James Barlow

Nothing to see here. Move along.

I choose the title of this blog entry in deference to Douglas Adams's analysis of Sunday afternoons:

In the end, it was the Sunday afternoons he couldn't cope with, and that terrible listlessness which starts to set in at about 2.55, when you know that you've had all the baths you can usefully have that day, that however hard you stare at any given paragraph in the papers you will never actually read it, or use the revolutionary new pruning technique it describes, and that as you stare at the clock the hands will move relentlessly on to four o'clock, and you will enter the long dark teatime of the soul.

This Sunday afternoon, I have dipped my toe briefly into the shallow end of the mashup experience. I have created a custom Drupal block that pulls content from the FeedBlitz RSS aggregator to display my regular reading list on a custom page of my blog. Or, to put it another way, I've cut and paste some automatically generated code from one browser window to another and pressed the "OK" button. But the first sentence sounds more 1EE7.

If anyone else wants to have a go, and hopefully come up with a more elegant solution, here's what I did:

Feedblitz has a widget that lists the contents of a subscriber's subscription database - i.e. the list of all RSS feeds that a subscriber reads on a regular basis.

Using Feedblitz's Widget Generator, I obtained a short bit of Javascript that does the relevant bit of content extraction. To display this on my Drupal Blog, I created a custom block containing just this snippet of code. Ideally I wanted the blog roll to be visible on every page of my web site, located in the left sidebar. Unfortunately the Feedblitz output doesn't seem to be constrained by the width parameter in the iframe, so it all looks a bit untidy.

As a compromise, I've created a new static page on my site, configure the custom Drupal block to be displayed in the content section of the entire site, and then used a filter to limit display the block on the new page.(Quick tip: filtering is done using the Drupal path, not the site URL, so in my case the filter is "node/25") This page is now referenced by a link in the main site menu.

Et, voila!  My Blog Roll. Not the greatest bit of integration in the world, but it killed half an hour.

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