On Dec 16, 2004, at 12:07, Bil Kleb wrote:

> The other month we hooked Dave's commit2rss.rb script up
> to our CVS repository to gain an RSS feed. (Thanks Dave!)
>
> Now we'd like to display the RSS feed in a sidebar.  What's
> the best method to do this?  Currently our web person is
> using some third-party converter that produces some rather
> ugly HTML.

My Dr Dobbs article has a trivial program to do exactly that.

Here's a variant of it that we use on the PragProg site to create some  
HTML which is injected into Mike Clark's automation page. It reads his  
blog's RSS, then uploads a converted file to our website.

Cheers

Dave


# Such down the top 'n' articles from an RSS feed
# and summarize for a web site

require 'rss/0.9'
require 'open-uri'
require 'rdoc/template'
require 'net/ftp'

TEMPLATE = %{
<div class="blogentries">
START:entries
   <div class="blogentry">
     <a href="%link%"><span class="blogentrytitle">%title%</span></a>
     <div class="blogentrydescription">
       %description%
     </div>
   </div>
END:entries
</div>
}

TMP_FILE = "/tmp/topfive"
BLOG_URL =  
'http://www.pragmaticautomation.com/cgi-bin/pragauto.cgi/synopsis.rss? 
count=5'

open(BLOG_URL) do |http|
   result = RSS::Parser.parse(http.read, false)
   entries = result.items.map do |item|
     {
       'title'       => item.title,
       'link'        => item.link,
       'description' => item.description
     }
   end

   File.open(TMP_FILE, "w") do |f|
     t = TemplatePage.new(TEMPLATE)
     t.write_html_on(f, 'entries' => entries)
   end
end

  Net::FTP.open('www.yoursite.com') do |ftp|
   ftp.login('user', 'passwd')
   ftp.chdir('somedir')
   ftp.put(TMP_FILE, 'topfive', 1024)
end