Colophon: "books on reserve" sidebar

I blogged a few days ago about syndicating the books I'm waiting for at the Ann Arbor District Library into the sidebar of my web site.  I thought I'd write up a little bit about how I'm doing it, so that it's more clear what the pieces parts are.

Let's start from the library and work our way back to the blog.  At the library, they are running an Innovative Interfaces catalog and a Drupal front end that manages user logins.  Each user of the system (and there are more than 5000 registered patrons now, for a library that has 385 copies of Harry Potter  on hold) has a private RSS feed for their holds and checked out books.  The URL is currently a keyed hash of username and password, so only you know what that link is when it's in your patron record.

I'm taking that RSS URL and sending it through Feedburner, which takes a long string of gibberish and turns it into a neat URL like http://feeds.feedburner.com/Vielmetti-AADL-Holds .  Feedburner also cleans up the feed a little bit and makes the URL link pretty to look at with a nice style sheet.  From there it goes through Feedburner's new feature called BuzzBoost (funny name) that turns the RSS into Javascript for inclusion on the page.  I wish that Typepad did the RSS transclusion on its own, but BuzzBoost looks like a good general purpose tool for sneaking in live content wherever you have a spot for Javascript.  (Tip of the hat to Rick Klau for pointing that one out in the comments.)

My blog http://vielmetti.typepad.com is hosted on Typepad, and I'm using their Typelist function to create a content block that has just the AADL holds feed in it.  Typepad has a pretty easy way to reorganize how your weblog is laid out, so when Jenny says she can't find the book links, I can swap things around some and make them more visible.  I reorganize pretty frequently to work on new ideas and satisfy the itch for change.

That's the whole story, at least at the level of the detail you'd need to get the pieces working yourself with the help of some documentation.  If you just want to have the holds show up in your own aggregator, Bloglines or My Yahoo are much better. 

UPDATE: added BuzzBoost from Feedburner to replace the old RSS-to-javascript setup.

Comments

[Rick Klau]

Ed -

Very cool use of FeedBurner. Thought I might point out that there's a short-cut for what you're doing with BuzzBoost, the new tool we released last week that turns a feed into a chunk of javascript (details here: http://www.burningdoor.com/feedburner/archives/001311.html ).

Love this idea!

--Rick

[Edward Vielmetti]

Thanks Rick - I redid the link to use BuzzBoost and it's a lot cleaner. Haven't played yet with the custom CSS options but I appreciate them, the old RSS-to-Javascript setup was not that flexible.

[Peter Cooper]

Definitely cleaner, so a good improvement! That said (and yes, this is a small plug!), it could be even cleaner and more customizable (customize every scrap of HTML and info shown about each item) if you used Feed Digest (also free - at www.feeddigest.com). You can also mix multiple feeds into the single digest if you wanted and order and filter however you like. Okay, back to normal programming now.. :)

[Peter Cooper]

Oh I should point out that that's not a replacement for FeedBurner! Just an extension, plug in FB's feed, but get more control on the output :)