gregdoolittle.com

i want to take the rss feed of this journal, and put it on my website. i started to write the xslt that would format my rss feed into something that looked like it came from my website. i got through a good part of it before realizing that i wouldn’t be able to reference the xslt from my rss. why not? :: as far as my class was concerned, the only way to perform an xslt transformation on an xml document was to have a line referring to the xslt in the xml doc. i have no way of modifying the rss document to add any style sheet or transformation template to it… :: so, i’ve been researching different approaches to the solution. the two that sound like they might work best are javascript and php.

javascript solution would mean learning about DOM and writing a script that will load my rss file as an xml document, load my xslt document, and return the result of the transformation. this script would be inserted on the body of a page dedicated to syndicating my journal. it would automatically update itself each time the page is loaded. the only problems with this method of syndication are that the content will not be searchable by a web-spider/search-engine (no biggie for me), and that not all browsers are javascript enabled. php is a very similar solution, except that the two javascript problems are solved, and a new one arises: i have no clue how to write php. i’m going for the javascript / DOM model for accessibility reasons. it will also be a nice primer for my javascript course i’m taking next semester.