RSS Manipulation in ASP

What is RSSmanip?

RSS­ma­nip is a set of scripts that allows web­mas­ter who already gen­er­ate an RSS feed for their site to dynam­i­cally cre­ate HTML, HDML, and WML doc­u­ments based on their RSS feed. Using the Microsoft XML parser (sup­plied with IE 5) on the server side, you can now enable your site for wire­less usage by using those scripts.

Min­i­mum Requirements

I haven’t tested these scripts on mul­ti­ple plat­forms but here’s the envi­ron­ment I used to cre­ate them:

• - NT 4.0 with ser­vice pack 6
• - IIS 4.0
• - Inter­net Explorer 5.5 (this is impor­tant because Microsoft replaced the XML engine on which this script relies)
• - A well for­mat­ted RSS file

What files are in RSSmanip.zip?

Recently, I’ve started doing some manip­u­la­tions or RSS file for dif­fer­ent pre­sen­ta­tions. Included in this zip file are three files to do so:

• html.asp Cre­ates an HTML out­put of your RSS file
• hdml.asp Cre­ates an HDML out­put of your RSS file (for more on HDML, check out http://www.phone.com)
• wml.asp Cre­ates a WML out­put of your RSS file (for more on WML, check out http://www.wapforum.org)

Instal­la­tion

Installing those files is rel­a­tively easy.

• Down­load the source code here.
• Open each of them in your favorite text edi­tor and edit the fol­low­ing lines: mylogo = "./presentation/images/TNLwlogo.bmp" myRSSfile = "/newsletter/channel.xml" mylogo is the loca­tion of your logo file. For HDML, that file has to be a .bmp file and for WML, it has to be a .wbmp file. Edi­tors for each are avail­able on the web.myRSSfile is the loca­tion of your RSS file beyond the root.
• Open up the IIS con­sole, go to your server prop­er­ties, click on HTTP headers, click on File Types and add the fol­low­ing: .bmp image/bmp .hdml text/x-hdml .wbmp image/vnd.wap.wbmp .wml text/vnd.wap.wml
• Save the set­tings and reboot your server.
• Put the files on your site and that’s it. You’re up and running.

• Optional:

  If you want to redi­rect WML and HDML browser auto­mat­i­cally to the appro­pri­ate files, use the fol­low­ing script: acceptHeader = Request.ServerVariables("HTTP_ACCEPT") If Instr(acceptHeader, "hdml") 0 Then Response.Redirect "/hdml.asp" Elseif Instr(acceptHeader, "wml") 0 Then Response.Redirect "/wml.asp" End If where /hdml.asp and /wml.asp are the loca­tions or those files (in my exam­ple, they’re in the root direc­tory of the server.

Other Ver­sion

An ear­lier ver­sion of these scripts allows you to gen­er­ate code from a RSS 0.91 feed. It is also avail­able for down­load.

How much does it cost?

RSS­ma­nip is free! If you want to use it, I’d like to receive a link back to TNL.net from you or receive a dona­tion from you.

Final com­ments

I’ve cre­ated those files for my per­sonal use and am happy to share them with you. How­ever, I do not make any guar­an­tee as to their impact on your server. They seem to work fine on mine when I used them. If you use them, I’d appre­ci­ate a link back to TNL.net. Since I moved TNL.net to a Linux plat­form in late 2002, I am no longer sup­port­ing these scripts.

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