Your own search engine and RSS feed

Written for Tav of the WFA, but the basics apply to all.

If you're using one of the main pieces of blogging software that are available they pretty much all come with an RSS feed and internal search tool built-in. If however you aren't; let's say you want some more flexibility in your blog posts don't like the licence terms, or simply have been doing this longer than most of the tools got to a reliable point how do you join in the fun?



I'll start with the RSS feed as that's the simplest - it's an XML file. If you're already using your own bit of software chances are you're already writing HTML so this shouldn't be a huge step.

At its most basic a RSS feed is a list of several items each comprising a title a description and a link with all items enclosed in a standard RSS specific body-style tag.

So if I were to create an RSS feed of the latest items for Tav it would look like this-

<?xml  version="1.0" ?> 
<rss version="2.0">
<channel>

<title>The Wyre Forest Agenda</title> 
 <description>Weblog of Tavis Pitt on Wyre Forest</description>
<link>http://www.wfa.org.uk</link>

<item> 
<title>Monday 4 January 2010: School's nostalgic exhibition

</title>
<description>From Stourport News and Kidderminster Times, 

Friday 3 June 1977...</description>
<link>http://www.wfa.org.uk/?/cal/20100104</link>
</item>

</channel>
</rss>

Save it as an XML file then in the head of your main page add in

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" 

title="WFA RSS Feed" href="http://www.wfa.org.uk/feed.xml" />

New items would go above the old items, once you hit 15 take off the last one in the list. So that's the downside, blog software manages that for you you have to add it in manually unless you can auto-generate it from tags in your entry.

Okay onto the search engine and this is even easier. Rather than write one yourself use Google. You need a Google account, but that shouldn't be a hardship they don't ask for much information. Just visit here and follow the steps.


So is that it? Well not quite for Tav. See he writes his entries in their own separate htm files so clicking on a link from either the feed or search results will leave a rather blank page with no real way to navigate. In this instance he's spotted this flaw and has a small snippet of vbscript that checks to see if it's in a frame and if not puts one around it. Sadly vbscript is one of those delights from Microsoft that tend only to work in their own creations.

So as Tav loves his javascript here's an alternative specific to his needs to try.

<script language="JavaScript">
  if (window.frames.length == 0) {
    window.location = window.location.hostname + "/?" +

window.location.pathname;
    };
</script>

Not tested, but should work for every browser.

That should be that.