Web development question
I’m trying to get Newscorp to support this project I want to work on for the paper, but they suck ass so I have to do all this legwork myself. I gots me some questions for you web savvy types.
Alright so here’s some background. I’ve been covering this story about the city’s plan to redevelop an area known as Willets Point in Queens, which sits across the street from Shea Stadium.
It’s a 65-acre site that currently houses 260 businesses that are mostly auto related and its disgusting. They have no sewers, street lights or fully paved roads.. which is sort of the city’s responsibility to provide but that’s another story.
At any rate, its also environmentally contaminated because of the industrial uses and lack of sewers, so the city envisions bulldozing the entire site to make way for this wonderful green neighborhood with thousands of housing units and millions of square feet of office and retail space.
The businesses don’t want to go anywhere and now its looking like the city would have to use eminent domain to get them out. So yeah, its a beaurocratic mess that I cover exhaustively and eats up my life.
Here’s where my idea comes in. Something I feel that gets lost in all of this is the human element, the people that actually have worked in this area in some cases for 60 years. I want to create a blog called Faces of Willets Point or something similar and do quick 250-word vignette profiles of workers there that would run a few times a week.
Our website, as I’ve shown you (www.yournabe.com), is a piece of garbage and we don’t currently have the capability to create a blog on the site. Yes really.
So now, I’m looking to make a blog on my own that could be linked from the site. What I need to know is how easy it would be to create an RSS feed for the blog that could appear on Yournabe.com.
What my editor envisions is, ideally, something that would include a rudimentary logo and either a summary of the most recent story on the site, or links to the last few most recent stories.
Because our web people are totally incompetent, I essentially have to deliver the ready made coding to them that they could just plop somewhere on the site. You know, cos that’s my job as a reporter. Lame.
Anyway, can anyone help me out with this/point me in the right direction???
Comments
Just about any blogging engine, be it something you run yourself like wordpress or typepad or a service you sign up for like blogger or tumbler, is going to feature an RSS feed. It will be built in. You can get your RSS feed link simply by clicking the RSS button that appears in your address bar in any recent web browser.
However.
Parsing said RSS feed into usable content requires some dynamic programming. If your site is using some sort of content management system (which I’m guessing it is by the use of .txt files for your articles [which, btw, is severely hurting your SEO]), you might have some difficulty doing that sort of parsing. If that’s the case, you may want to look into creating a Google Gadget (http://www.google.com/webmasters/gadgets/) which will do the parsing for you and give you drop-in code.
And if your company decides they want to pay someone to do this stuff right… you know who to get in touch with.
Thanks Hutch, believe me, if I could get them to pay to do a damn thing about any of that horrific site’s woes, i’d post that shite up here lickity split.
I’ve taken a look at the google gadget and I think it’s probably my best bet. Would something like
this work? I’m looking to present as many options as possible.
On a side note, I’ve noticed the problem about the SEO, but on my own I certainly cant explain it. if you get a minute can you detail why the .txt files are hurting it so badly?
This is so ridiculously frustrating, a picture perfect example of why print journalism is fading fast. It’s mind boggling to me. As a reporter who gets paid shit, I am coming to them and saying hey, i’m willing to do this extra work, give you this supplemental coverage because I believe in the project, its purpose and think it will help modernize our publication to boot.
They’re answer is we, one of the largest media organizations on the god damn planet, cant do any of it for you but if you go outside your zone of expertise and gift wrap the product for us we’d be willing to listen to a presentation on it. Fucking brilliant.
The blidget could definitely work, Steve. You might also want to look into Yahoo Pipes. I think that also has widget-type capabilities, but with the added bonus of being able to combine several RSS feeds.
As for the .txt files, google doesn’t realize it’s HTML so it doesn’t look for HTML. It doesn’t look for links or try to figure out what the headers are for more important keywords. It basically just indexes it as a bunch of text with no real meta information on it.
Thanks again. Hopefully now that I can offer some form of explanation, I can get them to do something about the SEO problem. Although, its still highly unlikely.
Well, about a month later, I’ve managed to fight through the bureaucratic nonsense and it actually looks like we’re going to formally launch the blog wednesday.
I feel pretty good about it, mostly because it’s almost entirely out of their control (we’re using the blidget on our homepage. It’s exciting too, because I really think people might actually read it.
Thanks for your help Hutch. You guys can check out the mostly finished product here:
I welcome you guys to tear it apart and break my spirit. I might also make a cheesy post on Wednesday encouraging people to check out the official launch to generate a better hit total to report to newscorp so that maybe, just maybe, they’ll recognize a medium other than print as valid.
Who did you get to do this? It’s actually pretty well done.
Thanks. I did it myself actually, that’s the only way I could get them to go for it. I even had to pay to map the domain name to the one they registered.
I guess in the end that’s better though, I wouldn’t exactly trust the idea in the hands of the people that made our website.
Steve, what’s the little smiley face in the right margin there?
Hah.. I’ve noticed that. It appears on all wordpress-based blogs for some reason.. in different places.
Hah.. I’ve noticed that. It appears on all wordpress-based blogs for some reason.. in different places.The only way to get rid of it is to shell out more money for the custom CSS upgrade. It’s probably just going to bug me forever.
No way, it’s easy to get rid of. What’s your template called? I can tell you what file and line #’s to delete.
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