I spent a
lot of time trying to figure this out, so am blogging about it so as to pass on the knowledge to other PSOs.
Basically, I wanted to put an RSS feed of the Sadistic Domme blog into my Niteflirt ad. But there's a lot of limitations to what you can do with a Niteflirt ad. Because of those limitations, most of the ways to publish your RSS feed into your ad won't work.
A brief discussion of each method:
- Run a server-side script on your own site to generate the HTML.
- The problem with this is it's on your own site, with no way to get it to Niteflirt. You can configure it however you like, but since Niteflirt disallows the IFRAME tag, there's no way to place it in your ad.
- Use one of a bazillion sites that turn an RSS feed into HTML for you.
- This includes things like Google Gadgets. There's scores of sites that will do this for you. The problem is, every last one of them requires you to add the feed via a SCRIPT tag with a SRC attribute. Niteflirt disallows the SRC attribute.
- Write your own JavaScript.
- The problem here is that JavaScript has to be able to read the XML generated by the RSS feed. For security reasons, JavaScript is not allowed to run on one site and read files from another. So any JavaScript running on Niteflirt cannot open an RSS feed - unless the file is on Niteflirt. You'd have to write server-side code on Niteflirt's server to get the XML file, which they're obviously not going to let you do.
- Automate submission of an updated Niteflirt ad.
- You could go ahead and write code on your own site, so that whenever you added a blog entry, the appropriate HTML would be generated and posted to Niteflirt via a command line browser. But this is not really an automated solution since if Niteflirt changes their form, it'll break the application. You're talking a very kludgy application that would be a pain to write and annoying to maintain.
So after a good 6 hours of research, I concluded that the only way to do this was to use a Flash component. Basically, if the component ran on my own site, configured the way I liked, I could insert it into a listing via the OBJECT tag.
Once I resigned myself to using Flash, I evaluated a few components. The one I ended up liking is
Tiny Flash RSS. It's free, licensed under the GPL, and runs on a PHP backend.
You can see
how it looks installed on my server as a test and
how it looks within a Niteflirt ad.
It's a simple component. It shows a rotating list of your RSS feed items, and also provides arrows to allow a user to scroll through the items directly.
To use it is simple, you download it and unzip it, edit an XML file with the URL to your feed, upload the files to a directory on your server, add a writable directory for the RSS cache, then edit the HTML.
There's three ways you edit the included HTML:
- Do a search and replace to add the URL of where you've installed it (three places in the code).
- Set the background color to whatever you want it to be to fit in your page.
- I discovered via trial-and-error that a line of the HTML won't upload into Niteflirt's form. Delete the line
<param name="enableHREF" value="true">
as this gives you an error when you upload it to Niteflirt. I'm not sure exactly what this parameter is supposed to do, but the component runs in my ad fine without it.
If you want to edit Tiny Flash RSS beyond setting the background, the full Flash source code is included. I'm not sure what version of Flash it was built in, but I discovered I couldn't open the FLA file in Flash 4 or Flash 5 (I don't do a lot of Flash development so haven't upgraded in quite a while).
If you want to build your own Flash RSS reader, there's a
tutorial available. I didn't go this route myself because I felt Tiny Flash RSS worked fine for me. But it's nice to know this tutorial is out there.
UPDATE: We found a better solution.
