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The Libguide of Libguides: 3. Custom Styled RSS Generator

Visual Style Guide

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  • Enhanced Presentation of Standard RSS Feeds and Yahoo Pipes

Guide to Visual Style

Enhanced Presentation of Standard RSS Feeds and Yahoo Pipes

Are you looking for greater flexibility in the display of your RSS feeds? Or maybe you have created an RSS feed mashup in Yahoo Pipes and you want to include that in your LibGuide. If so, this is the tutorial for you!

The following steps will give you access to custom CSS styles that have been created for displaying RSS feeds in the Tufts LibGuides system. Any standard RSS feed format can be used including feeds generated by Yahoo Pipes. What you will be doing (and don't get scared here, it's ok) is using a utlity to generate JavaScript that you will paste into a LibGuides box via the plain text editor. We'll guide you though it:

  1. Once you have the feed address (.rss, .xml, .atom, etc.), launch the RSS to Javascript Code Generator (this will open in a new window)
  2. Paste your feed address into the input box provided. A link to a feed validator is included in case you want to verify that you have a valid RSS feed.
  3. There are several options for tailoring the display of your RSS feed to your liking including:
    • whether or not to show descriptions (or how many characters of the description)
    • the number of items to display
    • whether or not to show the posted date
  4. Either preview the feed or generate the JavaScript using the corresponding buttons to the right
  5. Once you have clicked the Generate JavScript button, drag you mouse over the JavaScript that is generated to select it and then copy it (you can right-click and choose Copy)
  6. Back in LibGuides, find the guide in which you want to display your RSS feed and enter 'Edit Mode'
  7. Click the edit text link in the desired box to open up the Rich Text Editor
  8. Switch to the plain text editor by chosing the plain text editor link. This link is above rich text editor controls in the second bullet point of instructions.
  9. Paste in the JavaScript
  10. Save you changes to the box
  11. That's it. The CSS styles will apply automatically

For Yahoo Pipes Users

If you have created a mashup of RSS feeds in Yahoo Pipes you can use the steps above but first you need select the 'Get as RSS' option in Yahoo Pipes:

Yahoo Pipes Example