No doubt that Web2.0 is one of the best things that happened in our lifetime (besides the internet itself). When we mention Web2.0 first things that come into our minds are AJAX, rounded corners, clean and light layouts and of course RSS feeds. Nowadays, you either provide an RSS feed or consume it in your web app using AJAX/JavaScript.
The only bad thing is that you can not request cross-site content with AJAX requests. Requesting someone else’s RSS in your JavaScript falls into this limitations. One way to overcome this problem is to apply a server-side proxy workaround. However, there is even better solution and workaround – RSS to JSON conversion.
Basically, using Google Feeds API service and jQuery plugin you can request and get any RSS from different domain converted into the JSON object in your javascript.
Let’s see an example of RSS2JSON converter:
<script src="jquery.js"></script>
<script src="jquery.jgfeed.js"></script>
<script>
$.jGFeed('http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/26767000.rss',
function(feeds){
// Check for errors
if(!feeds){
// there was an error
return false;
}
// do whatever you want with feeds here
for(var i=0; i<feeds.entries.length; i++){
var entry = feeds.entries[i];
// Entry title
entry.title;
}
}, 10);
</script>
In order to have universal client-side RSS to JSON converter you first need to include jquery.js and Google Feeds API plugin jquery.jgfeed.js. Then use jQuery plugin and Google Feeds API to get reliable and fast RSS to JSON(P) converter.
The code above gets Twitter RSS feeds in JSON format and does whatever it wants with it. Great workaround isn’t it :)
To see jGFeed()’s argument lists and how to use it please read this post.