Portfolio Overview

It was time for an overhaul of both: the RSS module and the widget.

I knew I made some chances that may have an impact on the module in certain cases and the processing of widgets has been remodeled so I actually had new features available.

Feed sections

My framework has support for multiple feed sections from the beginning.  Although, all the links for all feeds worked as expected it wasn't just as perfect. That's not good for me and not as I wanted it to be—now it kinda is.

I had to dig a little deeper into the code for this because I knew it had a few hiccups under certain conditions. So, I basically rewrote the whole method handling this procedure.

The feed data also validates with FeedValidator and W3C (which I believe is the same validator, though). I have included a filter for all relative href references and they are now exported as absolute paths in the XML file.

Thanks to the update each feed gets properly detected and it sets the correct link. Additionally a seperate title can be set for the RSS Feed link.

Widget integration

Because I made some changes with the widgets and the feed button is implemented as a widget I have the option to add some config stuff into the application's configuration. This makes it easier to manage and is a more straight forward process now.

Most importantly I can no only add information for the widget but also information which is related to the connection for each detected feed. One such information would be FeedBurner or the title I mentioned above.

New FeedBurner support

Thanks to the new widget configuration it was quite simple to add support for FeedBurner; which in case you don't know now belongs to Google.

When a RSS feed has been set up with Google's FeedBurner I can simply add the link to the configuration. This will automatically transform the link for FeedBurner.

Furthermore, it redirects to FeedBurner in case the link for FeedBurner has been created later and some users already use the old link. This way all request are handled by FeedBurner and show up in the statics with them.