel source &num=0 Show all blog posts; substitute an integer for 0 to show a specific number of posts &desc=0 Show only the blog title with no portion of the blog description; substitute 1 for 0 to show the complete blog description; substitute an integer larger than 1 to show a specific number of characters from the blog description &date=n Don't show the dates of the blog postings &targ=n Don't launch the blog postings in a new window when the blog link in the page is clicked
Now, this produces VERY plain information. If you use a package file of even one page, you can put the following in the <head> of that page to call an external css file (don’t use the css link I’ve used below–it’s intentionally horrible to illustrate a point).
<link rel='stylesheet' type='text/css' media='all' href='http://www.telecampus.utsystem.edu/forms/rss.css' title='rssstyle'>
Other stylesheet options can be found at http://itde.vccs.edu/rss2js/style.php?feed= which is also where the server lives that runs the PHP file that converts the feed to an HTML format.
This technique is known as small pieces, loosely joined:
- the CourseDev blog and associated RSS feed run on a server at WordPress in California
- the PHP program that takes that feed and converts it to HTML runs on a server in Virginia
- the page that accepts the converted HTML runs on a Blackboard server in Maryland
- the converted page is styled by a CSS file that runs on our UTTC server in Texas
So, what you see in your browser is RSS data from California converted to HTML in Virginia and placed on a server in Maryland where it is styled by a CSS in Texas.
Michael
September 21, 2007 at 11:25 am |
Clay set up feed2js on our servers, and I just tested it out with a flickr feed and it works great. If you can get the whole program set up on your own server, you can set more options than the VCCS one above. But – you have to convince IT people to set it up for you
Luckily, our IT guys likes PHP and didn’t mind doing it. He said it took him about 2 minutes to install it. More info here:
http://feed2js.org/
I’ve also noticed there seems to be a lot of controversy about what RSS stands for. It stands for different things depending on what version you are talking about. The initials “RSS” are used to refer to the following formats:
* RDF Site Summary (RSS 0.90 and RSS 1.0)
* Rich Site Summary (RSS 0.91)
* Really Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0)
The RSS Advisory board that uses Really Simple Syndication for RSS2.0, after all: http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification
October 20, 2007 at 2:02 pm |
I like reminding folks of the true acronym (RSS=RDF Site Summary) because the technology underneath all flavors of RSS is RDF or Resource Description Framework, a W3C official recommendation. RDF is the foundation for processing metadata and provides interoperability between applications that exchange machine-understandable information on the Web. It’s the heart of the semantic web envisioned by Tim Berners-Lee whcih is seeing its first (and fairly weak) implementations in the media frenzy around Web 2.0 and Ajax. It’s fine to use Really Simply Syndication for the folks who just want to insert a feed somewhere, but let’s not forget the real technology under the hood or else we’ll lose the ability to modify and enhance those technologies.
December 8, 2007 at 6:52 pm |
That’s a good point on RSS. I think ‘RDF Site Summary’ is a better description. And easier to tell people. If you say ‘Really Simply Syndication’ people get this weird look on their face like “I know what syndication is, but can’t quite place it in this context.” Even the terms “Site Summary” give a better picture of what RSS does, even if a person isn’t familiar with what RDF is.