Feature request - Scrolling feeddigests

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Author	Message
barrettweb Member	Posted: 6 Apr 2006 08:19:29 If you're open to requests, it would be nice if there were templates that would have some scrolling layouts. This page has examples of what I am looking for except that their examples slow everything down so much. http://www.feedostyle.com/sample_feedo_style.aspx
admin Admin	Posted: 6 Apr 2006 08:59:41 Wow, that page slowed my browser to an absolute crawl! I thought about this a few days ago. Shouldn't be too hard to do. I imagine some users are already doing it (I have one client who uses a <marquee> tag to do horizontal marquees, at least). I've also considered getting a Flash applet made so that users can drop a Flash applet on the page and get really nice digests going on :)
barrettweb Member	Posted: 6 Apr 2006 17:36:06 Great! Thanks for the speedy response. I look forward to trying out what you come up with.
admin Admin	Posted: 6 Apr 2006 19:54:03 I think, that in probably at least half the cases, it'll be simple code templates added into FeedDigest which can already be created by users (albeit on a digest by digest basis). There might be some more advanced scrolling stuff that may require some reworking though.. :)
Anonymous	Posted: 7 Apr 2006 08:14:31 I would love this feature as well. But some of my feeds are loading so slowly now, I hesitate to add anything that would worsen the situation. It may not be feeddigest that is the slowpoke, I don't know. www.vygear.com The links to Big 12 school feeds load really slowly, for me, at least. Tommy
mike power Member	Posted: 7 Apr 2006 14:07:25 Here are a couple of scripts which look promising. I tried the first one out. Something happens, but some tweaking is required by someone competent to get it right. Devarticles The second one seems more sophisticated but I haven't yet tried it. Both may provide a basis to start from. Worth a peek at any rate :-) Tigra Scroller They both allow html or php scripts and external html fetching. I'd be iinterested in any feedback :-) Finally, check out Easybyte. Although it's a paid service the code is freely downloadable, you can select from a variety of news feeds (to make your own you have to pay) and although it's a trial I've had one for months working perfectly well for free! EasyByte
TommyG Member	Posted: 9 Apr 2006 11:25:53 I'd like to be able to scroll just selected headlines from my digest. Is that possible? Pointers? Newbe, sorry.
TommyG Member	Posted: 9 Apr 2006 11:49:18 Well...this didn't take long. Located something called Feedo Style which is in beta and does the scrolling headlines. Is this something we could get in Feeddigest? Since I'm paying here, I'd love to be able to stick with one provider for this kind of utility. TommyG www.feedostyle.com
mike power Member	Posted: 9 Apr 2006 14:55:08 TommyG the link to Feedostyle is broken in your comment. You can use this: [url=www.feedostyle.com]<b>www.feedostyle.com</b>[/url] :-) Sorry people but I'm going to be a party pooper here. Most of the featured sites at Feedostyle are, erm, cr*p. The scrollers are even worse. I really cannot see what a scroller can bring to any site that cant be better acjieved with a well planned feed from here. Take a look at the gig news aggregator site like HuffPo or indeed, the major news sites where your feeds will come from. You bwill not see many scrolling anything (apart from very high quality adverts etc) Marquees look totally uncool. The Feedostyle vertical scroller on fast setting is so slow your readers would have left before the messaage finishes. Om slow setting it's a joke! There are some well designed tools out ther but they need to run from your servers and can be a pain to set up. Tigra is good looking, especially for images/text mixes but the documentation sucks. in the end you have to think about what you are trying to achieve. Remember, you've already got a scrolling feed its your scroll bar!! :-) Don't mean to be negative but most of the examples I've seen today are very uncool, and we don't want that, do we ;-)
mike power Member	Posted: 9 Apr 2006 14:59:53 Whoops!! Add the http:// you fool!!! :-) Try again... Feedostyle
TGK Member	Posted: 9 Apr 2006 15:36:26 Mike, Sorry about the broken link. www.feedostyle.com I'm trying the Feedostyle and am having mixed luck. It works fine in Firefox but doesn't scroll in IE. I sort of like it because I can draw attention to some feeds in the 'interior' of the site. I'm not wild about scrollers generally...get tired of the scrolling...so I may not keep it. Won't keep it for sure if I can't get it working with IE. Just an experiment at this point. TommyG
admin Admin	Posted: 9 Apr 2006 20:56:04 FWIW, anyone can implement scrolling on their digests if they have some HTML to do it.. all templates are editable by users :) I have a client who uses it. We just threw a <marquee> in the header and </marquee> in the footer :) For vertical scrolling more elaborate is needed, of course.
