How to Use RSS Replay in Dreamweaver Layouts | 2

How to Create RSS feeds with Dreamweaver

Now that you've finished all the specifications, you'll want to see what the page will look like. RSS Replay provides an in-Dreamweaver preview of the content to better assess how the content fits into your page and make adjustments as necessary. To play the Replay press the "Play" button in the inspector.

Your page will change to display the RSS content in the layout and the "Play" button will change to say "Stop" -- press this when you've finished with the preview.

OK, that looks pretty good, but let's say you wanted to make those headlines a little bigger than the other content. You can do that with CSS. Create a CSS class, name it "replayheads" and set the font size to be "larger" and set the weight to be "bold."

Now apply that style to the headlines by selecting it from the "Headln Class" popup.

Preview the Replay again (press the "Play" button) and you should now see that the headlines are larger.

You'll note a blank line above our feed content that appears to be part of the preview selection. What's happening is that RSS Replay is inserting content where it's placed in the layout. By default, Dreamweaver puts any content into paragraphs (P tags). What we have is an extra P tag wrapping our Replayed content. It's easy to fix this -- switch off the preview, so you're looking at the little icon in the layout. The icon should still be selected, and the Tag Insepector (the status area at the bottom of the Dreamweaver window) shows which tags are wrapping the current content. Right now it says "<body><p>". Right click (or control click for you Mac folks) on the P tag there and select "Remove Tag" from the contextual menu.

If you preview again (press the "Play" button), you'll see that the extra space is gone.

Perfecto! Now you'll want to take a look at the page in the Web browser. Post your "tutorial.html" page to your Web server along with the files that RSS Replay created -- rssReplay.js and rssReplayProxy.asp/php.

Note: Until you register RSS Replay the content in the browser will only show "RSS Replay is Unregistered." Once registered, the JavaScript and ASP/PHP files will be unlocked. After unlocking the files you can repost them to your server. Then you'll see the same display in Dreamweaver and your Web browser.

Lastly, I want to leave you with one more idea. You can customize your display not only with CSS but also by changing the HTML that is being generated by RSS Replay. In the "Format" menu of the property inspector you'll see the "Advanced" option. Selecting that option will present you with a dialog where you can enter the HTML codes that will be used along with special Replay tags used to identify where content is placed and what to do with it -- such as <<headline>> and <<story>>. I'll leave that for you to play with. More about the Replay tags can be found in the help file at
http://www.rnsoft.com/en/products/rssreplay/help.php

About the Author

Ronald Northrip is the President of Ronald Northrip Software, a technology company focused on creating software tools for developing Web sites, creating content and simplifying the use of your computer.

 

Created: March 27, 2003
Revised: October 18, 2006

URL: http://webreference.com/programming/rss_replay/1