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Can anyone recommend a good, highly customizable Web 2.0 news / article reader service which can be embedded it in your own web pages, using good old RSS? I'm just looking for a way to host my own feeds online using web 2.0 rather than writing my own script, which I've found notoriously difficult given all the xml namespaces Ukoln RSS contains. Do Google do anything of the sort?

Tags: api, blogs, embed, feeds, news, rss

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Damian,
Can you describe the context of "hosting your own feeds". Is that different than providing RSS links to your feeds? I'm interested in your question, but don't know enough about the topic to be helpful.
Rhonda

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It is different in a sense. Providing a link to your RSS is to simply provide a draggable link to the xml file, a small bit of standard html code is suitable for this. What I want to do is to embed a news aggregator from some sort of web 2.0 service, just like I could embed my links generated in Clusty or del.icio.us, and re-host my own previously generated RSS feeds from my home page. It would be displayed rather like a blog (or the news items on this site) but, as it's an embedded piece of script, I could insert it in many parts of my site or change the position and dimensions easily. I could also mix and match various feeds and display them to my users how I decided. This is basically a get around because I can't for the life of me get javascript to load XML successfully into an Array; also I can't be bothered to make complicated stylesheets; nor do I have recourse to a web server. Another reason, embedded Web 2.0 things service just look good and usually offer much more customization tool that I wouldn't possibly have time to develop myself. There's probably some really easy solution I have missed as I do have many more blind spots than the average person. Hope this helps.

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Bit unclear what you're after, but you may want to look at something like Grazr: http://www.grazr.com/. I have used this (combined with a collection of feeds I set up in bloglines) to embed some feeds on a page on my intranet. Set up the feed in bloglines, exported as OPML file, imported that into the Grazr widget and voila. Copy code into page HTML and you're up and running.

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This is just what I was after, thanks Scott. There's a look that perfectly complements our web pages. It's much better than the javascript tickers we still have. Rhonda, have a look at this!

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Cool. I will go take a look at it. I found a simple javascript that reposts my blog postings to a website. I don't know if that is similar in function to grazr, but I'll go play around with it.

What I really want is a federated tag search engine. Some kind of search engine where I put in all the urls for my online content (flickr, delicious, etc.) and it searches them all. So if I want to find all my content marked "serendipity", I can find it. Have you ever run across something like that?

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Rhonda - You might try looking at tagsahoy http://www.tagsahoy.com not sure if this will do what you want, but it's interesting.

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I have not used it, but others have mentioned neomyz to me.

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Let me round up this discussion with some brief notes about the two website news widgets that grazr and neomyz make available (this is the opinion of a librarian with moderate technical aptitude). Neomyz is no where near as customizable as grazr in terms of dimensions, styles, and skins themes; all the skin themes other than the 'classic' require payment and the pay-for-skins are very poppy, probably too doozy for library sites. It does however have stats, which, at a glance, look better than awstats. Grazr is better and the free skin themes are much more adaptable. I didn't quite grasp the point behind the 'outline' view and the 'three windows' view was just unattractive but who am I to say. Some of the customizations, like the font size and the menu hider, didn't work when I loaded the widget into our site. Nevertheless, grazr was the only choice of the two for our website and I hope to get it up there soon. Word goes to Brian C.Gray and Scotty Vine for the recommendations.

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To correct this earlier reply. All of grazr's customizations worked eventually.

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I've had good luck with grazr. Like the way it allows the user to customize their view on the fly. I've used it for a small list of job listings : http://librarycareersny.org/jobs/nysjobfeed.cfm

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