mike power Member	Posted: 10 Apr 2006 14:45:50 Point taken TommyG, but my problem is that the scrolling is so slow that it simply seems out of kilter with the rest of the page. In fact you could read a static list much more quickly. This is also the problem with marquees and similar code. You need something that pulls a block of code up, holds it and then does the same with a second, third etc. This is what Tigra does but it's overcomplicated for a lot of people (well me at any rate) which is a shame. Also, I can't see a way of incorporating feeds into the scroller text which rather defeats the point we are all trying for! :-) BTW: Feedostyle is being commented on at the moment over at Techcrunch (and not coming off too well!) My main observation was (after looking at many of the featured sites on Feedostyle) that the scroller was adding nothing to the sites and in many cases was detracting from them. To be absolutely blunt, most of the sites would have benefited from a more careful approach to design and layout rather than the addition of yet more features. Feedostyle say that a scroller makes your blog/website more interesting to readers. It doesn't. Good, relevant content that is easy to find and read does that. I still haven't found a better method of delivering that content in such stylish AND efficient way than Feeddigest. (Can I have my tenner now please Peter?) :-) Ok I promise I'll shut up now.
TGK Member	Posted: 10 Apr 2006 21:19:21 Mike, I couldn't get Feedostyle to behave with IE so I removed it. I was poking around tonight and came up with some scripts at Dynamic Drive that may do what you suggest...pausing scroller: http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex17/rsspausescroller/index.htm TommyG www.vygear.com Vince Young NFL Draft News Feeds
mike power Member	Posted: 11 Apr 2006 08:02:32 Thanks Tommy, I've just downloaded it and I'll put it on my server and play around with it. I'll try and get a page up as a demo. It looks pretty darn good and it appears to be free. After everything I said last night I went and downloaded TigraPro (yes I paid for it!!) and had a play around. It's pretty smooth but I don't think it takes RSS feeds. Links yes, feeds no, although I'm going to check with them later. DynamicDrive looks good and drops feeds directly from your own server. That is also a limitation. Not everyone has root access :-( I feel I'm going to be eating my words if things continues like this. No more cool apps please!! :-)
admin Admin	Posted: 11 Apr 2006 09:41:02 It's only a proof of concept, but.. just to prove what I was saying (that any user with the know how can make a vertical scroller with FeedDigest) check out: http://app.feeddigest.com/digest3/5MQNOMFP0D.html Entirely created in FeedDigest.
TGK Member	Posted: 11 Apr 2006 12:02:07 Sow off. But can you make it pause? For the code impaired like me, want to post a tutorial? BTW here is another little goodie: http://www.tickermyfeed.com/ works great except I couldn't get it to scroll my feeddigest feeds. Tommyg www.vygear.com
mike power Member	Posted: 11 Apr 2006 14:23:02 Yes, Peter, much better than the effort at Fedostyle but still not smooth enough to grab me. (no offence) :-) Tommy, Tickermyfeed's servers must be down at the moment, I can't get through. I'll try later. Here a problem I have. The one scroller I really like is the typewriter newsfeeder from EasyByte. It is very similar to the one on the BBC and The Guardian and looks very professional. You have to use preexisting feeds from a list but they are all good quality. I've had it on a test page for months but I decided today to try it on my Newspage. Unfortunately it is glutinously slow and hesitant. Take out the FeedDigest php code from the page and boom! it reverts to its fast speed again. Does anyone have any ideas? I changed over to php to speed mypage loading but it is somehow affecting this JS.
admin Admin	Posted: 12 Apr 2006 02:17:28 It was only a quick demo. There are definitely smoother implementations :) (Changing the pixel amount should make it smoother) We are looking at having Flash animation(s) developed that use data from FeedDigest so you can get beautiful feed boxes to include on your sites. This would look a lot nicer ;-)
mike power Member	Posted: 12 Apr 2006 02:52:26 Look forward to it. I wasn't having a dig :-) I know it was a quick proof and indeed was better looking than most of the specialist stuff out there. BTW: Did you have a take on why the EasyByte JS is running slowly when I use php for the FD feeds? (mentioned above) After a lot of trials and forking out $30 for Tigra, (see above) which is a good scroller set but with no ability to include RSS feeds, I finally settled for a free headline scroller from DynamicDrive (see TGK above) - BTW, thanks for the heads up Tommy! Just links as headlines, very simple, but you can add dates and content easily should you wish. It requires files on your server but is smooth, quick, totally customizable (I kept mine plain) and easy to use. I'll be adding different feeds to the top of each of my newspages. For now you can see it running on This Page. It looks pretty professional I think you'll agree. Did I mention it was free :-)
magpie03 Member	Posted: 12 Apr 2006 13:01:44 The tickermyfeed code works fine, but when you click on a link from it you get the origin of the feed underneath several adverts. Not what I'm looking for - I like the idea of the flash animation and look forward to the development of those.
admin Admin	Posted: 7 May 2006 10:22:37 As an update on this topic, I am now talking to developers to implement this for us :)

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