build your own
online store
Actinic Ecommerce News Feed
The Actinic RSS Parser is designed for formatting and displaying
Actinic ecommerce news feeds on web pages. It will also work with
other feeds in the same format, and you are free to use it for that
purpose. It is not a universal RSS / XML parser.
Unlike Javascript-based programs, the Actinic
RSS Parser delivers text in a format that is visible to search
engines. However, it
does require that you have PHP 4 or higher running on your web
server, and Server Side Includes (SSI) enabled. You can display
the feed on either PHP or HTML pages. To display it on an HTML
page, the page MUST have the suffix .shtm or .shtml, and not .htm
or .html.
The format of the feed can be easily adjusted
to match the look and feel of your site, and the space available
for it, as described
below.
You are free to use the Actinic RSS Parser to display and
distribute your own news feed. One program that generates feeds
compatible
with the Actinic RSS Parser is ListGarden, from Software Garden
Inc. Both ListGarden and the Actinic
RSS Parser are distributed freely under the Gnu Public Licence.
Click here to download the required files.
To display an Actinic feed on a PHP page
(.php or .php4)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
1.
Copy the following files into a location in your web root
actinicreader.php4
reader.php4
actinic.css
2. Add the following code in the required
position on the page
include ('reader.php4');
If the Parser files
are in a different directory from the page where the feed is to
be displayed, use
include('/parserdirectoryname/reader.php4');
To
display an Actinic feed on an HTML page using Server Side Includes
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1.
Copy the following files into a location in your webroot
actinicreader.php4
reader.php4
actinic.css
2. Make sure the page where you want to include the news
has the extension .shtm or
.shtml
3. Add the following code in the required position on the page
<!--#include file="reader.php4" -->
If
the Parser files are in a different directory from the page where
the feed is to be displayed, use
<!--#include virtual="/parserdirectoryname/reader.php4" -->
Formatting the feed
---------------------------
The feed uses CSS-based font styles defined
in the file actinic.css. This can be edited using a style sheet
editor or Macromedia Dreamweaver,
or directly using Notepad.
The text is displayed in a table whose
size and attributes are defined in the file reader.php4. This file
can be accessed and
changed using any web page or HTML editor, or Notepad.
Three parameters
in the file reader.php4 can easily be changed by the user:
- line
3: define('NUMBER_OF_ARTICLES', 5);
Controls the number of items from the feed that are displayed. The default
is 5
- line 4: define('HIDE_DESCRIPTION', false);
To display only the title of each item and not the description, change ‘false’ to ‘true’
- line 5: define('FEED_URL', 'http://www.actinic.co.uk/rss/ecommerce.xml');
Defines the url of the feed to be used
