Wednesday, February 18, 2015; 12:17:35 PM Eastern
Scripting News is a feed reader
- I like to think my blog is interesting because of what I write here, but it's also interesting in how it works. And this is something, I think, anyone with a little experience in HTML can appreciate.
- If you open most web pages of news sites, you'll see a combination of markup, things in <angle brackets> that tell the browser how to present stuff, and the text that makes up the page. Do a view-source on the home page of the New York Times for example.
- If you do the same thing on the home page of Scripting News, you'll see something quite different. The content isn't there. Look more closely, near the top, there's a section of script code that says where it is:
var urlRss = "http://scripting.com/essayblog.xml";
var urlRiver = "http://rss.scripting.com/rivers/iowa.js";
var urlLiveblog = "http://liveblog.co/users/davewiner/rss.xml";
var urlCardFeed = "http://littlecardeditor.com/users/davewiner/rss.xml";
var urlFlickrFeed = "http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?id=22221172@N00&lang=en-us&format=rss_200";
var urlAbout = "http://scripting.com/abouttab.opml";
- Each tab on the home page displays a feed, each from a different source of content: my main blog, liveblog, cards, Flickr photos, links, river, and an outline with information about the site.
- In other words: Scripting News looks like a blog, but it's actually a feed reader. ;-)