Feed2JS Has Left the Building
For what its worth, since I no longer work at Maricopa and soon likely cannot even access this server, I have moved the primary Feed2JS site to its own domain, thanks to some hosting offered for free by Modevia Web Services. You can find this very same site, and source code now at http://feed2js.org/. What does this mean for current users? I thought of automatically redirecting the script, but what the heck, this is a mirror that new serves 10000+ feeds per day. So if this site works fine, leave your code as is, but if it were me, I'd swap out each http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/feed/ for the new url http://feed2js.org/ in your pasted feed strings, or go to the new site and build your feeds all over again.
Download Support for Podcast Enclosure
We've yet to hear any reports of problems using the May 7 update that allows support for RSS 2.0 media enclosures, so we've rolled the code into the current downloads (mirrors have yet to be updated, this will be done by end of the week). All style sheets available from this site contain basic styles for formatting the buttons to link to the media files; some crude instructions are provided from that same link.
Beta For RSS Enclosures
I have a preliminary version of Feed2JS running on this server only that is aiming to support access to RSS enclosure media for podcast feeds. I hope I can get a few testers to try it out before it gets rolled into the download versions. There is a new option on the Feed Builder form to indicate whether enclosure media should be displayed (default is "no" just so we do not present any surprises to current users). If you have a current Feed2JS code embedded into your page, you can activate this merely by adding &pc=y to your JavaScript string, or rebuild the feed completely with our new form.
Feed2JS Updated And Mirrors
There is no time better than what is left. With only 1.5 days left before I leave Maricopa, I plundered ahead and updated the source code and site for Feed2JS. The big difference again is if you have created your own style sheets to display generated content. You must edit all CSS classes that have names like .rss_XXXXX to read .rss-XXXXX which will make it compatible with CSS standards.
Major Feed2JS Changes / Roadmap
The first week of April 2006 brings a number of changes in Feed2JS, all to make it bigger and better. First of all, anyone using the primary "jade" server at Maricopa, this server will be going offline for a few hours starrting 8:00am Tuesday, April 4 (MST), as the server will be moving from my office up to the main server room in our bulding. In the long run, this will increase the speed and uptime of our server.
Minor Fix for Atom HTML Display
Minor update to script to deal with situations where the Atom item description/content is delivered with HTML entities escaped (all HTML rendered like:
CSS Update Notice
I am almost too embarrassed to admit this, but thanks to an email from Keith K, it was pointed out the CSS class names used by Feed2JS are not exactly W3C valid since they use underscores (e.g. .rss_box) and this may/will cause display problems in Internet Explorer (See Underscores in class and ID Names)
Feed Building Bookmarklet
From a idea suggested by Bruce Arnold via email, we created a browser bookmarklet tool to help you build a Feed2JS script.
Beta Test Timezone Offset
I've been bothered by the timezone issue of items. The version of Feed2JS running on this site only has a new parameter named tz. If not defined, Feed2JS will just echo the string it finds in an item as the published date. However, if you specify your local timezone offset from GMT, it should correctly display the date and time in your local zone. For example, here in Arizona, the offset value is 7 hours ahead of GMT, so I enter -7.
Magpie Update 0.72
We just updated MagpieRSS to the released 0.72 version (some small but important security fixes), and added one more item date stamp piece of logic (Atom 1.0 uses item->created). Hopefully in the next few weeks, we will move the primary information and download site to an open source repository and develope a better method of releasing updates.
Our Clocks Have Been Wrong For a Long Time
Thanks to some keen observers who have recently noted a long standing problem with Feed2JS-- for the display of the date and item was posted, we had been using some Magpie and PHP functions to convert the date/time stamp of an item to a milliseconds value and then using the php date() function for the screen display. Yet I was overlooking the fact that the functions were converting the time into one relative to the local time on my server.
Pesky Curly Quotes
Numerous problems with strange characters in feeds are due to character encoding issues, especially content derived from sources that publish those pesky curly quotes. If your content is displaying unexpected characters, then there are two things to adjust- first is to select the UTF-8 encoding when building your feeds, but also your content page must either serve all content as UTF-8 or have in its HEAD content:
Scheduled Outage
This is a reminder that the Feed2JS server will be offline on Saturday, August 6 from 7:00 AM PDT (check world time clock for your local time) to 5:00 PM (check world time clock for your local time). Our building's internet connection will be off due to work on our electrical system.If you wish to avoid an interruption on your use of Feed2JS, we suggested modifying the JavaScript code to use on of our mirror sites instead. All you need to do is to change the part of the url that reads http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/feed/ and use instead:
New Mirror in the Netherlands
In just about 15 minutes of set up time, we had a new mirror site up and running in the Netherlands at vindbaarheid, originating from Utrecht, thanks to Mike Platenkamp.As an FYI since some folks are confused, the purpose of our mirror sites are to provide more or less a clone of this original site running on my humble server in Arizona, at other geographically spread locations around the world. I have no interest in creating gobs of mirror sites (we have plenty in the US). This is nothing much more in terms of functionality than one gets by downloading our source code and running it on your server, except you get all the pages and orange colors of this site. For an example, see the Chinese translated version of Feed2JS, which is an available service built on the download, though not strictly a mirror site.
Potential Service Outages
Please note that due to some building electrical upgrades, the server hosting Feed2JS is scheduled for some downtime as listed below. All times are Pacific Times (as if we were in L.A.). These are some long stretches but necessary.If this presents a major problem, you may want to consider switching your feeds to use on of our mirror sites. The outages are scheduled for
Did The Lights Blink Out?
Apologies if there was Feed2JS outage in the last 24 hours. I was unable to reach any of the servers in my office area and being the weekend,. I was unable to check on it. The server hosting Feed2JS had lost its connections to services, still trying to research why. For thos that ask, any outages are temporary and the service will never be shut down completely without sufficient notice.
Version 1.5, New Preview Buttons, Full Format Feeds
I have been embarrassingly delinquent in not doing a good job of versioning the feed2js code. So based on the long history list I have guestimated the current code to be version 1.5 which is totally arbitrary. Anyhow, this is now embedded in the main script, and is displayed in this site where we refer to the code.