Archive for the 'Web Development' Category

Drupal RSS Feeds using Feedburner and Views

I recently was given the task of publishing RSS feeds in Drupal to iTunes. My organization does podcasting, and wants the shows to be discoverable using the search feature in iTunes. Using FeedBurner, I was able to manage the feed’s content pretty easily, controlling how it looked in feed readers, including iTunes. One of the shows is published through our Drupal site using the Views module, which gives a lot of options as to how we display it on our website.

The Views module already generates an RSS feed, but I needed that link to get redirected to the show’s FeedBurner page. Using the FeedBurner module for Drupal, this can be done, but I didn’t find very good instructions for doing it when using a feed generated by the Views module. Well, I figured it out, and hope to enlighten someone looking for answers with a quick walkthrough of the process.

Once you’ve set up your View, go into its settings and do the following:

  1. Scroll down to the Arguments section.
  2. Add the following Argument: “Node: Feed Selector”*.
  3. Change the Default dropdown to “Display All Values”.
  4. Save your changes.

Views module settings
The URL of your feed becomes whatever your View’s URL is, with “/feed” tacked on to the end of it.

*A quick note: if you are not redirecting your feed’s URL, use the “RSS: RSS Feed Selector” argument with the same Default value.

Now you can set up FeedBurner using that URL. To redirect it, we will use the FeedBurner module. Go to the module’s settings page (Administer > Site Building > FeedBurner). Click on the “Add feed redirection” link, and fill in the two fields with your local and feedburner URLs.

FeedBurner module settings

I actually had a problem using my local URL at first, because it starts with “?q=”. When I left that part out, the module was able to create the redirection, and it worked fine.

The end. And hopefully you live happily ever after!

Web Development in Firefox

FirebugAt work, I do a lot of website tweaking, and I used to update stylesheets on my desktop, and upload them via ftp to see the changes. This was tedious, typically because many times, I did not write the stylesheet, and was only making minor changes to it. It was a lot of trial and error, to say the least.

Then I found out about a Firefox extension called “Web Developer Toolbar.” I had previously heard of it, and wanted to stay away from it, just because I thought what I was doing was simple, and that this tool couldn’t possible help me in the way I wanted. This was until I read that it could edit CSS in realtime. It allows you to edit HTML, highlight or label divs or other page elements, and more. It has become an indispensable tool for me.

At the same time, I had heard of Firebug (a similar extension), but never tried it because the other tool had worked so well, and I didn’t need two of them. Boy, was I missing out. I just installed Firebug, and with only a few clicks, it amazed me. Content was highlighted when I moused over a section of editable HTML, which was very well structured, properly displaying the tabs. I only used it for a few minutes, but it looks incredibly promising.

I will post back in a few days, after I try it out some more. I’m extremely excited to play with it.