Version 1.5 of the Flash RSS Reader has been released today. The reader now sports categories as well as a favorites category where you can add the Flash newsfeeds that you want to read. The real news in version 1.5 is the ability to add any newsfeed supporting RSS 0.91, which means that the Flash RSS reader now have become a general RSS reader, very nice. The reader gives you the option to set the Favorites category as the default start up category.
This is great work from Phil Chung. He mentions that he has gotten great help from Robert Penner, Robert Hall, Keran McKenzie, Ming Chan and Cyberfunk. So in many ways its truely been a community effort.
Hey buddy
just a minor spelling error
it’s Keran McKenzie … and my blog is http://pnut.studiowhiz.com :)
Didn’t have time to answer this one here – but I did fix it and answer you by e-mail. If nothing else :-) hehe
hey jarle,
so, i took a look at Phil’s RSS reader version 1.5, and wondered if you (or anyone else) knows how Phil was able to inplement the custom RSS feeder.
i guess the thing that i am most concerned about, is that flash can not read xml feeds from outside sources, unless a script on the server acts as a go-between ( http://weblog.bergersen.net/archives/000169.htm l). Any idea on how he got around this?
Maybe once the info is filled out, and the user clicks on ‘Add Feed’, it calls a perl script (or other script language) that takes care of all that stuff?
I am sure Phil will be happy to let you in on his secret. As far as I can tell (I don’t have access to the source code), he is using a dynamic redirect script on his web server.
Basically, all you need to do is to make a script on the server that takes a variable – like url – and then redirects to that url. So in Flash you would build url’s like
http://foo.bar/redirect.php?url=http://foo.bar/url/to/redirect/to/
If you were to make it in PHP, it would be an eays job in the PHP script:
<?php
header(“location: $url”);
?>
(Requires register globals to be on).
Michael,
You are basically right on. I use a serverside script (ColdFusion in my case) to grab the feed from a different domain and add it to the reader. I also use SharedObjects to save that new feed locally to your machine, but everytime you read that feed, it has to go through the server side script.
Jarle hit it on the head with his example. If you want my ColdFusion example, basically, you load the xml like this:
customXML.load(“http://www.philterdesign.com/dev/flashFeeds/feedRedirect.cfm?feed=” + feedURL);
where “feedURL” is the url that the user inserts. The ColdFusion script is basically just as simple as Jarle’s php script:
<cflocation url=#url.feed#/>
so i’m just accepting the “feed” variable that was appended to the url and using that to do a redirect.
Good luck!
Hey Phil,
I understand now. Thanks for getting back to me so quick!
That makes sense. I’ll be using perl, but it will be just as simple as the ColdFusion script.
Thanks again.
The one thing about RSS feeds is that they are standardized; once you pull down 1, you can pull them all down in the same exact way.
From there, all you need to do is find a way to reference a feed from something–for example, the portlet I’m building feeds from XML and then passes parameters from there, so the first XML actually tells it what feeds it’s pulling.
The code only has to be displayed once and/or can iterate to show many different feeds.
Wow, I think that was fairly convoluted, but it’s not too terribly difficult to accomplish.
any way to modify the flash component on flash mx 2004 such as changing font