Google’s AJAX RSS feed widget wizard is majestic

I’m tired of using the word “awesome” to describe things that are awesome so I went with majestic instead. Awesome, huh?

Rather than get techy about Google’s new AJAX Feed API I’ll focus on their much easier to understand wizard for creating a very simple AJAX Feed widget. To do that though, I need to cover the AJAX Feed API so much to say that it’s a way for you display snippets of an RSS Feed – or multiple RSS Feeds – on your website without doing anything more than click a button.

You can find the Dynamic Feed Control Wizard Here.

Type the name of your blog in the textbox and click preview. As long as you’re indexed by Google Blog Search, your feed will show up. Don’t worry if it doesn’t though, it’s easy to change the title and feed(s) you want to display.

For instance, if I wanted to get rid of the Twitter flash widget to the right here and replace it with the vertical feed widget from Google I would simply look in the code for this (assuming I had just generated one for my blog of course):

title: 'Greg-J',
url: 'http://feeds.feedburner.com/Greg-jcom?format=xml'

and change it to

title: 'Twitter',
url: 'http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/14853318.atom'

And it would display a nice little feed of my most recent tweets in the right column of this site. Doing so however, I would also find that the style of my theme makes it look ulgy and I would have to go back to the flash widget until I had time to style it nicely…

Note:
I just realized that by typing twitter grilla it pulled up my twitter feed, so I’m assuming it’ll find your twitter feed by simply typing in twitter username too.

I kid you not, it wasn’t more than a week ago I was thinking to myself “I need to make a service that creates cool ajax feed widgets for people to display” – so when I saw this today I had to share it. I’ll definitely be integrating these into the new profiles on MySpace Pros.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 13th, 2008 at 11:55 pm You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.