Displaying an RSS Feed on a MySpace Site: Elegant Hack

So your organization has a MySpace site — great, one more chunk of text to edit constantly or let fall out of date. You could restrict your content to evergreen background about your issues, but wouldn’t it be better to have news? Displaying an RSS feed would be perfect, but MySpace blocks javascript.

Turns out some guys have come up with a solution that’s about as crafty a hack as I’ve seen in a while — a site called MySpace Feed will take the contents of your RSS feed and display the headlines as a .gif image. It updates just once per day, only contains the headlines and has limited formatting options, but it works — I’ve been using it for several weeks now on the National Environmental Trust MySpace site. The individual headlines aren’t linked to their stories, but we link the whole image (which has a fixed URL) to our news headlines page. It’s a clunky solution, but it’s probably the best we can do these days.

cpd

Written by
Colin Delany
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2 comments
  • That’s pretty cool. Now who would’ve given you the brilliant idea to start a NET myspace page? 😉

  • It’s clunky because I wasn’t sure whether people would be interested in it or not.

    I recently did an open source code release – so people are welcome to improve on it.