Using the new Remote RSS Feed Component

Beth Allen:

Thanks Bruce! Appreciate your filing the enhancement request.

Is there any way to track feed subscriber statistics within the CMS or is Feedburner our only option?

Bruce Keilin:

Bobby, this thread is discussing the consumption of RSS feeds by CMS. Are you wanting to track the popularity of the individual consumed items or are you asking how to track RSS feeds generated by CMS and consumed elsewhere?

Sorry about that. I read the thread quickly. I was talking about RSS that is generated through CMS and consumed elsewhere.

Bruce Keilin:

No problem, Bobby, just wanted to make sure I was answering the right question.

I'd say Feedburner is a good option for many/most situations. If you have an analytics package and you want to track results using that package, you could create a custom RSS feed using the XML document content type and a List Template that renders XML instead of HTML. That way you could pass a source code or other URL parameter in the link to each story and you could put something into the single display template for the story that reads the source code/URL parameter and does the right thing to inform your analytics package.

For those of you who found that paragraph a little too abstract, here is what I'm talking about.

1. Create a List Template for the Content Type that you want in your feed that renders the list in RSS-compatible XML. Add a special URL parameter to the link to each item (in this case fromRSS=true.) Here is an example template:

    Fri, 21 Nov 2008 09:04:37 -0600    



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2. Create a new instance of an XML Document (note, you may need to contact support to get the built-in XML document content type enabled for your site)

3. Insert a list of the appropriate items into the XML document. Configure the List component to render the list using the template you wrote in step 1.

4. Update the single display template that renders the feed item to check for the "fromRSS" URL parameter and "inform" the analytics package if the parameter exist. The actual implementation details depend on your package and what you want to track. For example,

That's a helpful suggestion. Thank you.

Bruce Keilin:

Here's another example of how you can use the RSS Display Component and a third-party API to achieve something useful. In this case, we're going to display a Twitter feed on our site.

The Twitter API allows us to make HTTP calls to get XML-formatted information about recent tweets. For example, http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/convio.xml?count=5 returns the five most recent tweets made by http://twitter.com/convio. If we create a page with an RSS Feed Component, point it at that URL and use this template to render the XML:

<t:list id="rss.status">

<p>$ - source: $ from ${user.name} a/k/a ${user.screen_name} in ${user.location}

</t:list>then we get an automatically updated twitter feed showing up on our page that looks like this (click the image to see a larger version):

You can also use in conjuction with Yahoo! Pipes to process a feed or serveral feeds into a new feed. Then you display the new feed.

For example, there is a pipe that merges a search on Yahoo! News and Google News into a single feed: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=1nWYbWm82xGjQylL00qv4w

Kirsten Suhr:

My apologies if this was answered elsewhere in the thread, I couldn't quite follow everything. We're trying to feed in our blog's RSS feed, and the developer I'm working with had two questions:

1. The descriptions that are part of the RSS that comes from the blog are rather long. You can see them here http://feeds.feedburner.com/blogforchoice?format=xml (use Firefox to open this link and have a look at the Source Code if you really want to see what's going on) We need to figure out if the Convio RSS Feed parser can truncate the RSS nodes. Here is how the display template looks, we need to truncate the description node/variable:

<ul class="listUpdates">

<t:list maxlength="2" id="rss.channel.item">

<li>

<h4>${pubDate}</h4>

<h3>${title}</h3>

<p>${description} <span class="linkMore"><a target="_blank" href="${guid}">Read More</a></span>

</p>

</li>

</t:list>

</ul>

2. The date has the time stamp. We'd prefer that it display like, "August 17, 2010" instead. Can that be changed?

Re 1: Try the words(String, int) function to shorten it to the number of words specified. You'll need to first store the shortened value in a local variable like this (which shortens to the first 15 words):

<t:set id="shortdescription" value="truncate(>

temp_handle1945 :

That's a helpful suggestion. Thank you.

Additionally, if you use campaigns in Google Analytics, you can append the URL with a Google Analytics Campaign parameters, such as:

http://www.mysite.com/page.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=rss

- Marissa