Rob Wilkerson

Like most folks in the technical community, I spent a significant amount of time reading blogs - particularly those of other members of that same technical community.

One of my favorite features of a number of those blogs is the section that links to other blog authors. These "pods" offer a great mechanism for introducing readers to new authors, new perspectives and still more time dedicated to reading. More and more, though, I find myself wishing I could see just a little of what these other authors are about. I can skip other authors who focus on, say, quilting. Or on Armenian ostrich farming. Anything that saves me time, in this respect, is a good thing so I wrote a pod for BlogCFC to offer just that.

The pod, cleverly called iRead, consumes one or more user-defined feed URIs and displays a link to the feed site as well as a user-defined number of item links. With this pod, at a glance, a visitor can see not only who the feed author is, but just a little bit of what they're writing about.

Requirements

• ColdFusion MX 7.0.x
• BlogCFC 5.6.002. Other versions may work, but only this one has been tested.
  

Features

• User can override the feed title, if desired
• User can specify a number of feed items that will be displayed for each feed individually
• Valid, standards-compliant XHTML/CSS output
• To reduce the performance impact, most of the rules I've discussed in an earlier post are followed

Known Issues & Limitations

• Supports RSS 2.0 feeds only
  
• If the homepage is reloaded twice after a reinit then the base styles will be lost. This is due to the fact that I wanted my code to meet current standards and that the entire content of the homepage is cached for performance reasons. To avoid this issue:
• Load two different blog pages after each reinit. Other blog pages are not cached so thoroughly and, when rendered, the pod injects the style sheet into the cache for later availability.
• Remove the section of code that writes the embedded style sheet to the head tag. The style sheet will be written into the body of the document and the styles should be available without fail.

Planned Enhancements

• BlogCFC 5.7 Support
  
• Support for RDF and Atom 1.0 feeds

I've submitted the project to RIAForge for hosting since I can't host the code at InstantSpot . If it's approved, I'll post the URI once I've posted the code. If it's not approved, I'll have to look for another option. Likewise, I also can't use this pod on InstantSpot, so if anyone installs it, I'd appreciate any feedback.

$('blog').update (

I didn't intend for that last paragraph to sound critical in any way.  I understand why the good folks at InstantSpot made the decisions they made and don't disagree with those decisions.  I merely meant it to be a statement of fact that I wrote this pod and would appreciate any feedback from anyone who uses it since I can't.  My apologies to Dave and Aaron if the words seemed to imply something I didn't intend.

)