Get Your Own News Reader

Here's the idea... You can easily set up a blog with an XML feed and then have the first item on your blog automatically appear on your website.

Here's how:

1. Set up a blog. We recommend Blogger.com. It's easy to do, just follow the instructions there.

2. Make note of your blog's URL. At blogger.com it will usually be yourname.blogspot.com

3. Add this code to your website HTML where you want the news box to appear:

<script language="javascript" src="http://doctoroakroot.com/tools/readatomj.php?blog=your blog URL"></script>

Note: See alternate method below.

4. The title and text in the news box have CSS classes, "title" and "text", respectively. You can use these to customize the font. You can change the class names with HTML parameters, titleclass=, and textclass=. (If you don't understand this, don't worry about it.)

5. The program assumes that your feed is named atom.xml. You can change this with HTML parameter, feed=. atom.xml is the feed that blogger.com sets up. For other blog servers you will need to change it. The program should work with either ATOM or RSS feeds.

6. The news box is yellow unless you change it with HTML parameter, bgcolor= . Note: if you want to use a numeric color, like #FFFFFF for white, replace the # with ~, e.g., bgcolor=~FFFFFF.

Alternate Method for Step 3

There is one problem with using javascript to call the newsreader. Some search engines will not be able to see the contents of your news. If you want to use your newsreader to draw search engine hits, you can use the php method. For this to work, your web site must be hosted on a server that supports PHP (most paid servers do). You may also have to have your page in a file named .php or .php4 - depending on how your server is configured.

If you meet those requirements, you can add this code to your php page instead of the javascript in step three:

<? $nf=fopen("http://doctoroakroot.com/tools/readatomp.php?blog=your blog URL",'r'); fpassthru($nf); ?>

All the other parameters will work just like in the javascript version.

This product is provided free, as is, no guarantee, no user service. But if you have problems, click here to send me an email and I'll take a look at it as time allows.