marypcbuk

I'm driving sbisson round the bend ranting about CSS (I want to be able to use an externally defined style inside a section that's using inline style links so I can use my preferred formatting for an element inside a badge supplied by a site without writing another definition and I can't find what I consider to be a clean way of doing this that doesn't multply at least one entity in a way I consider unnecessary). I'm so annoyed with CSS I'm even starting to prefer JavaScript, which is saying something. I want point and click, documented mashup tools that don't require someone who wants neat things on their website to become a programmer; that's what I'd call Web 2.0.

Admidst all the ranting I have found some useful tools, especially Feed2JS which interactively writes JavaScript for embedding an RSS feed on a Web page, letting you pick and choose the obvious settings, and then helps you interactively style it. Don't like the style? It not only documents the CSS classes it creates, it also shows you what the CSS classes look like laid out on the page so you can see where to change borders, margins, padding etc. You can choose spoon feeding or a recipe or the tools for writing your own recipe; that's what I call interactive.

I don't want my whole LiveJournal on my website; I want to use tags to generate multiple feeds and pull in a feed of posts about my writing, a feed of posts about my travels and so on. Rummaging in lj_nifty produced this service for producing an RSS feed for one of your LJ tags which does almost exactly what I want. (It would be very nice if the service went into the LJ code proper, because kind as it is of avatraxiom to host it, LJ will have better availability long term.) The LJ RSS only delivers recent posts and if there aren't any posts with your tag in the most recent batch you won't get any posts for that tag. RSS isn't all about what's new and shiny, LJ!