7 replies to this topic

[allfortino]

How do I allow users to set their search results in RSS format?

[Jill]

Welcome allfortino!

Not sure I understand the question.

[allfortino]

Thanks for the welcome!
I want users to be able to save their favorite searches into RSS format. Example, www.rssauction.com/ or Craigs list offers something similar.

[Jill]

Ohhh...I understand what you mean. I don't know how to do it, but I'll move this to our RSS forum and perhaps some others who do, will see it and provide you with an answer.

[Randy]

Welcome allfortino !

I don't know of any free scripts to do it off the top of my head, but I wouldn't think it would be too terribly difficult to cobble one together. So it wouldn't surprise me if there there isn't already something out there that would do what you need it to.

Have you tried looking at HotScripts.com? If you're interested in something that will connect with something like eBay or Amazon, they both have API capability, so someone in their development community will likely have already created what you're looking for.

[allfortino]

I did check out hotscripts.com, but couldn't find anything. I'm not looking to connect to amazon or ebay. I just want to run this on my own domain. Example, a user searches on the keyword "razor". I want the user to be able to enable RSS feeds for that search if they want to. That way the user can be notified via the feed if that keyword returns different search results.

Are you saying that the search results page should have what would be like a js call to run the output in RSS format? I'm not sure I understand how the search results get translated to RSS format.

[Randy]

Well, I'm not sure how Craigs List does it since I've never looked that close. RSSauction however I believe has a script that actually generates a new page on their server (in rss format) that is then offered as the bookmark. You can even see the page number change if you create a couple of search feeds.

So not Javascript if you're looking for something similar to what they do, since JS doesn't have the permissions to create new files. But any of the server-side scripting languages (php, asp, cgi, etc) could do it.

[meta]

I'm not sure I understand how the search results get translated to RSS format. 

allfortino, how familiar are you with rss? Have you ever taken a look at the code in an rss feed?