smk17 wrote:
Quote:
This sounds like what I need. Creating my own RSS feed. I checked two
of my local papers and they do have sports RSS feeds. But it seems as
if I'd get every sport headline they send out. I only want the scores
from boys basketball. I don't even want the article about the game.
But I'll keep looking into that.
Well, you could take their feed and then filter out the stuff you don't
want. You don't need to include the articles if you don't want to. They
may offer easy ways to filter by sport. For instance, they may use the
RSS tag "category" to specify which sport each article refers to. You
could elect to only show those items that have a category of
"basketball". Could you share the link for the RSS feeds? If I saw the
feed I might be able to help imagine some filtering strategies.
Quote:
So let me see if I understand all this.
I'd create a form, web page, where the volunteers can go, hopefully
password protected? They fill out the form with the teams names, the
score, the date, etc. and submit it.
Well, if the local newspapers have all this info in their RSS feeds,
then you don't need to recreate the data, you just need to find a way
to filter out the data you don't want. But if the local papers aren't
providing the information you want, then yes, this is the way to go.
Quote:
That automatically gets sent to the specific page on my site for the
scores and it's posted. Do I need to create a form page for every
volunteer, or will one form work even though people from different
towns could possibly be filling out that form at the same time?
A simple arrangement would involve a total of 4 files on your website:
1. the form where people put in the scores
2. the PHP script that turns the scores into an RSS feed
3. the RSS feed
4. a page that renders the RSS feed and makes it look pretty
For the different towns, or conferences, I suggest that just be field
in the form. That is, as people fill out the form, they specify what
town or conference they are from.
Quote:
Is there any way I can format the results to be displayed in a table,
or do I have control over how that looks? I'd like to separate these
scores by each conference, there are 5 in my area.
With enough effort, all things are possible. You could, with very
little effort, grab a free script and accept its default formatting for
rendering your information. With more effort, you could make the output
look like anything you want. There are even some interesting Javascript
scripts that would allow you to put the info in an interactive table
that could be sorted by various columns, live, allowing people to
interact with the information on the page.
Quote:
I know how to create the form, but connecting it to feed into that
"scores" page is where I get lost. Is the link you gave me
(
http://usefulinc.com/rss/rsswriter/) intended to show me how to do all
that? I really appreciate your help.
I think RssWriter could help, but its not a whole solution. You need a
form that collects info like this:
1st team
2nd team
location
date
final score
etc. You can add in what information you'd like to keep track of. The
HTML of such a form would look like this:
<form method="post" action="makeRss.php">
<p>1st team: <input type="text" name="input[firstTeam]" /></p>
<p>2nd team: <input type="text" name="input[secondTeam]" /></p>
<p>Location: <input type="text" name="input[location]" /></p>
<p>Date: <input type="text" name="input[date]" /></p>
<p>final score: <input type="text" name="input[finalScore]" /></p>
<p><input type="submit" value="Add game to page" /></p>
</form>
You see the part at top that says action="makeRss.php"? That means
you'll want to have a file called makeRss.php, and inside of that file
should be a PHP script that does the magic of turning your form into
data.
If RSS is too hard to get, you could probably get by with your own
formatting rules, such as separating each field with a comma and each
record with a newline. Such a PHP script would be trivial.
You may also want to break up the date into its parts:
1st team
2nd team
location
day
month
year
final score
and you may want to break up the scores:
1st team
2nd team
location
day
month
year
1st team score
2nd team score
The more you break it up, the more people have freedom of sorting the
data, splicing it up as they like.
