How Google saved my weekend.
I love my new day job. I really do. However as with any job where you are replacing someone who has moved on, there are a lot of old projects that come back to haunt you. One of those for me has been the revival of an XML file used to generate an RSS feed for final exercises at the University. The feed is used to notify patrons what locations are open for remote viewing of graduation.
First let me say that most of my experience with mark up languages has been centered on what XAML code I needed to know to write Microsoft Surface applications. So writing XML code to create an RSS feed was new to me. Plus there are several other pressing projects to deal with at the same time as this one. The previous owner of the script that generated the XML file was a PHP coder. So that's what we had to go by. My IT manager and myself are not PHP language people so I was lost. The owner of the PHP code did come back and give us permission , but when my team rewrote and saved; the file was rewritten over night and returned to the previous state. We are pressed for time on this since graduation is weeks away and as I said there are other projects needing to be completed.
I decided that the most efficient thing to do was to discontinue trying to make the PHP code work and start from scratch. Creating the XML that would work as an RSS feed was the easy part. What I wanted was a quick way to update the information in the XML in real time. At first I thought Microsofts XML Notepad would be the answer. However that didn't generate the webpage with an RSS link to subscribe to for updates. After some research on the interweb, I found a little blog post about how Google Spreadsheet could generate an XML file RSS feed that included a URL. Bingo! This sounded like what I was looking for.
I went to my Google account and created a spreadsheet doc. I modeled the XML layout from the previous PHP file, shared it as an XML/RSS feed, copied and pasted the URL to Firefox and Explorer and "bam" there was the same web page that the other script created with the RSS feed subscribe button at the top. Click the RSS to subscribe and the same layout as the spreadsheet appeared. Now when I made changes to the spreadsheet on my Google account, the changes would appear in the RSS feed every 5 minutes. Whether or not we use the generated URL has not been determined. But the other parties that will snag the XML might be open to just grab the RSS from the URL. Here are the steps:
Google Docs XML Feed
First let me say that most of my experience with mark up languages has been centered on what XAML code I needed to know to write Microsoft Surface applications. So writing XML code to create an RSS feed was new to me. Plus there are several other pressing projects to deal with at the same time as this one. The previous owner of the script that generated the XML file was a PHP coder. So that's what we had to go by. My IT manager and myself are not PHP language people so I was lost. The owner of the PHP code did come back and give us permission , but when my team rewrote and saved; the file was rewritten over night and returned to the previous state. We are pressed for time on this since graduation is weeks away and as I said there are other projects needing to be completed.
I decided that the most efficient thing to do was to discontinue trying to make the PHP code work and start from scratch. Creating the XML that would work as an RSS feed was the easy part. What I wanted was a quick way to update the information in the XML in real time. At first I thought Microsofts XML Notepad would be the answer. However that didn't generate the webpage with an RSS link to subscribe to for updates. After some research on the interweb, I found a little blog post about how Google Spreadsheet could generate an XML file RSS feed that included a URL. Bingo! This sounded like what I was looking for.
I went to my Google account and created a spreadsheet doc. I modeled the XML layout from the previous PHP file, shared it as an XML/RSS feed, copied and pasted the URL to Firefox and Explorer and "bam" there was the same web page that the other script created with the RSS feed subscribe button at the top. Click the RSS to subscribe and the same layout as the spreadsheet appeared. Now when I made changes to the spreadsheet on my Google account, the changes would appear in the RSS feed every 5 minutes. Whether or not we use the generated URL has not been determined. But the other parties that will snag the XML might be open to just grab the RSS from the URL. Here are the steps:
Google Docs XML Feed
- Create Google spreadsheet
- Share
- Publish As Webpage
- More Publishing Options
- File Format: RSS
- Generate URL
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