One of the last major tasks I had set for myself while on vacation was to come up with an RSS feed partners page for Erie Gay News.
About a year ago, I noticed that one of the local bars had pasted in the calendar from our web site onto their site. However, the calendar was out of date. I figured that it would be kind of a pain for them to have to copy and paste new entries and take off old ones every time that I made a change, so I hunted for a script that would consume the RSS feeds that I already had. I found a rather nice one at Landmark Project. Apart from the webmaster initially pasting in the code, there is no further work – we maintain the content, and the other site stays updated.
It occurred to me that there were other relevant sites that could also carry the same code, which meant that the original research and development for the code paid off. I saw it as a mutually cooperative and beneficial arrangement: the more sites that carried the RSS feeds, the more likely that folks would be to find news and events. If I am looking at this correctly, everyone wins! And since it is an automatic thing, no one has to do any additional work past the one time pasting in of the JavaScript snippet.
I wanted to give the sites that carry our RSS feed some extra love, and I also wanted to get the code out there to make it easier for other sites to paste in. I did some database design and coding, and added it on to the existing resource section of the database and also created the new RSS feed partners page. I added a drop down to the page so that I folks could easily jump to the other feed. I have only pushed the calendar and news RSS feeds, but there are others as well.
Hmm, just realized that I should add some kind of indicator about RSS stuff to the resource page. Oh well, that should be pretty quick to do. I should also try to write some kind of article for the web site to let folks know about the new feature.
I have some social stuff for tomorrow, which is good since I should balance out. But I do feel pretty good about getting this done.
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