Custom "Latest Activity" RSS feed?

[Jason Frank]

I am trying to make a little "badge" on another site that pulls the activity log from my Ning site. Since there is an RSS feed for the activity log, I thought it would be pretty easy. Unfortunately, the RSS feed doesn't seem easy to work with. For example, when a new member joins, the title of the associated RSS entry reads:

[Joe User] joined [Network]. Leave a Comment for .

The part in brackets, e.g. Joe User, is not really what comes in the feed, it is just an example. The strange thing is the "Leave a Comment for ." No name, just a blank followed by a period. So I do not want to publish this kind of thing on my external site.

How have others gotten around this issue? I am considering building a custom activity feed in PHP, but that does not sound very appealing. Perhaps I am missing an easier solution.

[TimG]

I have an idea for you...

Visit Yahoo! Pipes and create a custom pipe that draws items from your network's RSS feed.
(You could theoretically incorporate other feeds as well... use the UNION pipe element)

I've done this with great success, pulling in six different RSS feeds (including my own Ning site's activity), customizing the titles, item.description, etc. (I use RegEx extensively to remove or shorten certain text elements).

When new members join, I get the event's "Title" correctly. HOWEVER, I recall tinkering with my network's Language Editor once. When I messed with the entry you mention above:


[Joe User] joined [Network]. Leave a Comment for [ ].

...I found it would 'break' if I edited that. Evidently, Ning fills in the [ ]'s using parameters (three of them, called %s in the Language Editor), and placement kinda matters. Make sure yours is set to the default (MANAGE > Language Editor > Edit ... search for 'Leave a Comment').

Anyway, Yahoo! Pipes is a great resource for mashing up your RSS. I'm currently working on incorporating a "Happy Birthday to [ ]" announcement, but after days of researching HOW to get/sort/display items from the Ning Content Store, I'm still stuck. Nothing works for me yet.

Will be posting shortly about my own troubles. Meanwhile, hope I've helped solve yours.

- TimG

[Jason Frank]

Thanks for the reply, Tim. I took a look at Pipes but didn't really think it would help me. I like the contents of the latest activity feed, and I'm not sure how I would recreate it by mashing up different feeds.

I have never edited anything in the Language Editor so I don't think I broke anything there. I have a couple of Ning sites, and they all exhibit this strange sentence in the title of the RSS items when someone joins the network.

My current solution is to ignore the title of each item entirely, because it is usually redundant with the description anyway. I am just grabbing the description, which contains HTML, and using that on my external site. This allows me to pretty closely mirror the actual Latest Activity section of a Ning site, which is what I wanted to do in the first place.