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Successfully scrolling RSS feeds on my blog using the Accessible News Ticker plugin
By braddock | May 1, 2008
Well I just couldn’t get the CNN News plugin to work with Godaddy hosting. The plugin uses fopen requests and Godaddy blocks those server side. Godaddy basically told me to find another way because they weren’t changing anything. I did find another way.
Accessible News Ticker doesn’t use an fopen request to pull feeds, and I have it scrolling the CNN Science & Space RSS feed in my sidebar right now. Accessible News Ticker is a widget, so you’ll need a widget capable Wordpress theme to use it.
Of course you can make almost any theme work with widgets just by adding this php call to your sidebar.php:
<?php if ( !function_exists(’dynamic_sidebar’)
|| !dynamic_sidebar(2) ) : ?>
Normally you would put that code at the top of your sidebar.php to make your whole side bar dynamic and widget friendly. You don’t have to though. You could have a standard sidebar with regular elements and then stick the widgets at the bottom…that’s what I did.
Accessible News Ticker let’s you specify any RSS feed. Some feeds look better than others when scrolled. The stories appear as links, so your visitors can click the title in the feed and be taken to the full story.
You’ll probably want to change the scroll speed in the ant.php file. It’s moving at a pretty good clip on the default setting. You can also change the style of the scroll box using the domnews.css file in /accessible-news-ticker/includes/. I’m pretty happy with it, but I’m sure I’ll tweak it some more.
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Topics: WordPress |
