Out of the Rough

Rohan December 6th, 2007

Recently needed to get RSS Feeds working on a Joomla! installation, but the default functionality within Joomla! only allows for feeds of items published to the front page. This was too limited for my requirements, as I needed to be able to produce feeds for specific categories of information within the website (nine categories in all).

Enter Run Digital’s RSS Feed Manager (RD_RSS), a 3rd-party Joomla! component, which caters for just this functionality. According to my research, there’s plenty of happy users who claim to have got it working, and it seems to have gained general acceptance as the Joomla! RSS Feed Manager of choice. All good so far.

Only problem is that what little documentation there is, is in German. And the people who wrote the component don’t seem to offer much (any) support for the product: a “here it is, use it as you will” type of thing. Strangely, there also does not seem to be anyone who has documented how they got the component working. So, after a bit of mucking around, I have managed to find a solution that satisfies my needs: a list of feed links located in the left sidebar under the main navigation - see it in action here.

Below are the steps I implemented to achieve my result - I’m sure there are probably other, more efficient and “better”, methods for implementing RD-RSS, but this is what worked for me.

1. Download and Install RD_RSS from the Run Digital website.

2. Once installed, you need to add feed categories to the component; click Components > RD RSS.

3. Click New to add a new feed and fill in the details as required.
(By default there is one feed already present, FRONTPAGE. This feed cannot be removed, but it really doesn’t matter; if you won’t be offering a feed for front-page items, then you can just ignore it.)

4. Repeat Step 3 for each category (or group of categories) for which you wish to create a feed.

5. You will finish up with a list of one or more feeds - take note of the URLs, as you will need them in Step 7, below.

6. In my specific situation, I needed a list of links that users could click on as a means of subscribing to that feed. In order to achieve this, I created a custom module in which I simply pasted links to the URLs noted in Step 5. above. To create a custom module, click Modules > Site Modules to see a list of existing modules.

7. Click New to add a new module (I called my module RSS Feeds), and fill in the following:

• Fill in the Details section (in addition to other things, this determines location and order on the page where the feed links will appear - sidebar, header, footer, etc.);
• Leave the Parameters section (not required for this method);
• In the Custom Output section, add links (from Step 5, above), one for each feed;
• In the Pages/Items section, you can choose which pages will display the list of links. If you want all pages, select All as I have done.

8. Be sure the module is Published, and click Save.

That’s all there is to it. FYI, these instructions are based on my configuration, which consists of Joomla! v1.0.12 and RD_RSS v1.x (the file name, rd_rss_v1_1.zip, implies that the component is at v1.1, but under Installers > Components it lists RD_RSS as being v1.0.0, dated December 2005, and authored by Robert Deutz).

• The Web , Design & Development , Work
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Rohan June 14th, 2007

There’s often a need to include characters in web pages that are outside the normal range found on the standard keyboard, and HTML Entity Character Lookup is a great new web app that makes this task so much easier. It works by finding the entity based on how it looks. For example typing an asterisk (*) lists all entities that look like bullets (alternatively, you could type bullet to achieve a similar list of matching entities).

Even better is the ability to give characters your own keywords for easier lookup. For example, the tilde symbol (˜) can, obviously, be looked up using the keyword tilde, but I know some people who refer to this character as a squiggle. No problem; simply find the tilde in the list from the lookup, click the + symbol and add your own keyword (in this case squiggle), and voilà, you can now find the tilde entity by typing squiggle into the keyword lookup.

Nice.

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Rohan June 8th, 2007

Well, as you can no doubt see, the first of the changes to the blog has occurred. The theme you’re looking at now is a modification of a theme called FallSeason, which replaced the original theme, Altitude. This is not, by any means, the way it will stay, but it’s a good starting point and has most of the base elements I will be working with.

I’ve got the random header images going with some of my own shots, thanks to the small piece of code referred to by David Davies. The header image changes at each page refresh - it’s not how I ultimately want the banner images to change, but it will do until I get some more time for tinkering.

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Rohan June 5th, 2007

It’s been more than a year since I first experimented with starting a blog, and after an initial burst of enthusiasm, these pages have lain dormant… I think the search for the “perfect theme” (I wanted the blog/website combination to be branded exactly the same, or as closely as possible) became all too much of a hassle. So I moved on to more urgent matters that required my attention at the time.

Well, I’m back… with some more advanced ideas for a redesign of my main site, which will encompass:

• all my work stuff, covering everything on my current site;
• pages advertising my hosting and domain registration services;
• a custom built CRM;
• a secured section for clients to log in and view their projects as ‘works in progress’;
• a link to my ’sister site’ targeting a specific niche market (don’t want to say too much now - all will be revealed in future posts);
• this blog (recently updated to the latest version, currently v2.2);
• a photo gallery.

The search is still on to pretty up the blog with a nice theme, but I’ve decided that this isn’t as critical as I was making it a year ago - in fact it is likely to chop and change a bit as I discover what this Wordpress software can and can’t do. In fact, the only requirement I have for the blog is that the banner image will change automatically, either on page refresh or after a given period of time (the reason being that I’d like to use photographs I take as banner images for the blog). This should be quite achievable, as I know there are scripts that will do what I’m after.

So, for now, it’s simply a case of start bloggin’ and worry about the details later. I have no precise timetable for when I’ll post; I guess it will depend on if/when I have something to say that I want to share with the world at large - could be hardly ever, could be every other day… I guess we’ll all just have to wait and see.

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