More webbish fiddling from Stag House,
Cockermouth.
We've been rummaging around Cockermouth's
Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds, and this is what he
found. Actually, this page is intended as a demonstration
of how a simple RSS fed page can be built to exploit the JCP Mirror system
and its use of RSS.
We've taken the top five (therefore latest) Jobcentre Plus entries
for Cockermouth; some Cockermouth news provided by our local paper,
The Times and Star,
and an National/International top news story. We've then asked your
web-browser to fashion the results with our 'navigation' stylings. If
you've Javascript enabled, then the page will appear as the RSS feeds
are retrieved, so you don't have to wait for the last item to be loaded
to start reading. Without Javascript, or with it switched off, the page
should appear correctly, if a little less dynamically.
Technical Notes are our way
of writing up the nitty-gritty of these sort of things. Deliberately
set in a formal, past-tense, third-person 'scientific' style,
we'd agree that they're not the lightest of reads. We do hope
you find them useful however, and we'd be delighted with any feedback,
good or bad, you have on them.
His name is Martin
Sullivan. He's a fifty-something some-time computer programmer
living in the quaintly named town of Cockermouth in north-west
England.
The Company
ZOIS Limited is basically a vehicle for Martin and his
OLTP work, he owns
it. You can find out more about it elsewhere on the main site.
Pro-Bono Plug
Martin is currently on a health sabbatical,
but is interested in the odd bit of pro-bono work by the way of
therapeutic recovery. So, if you've anything that he can tackle on a
non-commercial basis from his base in Cockermouth please let him
know. Unsurprisingly, he's particularly interest in biology, again,
and the application of computing to it.
This page is both rather crude and complicated. It started with
fewer than twenty-odd lines of PHP,
which we'll happily share with you. It has, however, become rather
more convoluted as a Javascript asynchronous element was added to it,
and then fixed so that you'ld still get more-or-less the same thing with
Javascript switched off. We've now written these these shenanigans up as a
Technical Note.
You can also build somewhat more sophisticated things than
this using a Content Management System or Blogging software,
popular examples being Drupal and Wordpress. We already know, from our
server logs, that some of you are doing just that.
This is vaguely another Technology Demonstrator. It is wholly dependent
on the Jobseekers Direct web-site and the fine fore-mention news sites
for content. It's their content and although they don't actually state
it, it's probably their copyright too (so we accept no liability for
the content). If anybody is unhappy about the subject-matter of this
Demonstrator let us know and we'll happily take it off-line.
We've had a bit of feedback, not a lot, but enough to make us do
stuff ...
Reworked and Reformatted
Following the release of the Technical Note, this page was
revisited. It had gotten rather wordy, and the interesting technical bit
occurred below the bottom margin, unobserved. The text, including this
Updates section, has now been shuffled around to bring these important and
illustrative things to the fore. 2011-07-03
A Generalised Version of this Page
An anonymous reader contributes:
"That's cool, but a bit 'Cockermouth'. What about a similar page for
my somewhat larger and more important town?"
"Once on that page there's a search form for fine tuning and
you can bookmark your favourite. The somewhat generalised approach
means no localised News feed or picture, but I'm sure you get the
idea". 2011-05-17
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