remote
     synthesis

Add dynamic content to your site with RSS and ColdFusion - Adobe Edge

Posted on Mar 19, 2007

As Peter Bell already noted, I had my first article for Adobe Edge published. It officially gets sent out tomorrow, but you can read it as part of the March issue by going here. The code uses an updated version I contributed back to Ray Camden of his RSS.cfc to read in RSS feeds to generate dynamic content on a simple site. The article is geared towards beginners, but might be of interest to anyone (and includes my first forays into Captivate demos).

On a slight tangent, with all the talk lately about promoting CF in the broader community, it would be great if people helped get the word out about the article. I would like to see more ColdFusion content in places like the Edge newsletter which reaches over one million subscribers, most of whom probably have little or no ColdFusion experience. However, that won't happen unless the interest justifies it (which I suspect in the past it hasn't). So, at the risk of sounding blatantly self-promotional, help me get the word out and drive some visits to the article.

Comments

I must say, remote synthesis has always been innovative with new ideas and its theme to help the begginers. :)

Posted By Dedicated Hosting / Posted on 03/19/2007 at 8:22 PM

My only concern about doing something like this would be bandwidth. I blogged a bit about this topic at http://musetracks.instantspot.com/blog/index.cfm/2007/3/18/Consuming-an-RSS-Feed-with-ColdFusion, but I'm not familiar with Ray's RSS.cfc so he may be handling these concerns.

If my site has even moderate traffic and an HTTP GET request is being made to the feed URI for every request made to my site then there's likely to be a lot of unnecessary traffic. The feed isn't going to be updated that frequently.

When I wrote my feed aggregator, I had the luxury of storing the XML I retrieved in the database so I didn't have to retrieve it every time my page was requested. I also stored the E-Tag and Last-Modified response headers so I could test them in each of my requests to the feed URI. If no changes had been made the server simply returned a 304 header and very little bandwidth was wasted. Does RSS.cfc do anything similar? Maybe using one of the shared scopes?

Posted By Rob Wilkerson / Posted on 03/20/2007 at 1:50 PM

I saw your caveat related to overuse, but didn't relate it directly to my post. Sorry about that. Your own page performance is an issue, of course.

The (potential) functional issue, though, is feed authors (or their hosting agents) who monitor bandwidth. If a pattern of "abuse" by certain IPs or, depending on if/how the user-agent is defined in the HTTP request, the user agent then they may simply elect to block that IP/user agent. Now that dynamic content you've carefully crafted simply isn't there.

Posted By Rob Wilkerson / Posted on 03/20/2007 at 2:04 PM

Nice article Brian, what i tend to do when aggregating feeds is use Google, they do all your fetching from multiple sites and i just grab a single feed, i've blogged about it here: http://www.succor.co.uk/index.cfm/2006/10/19/Using-Google-Reader-and-RSScfc-to-aggregate-feeds

Posted By nick tong / Posted on 03/20/2007 at 4:16 PM

Congratulations on your first Edge article, Brian. It was so easy to understand the concepts that I already implemented a Flickr feed on my own site. Works great!

Thanks!

Posted By Glenn Gervais / Posted on 03/21/2007 at 2:31 PM

I'd be interested in seeing an online supplement on caching such information so that GET requests aren't issued with each page load.

If the article is for beginners, having an online supplement regarding caching specifically targeted to this case may introduce them to your blog and other online Cold Fusion resources.

Posted By Lyle / Posted on 03/21/2007 at 6:36 PM