wURLdBook LinkReel Features

The end of this page displays a proof of concept new beta feature that I'm adding to wURLdBook Research to allow members to add headlines to their blog or web page based on some topic. Currently it's been incorporated into the Preview service and only displays Yahoo! News headlines.

I have included a LinkReel example of headlines along the side of a blog here: 914-6 Car Blog
It's not to sophisticated right now as it is a beta test idea. I'll be working to incorporate this idea into wURLdBook to allow members to add their published public content in a similar manner.

The production feature will allow more control over the out come like limiting the number of description characters or have none at all and other things. If you decide to use it send me some feed back with respect to ideas to include into the final production feature.

You can go ahead and try it out on your blog or web page as I don't plan to discontinue the current concept only add to it based on feed back. Heck, you don't even have to be a member of wURLdBook to give it a go.

How to get it to work

You need some basic knowledge of HTML and URL formats for this to work properly

There are three steps need to take to get this to work for your web page. You need to add some CSS styles to the page and a bit of javascript to the location where you want the list to show up. Also, you need to configure the javascript url to show the stuff you want to ultimately want to display.

You need to add some css styling to style the div objects in the resulting javascript file. You need to add it to the "head" of your html file. Here is an example:

<style>
#wb_list { 
margin:10px 0px 0px 10px;
}
#wb_list>h2 {
	font:bold 14px/14px verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif;
	color:#336699;
	margin:0px 0px 5px 0px;
	padding:0px;
	}
#wb_item { 
margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px;
width: 500px;
}

#wb_itemdescription { 
	font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica; 
	color:#000000; 
	font-size:12px; 
	font-style:italic;
}
#wb_itemlink>a:link { 
	font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica; 
	color:#006699; 
	font-size:14px; 
	font-style:bold;
}
#wb_itemlink>a:hover {
	font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica; 
	color:#006699; 
	font-size:14px; 
	font-style:none; 
	background-color:#ffffcc; 
	text-decoration: none;
}
</style>

Add some javascript to your page that looks like this:

<script language="JavaScript" src="http://rss.wurldbook.com/preview.html?a=n&searchterms=coffee+beans&format=rss&num=5&topics=coffee+beans@blogger@iPod@UAV@free+music">
</script>

This Javascript src url broken down:

• searchterms=coffee+beans - searchterms is the topic of the list of information you want to display. Alternatively, you can use complete URLS like http://rss.wurldbook.com/labels/Olav/Music.xml
• format=digest - this means display it as a javascript file otherwise it will be xml.
• num=5 - This means display a maximum of 5 items. The most that will be display is 20.
• topics=coffee+beans@blogger@iPod@UAV@free+music - Optional: This is a list of topics to randomly select from. Each topic should be separated by an "@" sign and any topic with spaces should have a "+" sign instead. Also, you can supply a list of URLs too.
• comments=false - Optional: If you don't want the description/comments to show up just add the comments=false and they'll be gone.

So, I have a URL that displays from a list of 5 random topics UAV, Coffee Beans, iPod, Free Music and Blogger with the default topic "coffee beans" as the searchterm. You don't need the topics if you only want one list of headlines just the searchterms will do. If you reload the page the topics should change.

So the final outcome creates this: