Creating a Mashup Using RSS Feeds

October 17, 2009 - 9:00 am to 12:30 pm

$160 (Simmons GSLIS Alumni price $125)

Overview

Did you know you can mix and blend information from different sources to automate the creation of an interesting web site using RSS feeds? All with easy-to-use tools?

For example, create your own custom bibliography in Worldcat, save a set of search results from Google News, and tag a set of web pages in your del.icio.us (or other social bookmarking account), then blend those into a single useful feed that can auto-populate any web page. As new results are added to any of your sources, they will stream into the page you've made, which makes it easy to keep up to date!

You don't need to be a programmer. Basic knowledge of HTML is all that is needed for this class.  Come learn how to do this, see examples, and get inspired at our hands-on workshop.

Schedule

9:00  Welcome and introductions

9:15 - 10:00  Demo

    a. Ideas for where to get feeds

    b. Examples from MIT Libraries

    c. Walk through of how to create

10:00 - 10:15  break

10:15 - 11:30   Hands-on

    a. Setting up your environment

    b. Source feeds - copying them to a list

    c. Set up containter pages (LibGuides)

    d. Log on to Feed Informer, blend and style feeds

    e. Paste javascript into your pages

    f. Tweak and adjust

11:30 Wrap up

      a. Idea brainstorm - how you might use these tools

• combine feeds from a Worldcat list you've created with everything you are bookmarking with a particular tag in del.icio.us
• combine the feeds from several blogs on the same topic
• combine a saved Google news search for a keyword, and a saved Twitter search for the same keyword, into one feed for breaking news on that topic:
• more ideas.... (discussion)

      b. Further reading

      c. Evaluations (online)