October 11, 2011
Alternate Feed2JS implementation using Google Feed API
I've used the Feed2JS service for a web site at work to convert RSS feeds into HTML to easily display feed content on web pages. Unfortunately, this service isn't very forgiving with feeds that contain invalid XML markup. In addition, the future of this service is currently in question.
This inspired me to create an alternate JavaScript implementation using the Google Feed API. This implementation has the following advantages:
- Google's Feed API is probably more reliable and robust than feed2js.org
- The Google Feed API is more tolerant of invalid feeds
- Since the RSS to HTML conversion is done client side via JavaScript, you can easily customize the output to meet your own needs
Posted at 11:11 AM
October 22, 2005
DHTML JavaScript Calendar
I’m currently working on a web application at work that needed to allow the user to input the start and end date of an event. A couple of text input boxes would work, but they would require additional instructions informing the user how to properly format the date—not a very user friendly approach. So the obvious alternative then, was to provide the user with some sort of calendar widget from which they could easily select the dates. But as you know, there is no HTML calendar form widget and I didn’t have time to write a custom widget…
I’ve been reading DHTML Utopia: Modern Web Design Using JavaScript & DOM and happened to have just recently read about a free, standards compliant JavaScript calendar so I decided to check it out and see if it would fit the bill.
I won’t go into a lot of detail other than to just say that I was very impressed with this calendar widget. It is easily configurable and can either pop-up a calendar in another window when the user clicks a link or a button, or it can be a “flat” calendar that always shows on the page. The calendar can be easily “skinned” through CSS style sheets to match the look and feel of your web site. It also allows multiple date selections and date/time selections.
This calendar turned out to be perfect for my application and did exactly what I was looking for! Thank you, Dynarch, for providing such a high quality component available to web developers for free.
Posted at 8:05 PM
October 8, 2005
cssQuery
I’ve been a big fan of Dean Edward’s IE7 standards compliance patch for Internet Explorer ever since I discovered it about six months ago. Recently I discovered another invaluable tool written by this same genius. It’s called cssQuery and it provides increased flexibility for accessing elements in JavaScript. Think of it as getElementsByTagName on steroids—LOTS of steroids! I can’t wait to try it out on one of my future projects.
Posted at 2:16 PM
