RSS feed in WebCT

Say you have a blog, like this one, or some other RSS feed that you would like to incorporate into your WebCT course. Sounds like a good idea to me. Or maybe you maintain a list of public bookmarks on a site like FURL or del.icio.us both which have RSS subscription possibilities. If you are not sure what RSS is, not to worry. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. An RSS feed is made up of code (XML) that a user can subscribe to and is then pushed out to other places you might be more inclined to visit like your google homepage or news aggregator or even a WebCT page.

The site that makes this so easy to do in WebCT is feed2js.org. This site will generate all the code necessary to build a simple RSS aggregator for yourself or your students. All you need to know is the URL for the RSS feed. This is usually a little button somewhere that says RSS or XML or ATOM. If you click on that, your screen typically doesn't look too pretty, but your address bar will contain the URL that you need. Select it and copy it. The feed for this blog is http://abbreviated.blogspot.com/atom.xml.

Then you visit Feed2js.org and click on the Build tab. Paste in the URL, make your selections, preview your feed and finally click the Generate JavaScript button. Select this script and copy it.

Then inside WebCT, create a new HTML file and paste in the script. Save it and take a look at your handiwork. Now, everytime that blog or RSS feed has something new added to it, your page will change automagically. If I update my blog, my feed page is updated as well. A great way to incorporate blogs reading into your WebCT course.

Thanks to Jason Vetter for showing this at the WebCT User Conference!