Using external RSS Feeds in a .Text (dottext) skin

darryn

20 Jul 2004

I recently moved from a home-grown blogging engine to .text (dottext), mainly because of the ‘blog anywhere’ web admin interface, and comment support. Because my old site was written by myself, it had in it most of the things I wanted. The released of .text contains many skins, but none of them were really what I was after, so I have started dabbling with skin design. You are probably reading this article on a page with my own skin. When you create your own skin or edit another you can add your own controls to the page.

Some of the user controls that I had written for my old site allowed me to syndicate some of my friends’ blogs. I wanted this functionality in my .text site, so I went hunting. As usual, it was Scott Mitchell who showed me the way, with his RSSFeed control. I have implemented a version of this in my site and I am happy with the result. See the code posted below.

Disclaimer: I am not a programmer, I am an infrastructure geek who dabbles. The below code has no error-handling, so if something goes wrong with the feed it will break your whole site. I tried to put in error handling but it didn’t work. I hope a real programmer reads this and tells me what to do.

Because I don’t want to potentially show a 2000 word post in the 200px wide box allocated, I have written a function to shorten the post to 49 characters.

 <%@ Control Language="c#" ClassName="darrynRSS" Inherits="Dottext.Web.UI.Controls.BaseControl" targetschema="http://schemas.microsoft.com/intellisense/ie5” %>
<%@ Register TagPrefix="skm" Namespace="skmRss" Assembly="skmRss" %>
     private void Page_Load(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
    {
                     RssFeed1.DataSource = "https://www.darryn.net/rss.aspx/";
                    RssFeed1.DataBind();
     }
    
    public string shorten(String input)
    {
            string shortbody = "";
            string [] a; // array of strings are square-bracketed
            int j;   // int not Integer
    
            if(input == null)
            {  // real quick error check to stop more serious errors
                return "";
            }
    
            a = input.Split(" ".ToCharArray());  // get our array of strings
            int maxnum = a.GetUpperBound(0) ;        // We actually know that 49's max from above
    
            if(maxnum > 49)
            {
                for(int x = 0; x <= 49; x++)
                {    // I love C style loops
                    shortbody += " " + a[x];
                }
                shortbody += "…";
            }
            else
            {
                return input;  // can return any string - not sure if using the function name as the string is "done" in C#
            }
    
            return shortbody;
    
    }
 

    
        
DarrynBlog
        

        

            <%# shorten(Container.DataItem.Description) %>

Please provide feedback below if you have a better solution, or for whatever reason.