Feedonomics

We are still putting the finishing touches on the features I promised you for this week, but after using Twitter with Grazr for a while, I felt we had to clean up the way the widget displays a Twitter feed. So we added a new argument called itemtext that only displays the title of an item in a Twitter feed. It also fixes Del.icio.us feeds, which have always looked pretty funky in the widget. It is easier to demonstrate this new feature than describe it.

Here is a link for a widget that displays my Twitter feed without any new arguments:

http://www.grazr.com/gzpanel.html?file=http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/grazr.rss

And here is the same widget with the itemtext=off argument added:

http://www.grazr.com/gzpanel.html?itemtext=off&file=http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/grazr.rss

As you can see if you try both examples, this argument is useful for sites like Twitter that repeat the same information in both the title and contents of the feed items. When itemtext is set equal to off, only the title of the feed items appears, and it is made a link to the matching Web page. The itemtext=off argument is global, so it applies to all feeds in the widget. If you display an OPML file with this argument, all the feeds in the OPML will behave this way. You might want to have more control over this feature, so we also added a new grazr:itemtext attribute that can be applied to individual feed nodes. Here is an OPML file that has two Del.icio.us feeds. The first displays the normal feed behavior with a Del.icio.us feed, and the second has the same feed with the grazr:itemtext=”off” attribute added to it’s definition.

 All of these examples use itemtext set to off, but you can also set it to on. This is the default setting, so it probably won’t be used much. There is one situation where you might need it. If you want most of the feeds in an OPML to use the off setting, and only one or two to have it set to on, you could add the grazr:itemtext=”on” attribute to those few feeds, and then apply the itemtext=”off” argument to the entire widget.