Our online calendar now features an RSS feed. What does this mean? RSS lets you pull content from one or more web sites, into another site, and have it updated in real time.
You can see it in use on our own web site, www.thedatabank.com. Look on the lower right - see the calendar items? We used to have to update those almost every day, as upcoming events turned into past events. Now, this section of our home page updates itself, based on our calendar.
How does it work? It's a bit technical, but if I figured it out, then so can you. Okay, look at our calendar (in a different window). See the square orange RSS symbol in your browser's address bar? That tells you that RSS - Real Simple Syndication - is available for the content of this web page.
Clicking that RSS symbol brings you to this page:
http://www.thedatabank.com/dpg/7/MEETING_rss.xml
...which is another version of the same information, formatted in a way that it can be pulled into another web site.
Now for the tricky part - I used Filter Feeder to create some code for our home page, which pulls it all together. There are lots of other free tools for embedding and filtering RSS content, just do a web search or ask your geekiest coworker to help you with this.
Monday, April 14, 2008
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Another detail you might be interested in: the feeds are updated nightly at 2:05AM Central. This removes expired events from your feed. They are also updated every time you create or edit an event within your Databank.
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