Web RSS reader

[web-dev101]

hi,
i not a member of x10hosting yet so i wanted to inquire that can i host a php rss reader.
actually it reads itunes RSS once a day and and caches it so that the visitors can see which album or song is at the top of the list.
also i read that your outbound traffic (cURL) is disabled. can i post data from my server at home so that no crons are needed to add data to the cache.
thankx

 

[essellar]

Blocked outbound connections are going to make an actual RSS reader impossible on free hosting servers, but posting updates from a remote computer to a static resource will work. Just make sure that any links you provide are to a legal source of the material in question (iTunes should be okay, as long as your page does not in any way represent itself as being "official Apple" -- and it would be a good idea to include an "as of" date and time on any listings you provide).

 

[callumacrae]

You will not be able to host your RSS remotely, you will have to upload it to your hosting, and then parse it. If your iTunes library has more than a couple thousand tracks in, this script may use quite a lot of resources, which could result in you being suspended for high resource usage.

~Callum

 

[cybrax]

Free Web hosts in general have tightened up on 'amateur' webmasters using cURL to scrape content and I can't say I blame them. There being no such thing as a free lunch unless you steal it, which is what a lot of folk were doing.

If it's just a straight read of the iTunes RSS feed/ xml file then this Javascript reader from Dynamic drive may be useful. http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex2/sagscroller.htm Of course this does not however make the iTunes feed content part of the web page or site so it's not read or indexed by google and as such does nothing for SEO but does look nice.

I would of suggest Yahoo pipes as an alternative (or perhaps Google Apps Engine?), running these server side on x10 though is technically using a proxy so I'm not sure that's allowed either but pipes are versitile and can be used with javascript client side on the visitors PC. It's a bit more fiddly and may still fall foul of the TOS here somwhere.


Posting data up to the web hosting server direct from a home server remains the only safe workaround. Again Yahoo pipes may be of some use with this kind of setup handling initial retrieval and parsing prior to your server posting or FTP'ing the data to the web site server.

 

[Livewire]

If it's running on javascript and not actually using x10's resources (as in it's having the client connect and download, NOT the x10 server), that'd be fine. It's the same reason why chatboxes like the ones from CBox work - they load client side and don't actually hammer -us- with tons of mysql queries, they hammer CBox.