Updated 16-Aug-2006 to reflect Feed2JS's move to http://feed2js.org
I never thought anyone would want me to syndicate my blog and put links to my latest articles on their website. But Marj Kibby in Australia with her very nice dog raising and training blog Choose and Raise a Puppy did just that. So I started thinking about how I might provide an HTML feed that could be included into blogs using client-side JavaScript as not all web/blog writers are developers who can integrate this data on the server side.
Well Google to the rescue: the Feed To JavaScript Open Source project provides a really great service that exactly fits the bill. If you have a website or blog and wish to list the latest articles from another website you can just fill out a form on the Feed2JS site and get the HTML to paste into your website. All you do is supply the RSS feed from the source site to Feed2JS, select the options and click Preview or Generate JavaScript to get the code you need. Feed2JS does all the "heavy lifting".
Here is an example of the generated HTML as it would appear in your website using the current data from this site:
The code for the above is a single (long) line of code:
<script src="http://feed2js.org/feed2js.php?src=http%3A%2F%2Fagilitynerd.com%2Fblog%2Findex.rss10&chan=y&desc=0&date=n" type="text/javascript"></script>
There are many other ways to configure/display the information from AgilityNerd on your site. Just go to: http://feed2js.org/index.php?s=build and enter: http://agilitynerd.com/blog/index.rss10 in the URL text entry box. Then answer the other questions.
Feed2JS kindly caches the latest RSS feed from the source site you specify and replies with the above HTML each time someone visits a page on your site. This has the added advantage of not taxing the webserver of the source site to feed your website; which is nice for sites like this one with a small monthly bandwidth quota.
Feed2JS also has a number of ways to style the HTML that is delivered so you can change the look of the links to match your site. Of course, web developers fluent in CSS can just style the HTML directly.
For Blosxom bloggers I've been playing around developing a new plugin based on the headlines plugin to provide this same functionality. I hope to post this new plugin when/if I get it working. Either way I strongly recommend Feed2JS, it is a great project developed in the true spirit of the Open Source movement.