Using Magpie RSS
December 12th, 2005 by Sarah KingMagpie RSS is an RSS parser available free from SourceForge.
It consists of a handful of scripts which sit on your site and creates a cache file which needs to be chmod’d to 755 or 777 – you may need to use your FTP tool to do that – or Magpie may do it for you.
So, what do you need to do? Read the rest of this entry »
Adding RSS to your website
December 12th, 2005 by Sarah KingThis is the main page of a series (yet to be written) of How-To guides for adding RSS feeds to your website.
It’ll cover HTML and PHP scripted sites and all the tools will be free to use.
Why HTML? Well, some blogging systems and the Blogger sites don’t allow the user to add serverside scripts. Poop to them, but until they relax or allow some controlled way around it then those sites need to be treated as pure HTML.
| Method | Type | Cache | 3rd Party? | SEF | Score | Demo |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Magpie RSS | PHP | Yes | No | Yes | 10 | here |
| DOMIT! RSS | PHP | Yes | No | Yes | 5 | here |
| CaRP | PHP | Yes | No | Yes | 4 | here |
| SimplePie | PHP | Yes | No | Yes | 10 | here |
Blocking Right Mouse Clicks
April 14th, 2005 by Sarah KingWhen I’m navigating around a good site I’ll often have several pages open at once, either as IE windows, or Firefox tabs. I’ll see a link and think “I need to read that when I’m done here, I’ll load it now”, right mouse click and get it going.
Sometimes people are trying to protect their images and page source by blocking the right mouse click. This really annoys me and usually I don’t proceed with the site. The owner has just lost all credibility.
Why that’s pathetic
- The main browser menu still works and will reveal the source
- You are only viewing the html and javascript – anything that is intellectual property should be contained in the serverside script
- Any javascript should be in a separate file, harder to get to but still accessible.
- If you’re trying to protect your images it’s too late, they’re already in my cache and I can retrieve them from there if I really, really want them, but copyright helps. If they’re not needed for a link then consider hiding their location by placing them as backgrounds in the CSS. Not foolproof but the casual image stealer will be stumped.
So if you’re tempted to throw some javascript like this on the page, please, please think again.
