Newsgator Forums / NewsGator Online / Editor's Desk - Widgets and Buzz / Feed history in my Widget? / Latest Posts

RE: Feed history in my Widget?

Jenny Blumberg — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 14:14:33 GMT

Pete,

I checked with our platform guys and widgets have not been set up to display SLE feeds properly. So to manipulate the order of a regular RSS feed, you will have to tweak the pubdates. If you want the order of posts to change predictably, be sure to use GUIDs for each of your posts (more info here)

Also, to refine what posts show up in the widget, simply use the Manage Articles utility within Editor's Desk. More info in our user's guide here.

RE: Feed history in my Widget?

Widgeteer — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 09:39:35 GMT

Hmm...one extra point if you'll see this...having added the namespace declaration to support SLE to my feed, and the tag to cause the feed to be treated as a list, now my MediaRSS retrieval of images for my posts seems to be intermittent at best. Do you have any inkling for whether this could be related? It's the only change I've made that I can think of...

Thanks,
Pete

RE: Feed history in my Widget?

Widgeteer — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 22:26:10 GMT

Dan, that was just the answer I needed. Easy as could be.

Thanks!
Pete

RE: Feed history in my Widget?

Dan Borrego — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 14:55:08 GMT

Widgeteer,

It sounds like switching to a simple list type feed would get you exactly what you are looking for. Look at some of the documentation in this NewsGator wiki page:[i] [url=http://developer.newsgator.com/wiki/index.php?title=Ensure_Your_Post_Items_Appear_in_the_Correct_Order]Ensure Your Post Items Appear in the Correct Order[/url][/i].

The basic story is this. For regular feeds (blogs, latest news, etc.) we aggregate the content from the feeds, and store them in our database so that people can read them at their leisure. If I go on vacation for a month (I wish), when I come back I may want to see all the stuff I missed while I was gone. If NewsGator only served up what is currently on the feed, i may miss a lot. It's sort of like the difference between going to the library and pulling up the microfiche for all the New York Times over the last year, and going down to the newsstand and buying today's copy.

But a list feed is for something like say, "Billboard's Top 40 hits". Or "Current NBA League Standings". It doesn't make sense to show things that are no longer on the list, and the order is important but not "pubdate" related at all.

Read over the docs. I think you'll agree that this is the way to go.

Feed history in my Widget?

Widgeteer — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 13:36:37 GMT

Hi, I'm getting started with Widget development. I'm trying to base a widget on a feed, which is generated every hour and is random assortment of items selected from our content. It's not based on the latest published items.

I get that this is somewhat against the spirit of RSS, but thought it might be possible anyway. What I see is that my 10 random items make it into the feed but previously grabbed items seem to be held by newsgator, since later items from the past still seem to make it into my widget, which grabs three off the top. So, even though my current feed contents have changed, since the items in the feed at any given time might not be the LATEST by pubDate, the latest by pubDate (including those grabbed over some past timeframe) still 'win' in terms of making it into the widget.

I can imagine how I could hack the pubDate in the feed to somehow reflect faux-currentness for the feed's current contents. This feed is purposed only for my widgets that behave this way, and not promoted or published anywhere else. But is there something I can do in Newsgator's toolkit to prevent holding of items not currently in the feed? Are my assumptions about NewsGator's treatment of the items correct?

Thanks for any help.