Slideshow from RSS for Wordpress

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It took me hours to find, but the easiest way I found to build a slideshow from a MediaRSS feed and add it to a WordPress blog was using the Google Ajax Feed API.

There are a few plug-ins that are supposed to work with WordPress, but I didn’t like them because they were really limited, or didn’t work on an IIS hosted blog. Good old Javascript, although it’s verbose, works fine.

That’s what I’ve used on this blog. Have a look at the slideshow on the lower right. It’s generated by the Google Ajax Feeds API.

If you don’t like getting your hands dirty with JavaScript, the best Flash based slideshow generator I know of is at VuVox.com. That’s what I use for some of the ObSrv examples of slideshows here.

The beauty of building a slideshow from an RSS Feed is that you don’t need to have the images on your own site, and the content updates continually as more items are added to the feed.

Of course, sometimes it’s hard to find a good feed. That’s where ObSrv.com comes in, because it can generate a feed from a google images search.

So when you use the Google Ajax Feed API and ObSrv.com you can make a slideshow of any topic you’d like. The one on this site is for “Information Technology”.

And just to make this post pretty, I thought I’d include a slideshow of the most recent ten pictures from the Creative Commons group on Flickr

July 13th, 2009 | Tags: , , , , | Category: Blogging, RSS | One comment

Improved image search

I just fixed a couple of minor bugs which were preventing ObSrv from serving up images based on advanced google image searches.

They should be working ok now.

If you still have any problems, please let me know or reply to this post.

February 4th, 2009 | Tags: | Category: ObSrv | 2 comments

Getting an RSS feed from ANY site with images

I mentioned earlier that I’d modify ObSrv to be able to generate an RSS feed from any site that has images.

I didn’t realize it, but it already does this.

Just key in the search words, followed by site:yourdomain.com

For example, if you want a feed of all images of the planet Saturn from Nasa.gov, just type in:
Saturn site:nasa.gov

Or for a feed of all images of Antarctica from NationalGeographic.com, type in:
Antarctica site:nationalgeographic.com

How cool is that?

January 30th, 2009 | Tags: , | Category: ObSrv, RSS | Leave a comment

Some example image feeds

Here’s some slideshows built on image feeds from ObSrv. If you’ve got some you’d like to show the world, please send an email to mail {at] ObSrv [d0t} com and I’ll be happy to showcase it here for you.

January 29th, 2009 | Tags: | Category: ObSrv, RSS | Leave a comment

Watching the World

I’ve just completed a project called “ObSrv” which will convert Google Image Searches into MediaRSS compliant RSS feeds.

If you don’t know what an RSS feed is, perhaps you should read this, or this. I love RSS because it’s an easy way to let other people know what you’re doing, and to find out news that is of specific interest to you. This blog (like almost all others) has an RSS feed. Most news sites and picture sharing sites have RSS too. This makes it easy for you to show their content on your website, or to view their content in an RSS reader.

If you don’t know what MediaRSS is, you might want to read the specification. Basically, it’s for a special type of RSS feed that contains media, such as pictures, video, and music. These feeds are cool because pictures, videos and music are much more entertaining than plain text. You can do more with them. For example, there’s a slideshow on the right hand side of this blog that updates every few seconds with pictures of hi-tech gizmos. It’s based on a Media RSS feed.

My favourite Media RSS application is John’s Background Switcher. It updates the wallpaper on your computer desktop with pictures from a Media RSS feed.

My only problem with Media RSS is that the biggest source of images on the web (Google Images) doesn’t serve up their image searches as an RSS feed. Which means that while you can search for images at google, you can’t automatically feed them into a media RSS application.

That’s where ObSrv comes in. It converts a Google Image search into a Media RSS feed.

Here’s how:

  1. Go to http://obsrv.com/

  2. Type a few search words in the box. (Hint. If you want, do an advanced search in Google Images, and copy the Google Images URL into the box instead).
  3. Press ENTER or click on the “GO” button.

  4. ObSrv will give you the link to your feed.

  5. Click on the link to open the feed in a new window, or copy the URL for the feed from the textbox.

Here’s some links to some applications that you can use with RSS Image Feeds:

John’s Background Switcher (Windows desktop background switcher)

Vuvox (Slideshows)

Feed Reader

RSS Popper

What’s Next?

I’ll be adding functionality to ObSrv as time permits. My next task is to get it to convert any webpage containing images into an RSS Image Feed.

January 25th, 2009 | Tags: | Category: Blogging, ObSrv, RSS | Leave a comment