WebCT news at SFU

For more information on what an RSS feed is and it’s role in education, download the Seven Things you Should Know About RSS], or go to http://www.weblogg-ed.com/ and click on the RSS tab near the top to download Will Richardsons introduction to RSS. For quick browsing, go to the ”Finding and Adding Feeds section”

How to add an RSS Feed Reader to your WebCT course section.

1. Log in as a Section Designer and go to the section.
2. From Course Content Home, click Add Content Link and choose RSS Feed Reader from the dropdown menu.
3. Click Create RSS Feed Reader.
4. Add the RSS URL in field #3
5. Click save and preview in the Student View

The settings
The easiest way to add an RSS feed is to use the default options available. Just remember to add your RSS URL in field #3. For more information on how to find an RSS URL, please consult the resources listed above.

Advanced setting changes

If you are an advanced user of RSS feeds, there are other settings that you can change for your own needs.

The proxy tool settings consist of the following:

1. Title: The proxy tool title that appears in the Course Content Home.
2. Operational Timeout: Leave this set to the default (10).
3. RSS/RDF URL: This must be set to the URL of the RSS feed. (e.g. http://feeds.macworld.com/macworld/all, http://rss.cnn.com/services/podcasting/newscast/rss.xml))
4. XSL Transform Can be set to:
   • Default RSS: use the built-in RSS transform to convert the RSS to HTML. If this is selected, the XSL URL setting is ignored.
   • Default RDF: use the built-in RDF transform to convert the RSS to HTML. If this is selected, the XSL URL setting is ignored.
   • Custom: use a custom transform to convert the RSS to HTML. If this is selected, you must also set the XSL URL setting.
5. XSL URL: If XSL Transform is set to Custom, this setting must contain the URL of an XSL transform capable of converting the RSS feed to HTML.
6. CSS URL: Can be used to specify a custom cascading stylesheet (CSS) file. If empty, the built-in CSS is used.
7. Window title: The text to display in the title bar of the popup window (when applicable).
8. Title contains HTML: Set this to true if item titles in the RSS feed contain HTML (otherwise the HTML code is displayed).
9. Description contains HTML: Set this to true if item descriptions in the RSS feed contain HTML (otherwise the HTML code is displayed).
10. Custom parameter x: These five settings can be used to set parameters for the XSLT engine. This is only useful if you have a custom transform.-The format of each Custom parameter setting is:
    <parameter_name>=<parameter_value>
    -So if you want to pass the current username and the learning context name to the transform, you would enter
    Custom parameter 1: username=$USER$.name
    Custom parameter 2: lcname=$LC$.name
    -In your XSL transform, you’d have something like this:
    <xsl:param name=”username”/>
    <xsl:param name=”lcname”/>
    …
    <xsl:template match=”channel”>
    <p class=”channeldescription”>Hello, <xsl:value-of select=”$username”/> from <xsl:value-of select=”$lcname”/>!</p>
    …
11. Open in new window

This entry was posted on Friday, July 20th, 2007 at 2:41 am and is filed under mashup, communication tools, content, Add-ons. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.