zoneRSS manual

zoneRSS is a Zonelets-compatible RSS feed and posting tool.

Read this manual to learn how to install and use zoneRSS, either as a companion tool for Zonelets, or as a standalone microblog.

Contents:

  1. Installation and setup
  2. Posting with zoneRSS
  3. Post options
  4. Zonelets integration
    • Modifying script.js
    • Preserving old Zonelets posts
  5. zoneRSS without Zonelets
  6. Extra features
  7. Alternatives to zoneRSS
  8. FAQ
    • Why do I need to refresh feed.html each time I make a new post?
    • I already have an existing RSS feed - can I use that with zoneRSS?
  9. About

Installation and setup

To install zoneRSS, first unzip zoneRSS.zip somewhere on your computer.

Inside you should see a handful of files. Copy the files feed.xml and feed.html into the root directory of your blog. These are, respectively, the RSS feed itself and a webpage for viewing and editing that feed. If you are using Zonelets, they should go right next to index.html, about.html, script.js, etc. If you are not using Zonelets, simply place them in whichever directory you want to be the home of your blog.

That's it - zoneRSS is now installed! But before you begin posting, you need to give your RSS feed a name and description, and link it to your blog.

Start by navigating to the address for your new feed.html page in your browser. For example, if your blog's address is https://example.com/blog/ you would go to https://example.com/blog/feed.html. The feed page acts as both a timeline of all the posts on your blog and as a tool for authoring the posts themselves. When you first visit, it will be empty. That's because you haven't added anything to your RSS feed yet!

We'll do that soon, but first, add the URL parameter ?post=profile to the address in your browser and reload the page. In our example, the full address would be https://example.com/blog/feed.html?post=profile. After the page reloads, you should see the profile editor. Choose a name and description for your blog, and then fill in the links to your blog's feed and to the blog itself. In our example, the feed would be https://example.com/blog/feed.xml but you should replace that with the actual address of your feed.

Once you're happy with your feed's profile settings, click the "save rss feed" button to download an updated feed.xml file. Copy this file back into your blog's root directory to replace the old version and update your feed. You're now ready to begin posting!

Posting with zoneRSS

Time to add your first post to your RSS feed!

(NOTE: Before opening the post editor, make sure to reload feed.html so it can load your updated RSS feed, and changes you made to your feed.xml in the previous step don't get lost. See the FAQ for more details.)

To open the post editor, replace the ?post=profile URL parameter in your browser's address bar with ?post=new. In our example, the full address is now https://example.com/blog/feed.html?post=new. Reload the page and you should see the post editor. (You may want to bookmark this address to make it easy to get to in the future.)

The post editor has two main fields, a title and a body. The title is where you write the title of your post. The body is where you write HTML for the main text of your post. There is also a link field that shows where you should upload the HTML file for your post in order to publish it.

Fill in the post title and body for your first post. Then click the "save rss feed" button to download an updated feed.xml file. After that click the "save html page" to download the HTML page for your blog post. (If you are not using Zonelets, you'll need to do some extra work to tell zoneRSS where to find the template for your HTML pages - see "zoneRSS without Zonelets" below for more information.)

Once again, copy the updated feed.xml into your blog's root directory to replace the old version and update your feed. Then copy the blog post's HTML page in your posts/ directory. Refresh the posts feed and you should see your post - you've published your first post to your RSS feed!

Note: If you are using Zonelets, you will also need to update the postsArray in your script.js file so that your post will show up in your Recent Posts and Archive pages. If you want to set things up so you can skip this step, continue on to the "Zonelets integration" section to learn how. If not, you can stop here - you're all set!

Post options

Before we move on from the post editor, you may have noticed there is an "options" dropdown containing two checkboxes. These options give you some additional flexibility in how you post.

Zonelets integration

As mentioned earlier, if you are using Zonelets, each time you post you will need to do an extra step and update the postsArray in your script.js file so that your post appears in your Recent Posts and Archive.

But all that data already exists in your RSS feed! So why not just have script.js read that from the RSS feed?

To do that you'll need to make some changes to your script.js.

(NOTE: Before we do that, if you already have a history of Zonelets posts that you want to preserve, you should copy your existing postsArray into a backup .txt file now. We will return to those after modifying the Zonelets script.)

Modifying script.js

In the folder where you unzipped the zoneRSS files, you should see two script files: zonelets-patch-start.js and zonelets-patch-end.js. Open your script.js and find section 2 ("Posts Array"). Delete everything in that section and replace it with the contents of zonelets-patch-start.js. Then scroll all the way to the bottom of script.js. Copy the contents of zonelets-patch-end.js and add it to the end of the file.

From now on, Zonelets will get your posts directly from your RSS feed - you won't need to update script.js anymore!

There are a few additional ways you can further integrate zoneRSS into Zonelets:

Preserving old Zonelets posts

If you already have a history of Zonelets posts that you want to keep in your Archive, you'll need to add them back into the modified script.js file. Find section 2a ("HISTORIC POSTS ARRAY") of your modified script file. Replace the empty postsArray with your old array. This will now be combined with the posts loaded from RSS, preserving your existing posts in the Archive and for previous / next navigation. (Your old posts will not be included in your RSS feed though.)

zoneRSS without Zonelets

Although zoneRSS is designed to be compatible with Zonelets, it is also possible to use it on its own.

The easiest way to do that is to use zoneRSS as an RSS-only microblog. To do that, just use the "rss-only" option when posting (see "Post options" above for details). Instead of uploading both feed.xml and an HTML page, you'll just update the RSS feed and use feed.html as the main page of your blog.

A more involved option is to use zoneRSS with your own HTML page template. To do this, you'll need to open feed.html and find section 1 ("Basic Configuration"). Edit postDirectory and postTemplateName to point at the file you want to use as your template.

Extra features

zoneRSS comes with a couple of extra features that are disabled by default. To enable them, open feed.html and find section 2 ("Optional Configuration").

Alternatives to zoneRSS

If zoneRSS isn't quite what you're looking for, consider these alternatives:

FAQ

About

zoneRSS is made by Adam Le Doux