By pheedbaq . on
4/26/2010 11:06 AM
After nearly 3 years of having this blog, and all the times I said I would put up some tutorials, I guess it's about time I actually did that :P. I intend to make my tutorials short and sweet, well, because I'd rather be keeping up with my YouTube channel or adding useful links to this site than doing grammar checks on blog posts, :D programming experience is assumed...
Anyway, XSLT, or eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformations, is handy for converting any XML-compliant documents into other XML documents. The perfect example is on this site's front page; you see I have links from GameTrailers, Joystiq, DigitalFoundry, and Gamasutra, all in their own little sections. Well, you don't really think I copy-paste those links to my site every few minutes, do you? No, each of those sites provides an RSS feed (Really Simple Syndication) for public use. RSS is a subset of XML, and as such can be modified by XSL, because an RSS document/feed is an XML document. Sooooooo, what I'm doing is slurping up the RSS from their site, and using XSL to reformat the data in those feeds for use on my site so that it conforms to my site's look and feel. Voila, valuable content for my site's users, and that content will now update itself!
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