Business News with RSS

sugeng — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 05:00:25 +0000

Keeping track of business news is an important for business people. With so many things happening in the business world, it is not easy to do so. There are so many hours a day to look through all the newspaper and news website. Luckily, with technology we can aggregate business news with RSS.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It is a technology that publishes frequently updated works. It is normally used for blogs and news. The output of RSS is called feed. RSS feeds can be read using RSS reader, feed reader or aggregator. The output format is XML (eXtended Markup Language). This is a universal format that can be read by many different programs.

The user subscribes to a feed by entering the feed’s URI (uniform resource identifier) into the reader or by clicking on the RSS icon () in a browser that will initiate the subscription process.

In this post I would like to introduce sending feed to JavaScript that you can post on your webpage. As an example you can see my Business News page. This page is produced using the service from Feed2JS.

First you have to find the RSS source of the web address for the feed. When you are on the news page that you would like to get the feed, you need to find the RSS link (or sometimes called syndication). You can usually find such as:

Just copy the link address and paste onto Feed2JS and follow the instructions.

On your blog, just create a new page and past the provided JavaScript. Just like me, you can put few news feeds on the same page so that you can read all the news together. If you are more advanced, you can even customize the sytle with your own stylesheet. You can do that on the style page of Feed2JS.

Actually there are many other sites with similar features, but I found out Feed2JS is stable and easy to use.

Please share your experience as I am also learning and interested in new and better ways to do things.

JavaScript for Business Blogs

sugeng — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 07:00:47 +0000

JavaScript is a scripting language and an interesting component to the webpage programming. Due to its flexibility, JavaScript has become one of the most popular programming languages on the web. It is also easier to learn. The popularity of JavaScript became even better when AJAX was introduced to the professional programmers circle. Ajax stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. It is a group of interrelated web development techniques for the creation of interactive web applications. Together with JavaScript, Ajax has brought an increase in web page interactive animation. In fact, we can use JavaScript for Business Blogs.

Primary use of JavaScript is to write functions to be included in HTML pages. Examples of JavaScript are opening or popping up of new pages, changing of images when the mouse cursor moves over them, interactive menus and many other interesting applications. For blogging, ready-made JavaScript can also be inserted into a widget or a post easily for it to function properly. This method is being used by many people to create a fun and interesting blog utilizing embedded music player, changeable mouse pointer, interactive cartoon character online and many others. You can an example at a blog by Garry Shi.

From business perpective, anything that can help drive traffic and let visitors buy more products and more frequently is definitely very welcome. Having said that, it is very important to keep in mind to use only those JavaScript that fulfill the three requirements above, increase customer, increase sales amount and increase frequency of sales. There are many interesting JavaScript applications, but not all can fulfill the three requirements. Some are just fun to look at and contribute nothing. To make it worse, some may cause confusion to your visitors. So, instead of getting interested in buying your products, the visitors got confused and clicked away and never come back.

There are many resources for free JavaScript download available. You can visit JavaScript Engines That Generate Tailor Made Code by Ed Zivkovic for a start. For JavaScript download, you can visit JavaScript Kit download page and The JavaScript Source. For JavaScript tutorial, w3schools.com has various kinds of free tutorial including JavaScript Tutorial. Personally, I also like the JavaScript tutorial at JavaScript Learning Center.

In the future I will introduce some of the useful JavaScript for use in business blogs. In the mean time, please also share JavaScript that you like.

Internet Business Toolbox» JavaScript

Business News with RSS

JavaScript for Business Blogs