Tinderbox and RSS

RSS is a format for syndicating your weblog (or a news site, or anything else). You can automatically create RSS files, a.k.a "news feeds," for syndication with Tinderbox.

Readers using a news aggregator can keep up with the latest RSS files from their favorite sites. Tinderbox can also act as a news aggregator and read RSS feeds from other sites, so you can automatically present the latest headlines from related weblogs and news sites on your page.

Different sites use different syndication formats: RSS 0.91, RSS 0.92, RSS 1.0, and RSS 2.0. Tinderbox can easily generate any of these formats. You can customize Tinderbox to adapt to any current or future XML format.

(Tinderbox also imports OPML files dropped onto Tinderbox views, and reads OPML outlines. More on this in a later manual!)

Setting up RSS feeds for others to use

RSS export works exactly like HTML export -- it's a template into which information is poured using template codes such as ^get(summary) to get a summary or ^text(plain) to include the whole text.

Note: the summary attribute cited above is not a built-in attribute. It's a user attribute, defined in many of the weblog templates, that holds a summary or short version of a note. You may include the first 25 words of the note by using the code ^text(plain, 25)^ instead of ^get(summary) if you prefer to generate summaries automatically.

Usually, people have two RSS templates, for example, NEWS.RSS (format of the overall news feed) and NEWSITEM.RSS (format of an individual item). Store these in you HTML export templates folder along with the other export templates for this document.

For more on creating and exporting templates, see the HTML Templates chapter of this manual.

Receiving RSS feeds automatically

To automatically fetch others' RSS 0.92 and 2.0 feeds into a Tinderbox note,

First, set the URL of a note to point at an RSS feed:

• select Document Preferences from the Edit menu or press Cmd-8
• click the HTML tab
• type the URL of the RSS feed into the URL (Web server) field
• click OK

Next, set AutoFetch to true:

• select Attributes from the Window menu or press Cmd-2
• click the System tab
• scroll to AutoFetch and click it
• enter true in the Default value field
• click Change

Manually refreshing RSS feeds

Tinderbox automatically checks your RSS feeds once they're set up and whenever you open a file, but if you don't want to wait:

• close your text space
• select Network from the Window menu or press Cmd-3
• click Fetch Now

Tinderbox will fetch the RSS newsfeed from the Net.

To control the size of your feeds

You may limit the number of items Tinderbox will import:

• select Attributes from the Window menu or press Cmd-2
• click the System tab
• scroll down in the box on the left until you reach RSSItemLimit, then click it
• enter a number in the text box to indicate the number of items you'd like to import
• click Change

To specify new RSS templates

By default, the RSS channel template is called RSSChannel and the item template called RSS. To change this:

• select Attributes from the Window menu or click Cmd-2
• scroll down and enter new values for RSSChannel and/or RSSItem
• click Change