That's rather handy. :D Seems to work just fine in Opera Kestrel too. My only suggestion for (a minute) improvement would be a toggle to progressively display WIL and News as opposed to interleaving them WIL/News/WIL/News (some strange people - like me - prefer grouped, even if you can already adjust the amount display from each category). Good job guys!
_____ From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of neil Sent: 08 January 2008 15:17 To: backstage-developer@lists.bbc.co.uk Subject: [backstage-developer] RSS Sliders We've been developing a prototype interface element for the BBC which we'd like to release to the Backstage developer community for feedback and improvements. http://projects.hinterland.nu/bbc/sliders It's a simple slider widget which allows for four RSS feeds to be mixed down into a single list. Two sliders are used, the first to mix two pairs of feeds into two lists, and the second to mix the two lists together. .. The focus is on the BBC website's 'Where I Live' section, and the aim is to allow users to easily choose a balance of News and Local Features, as well as balancing the mix between two counties. Stories are given a value based on their order within the feed, and as the slider moves across, low value stories from one list drop off, to be replaced by high value stories from the new list. Questions include: Is this intuitive? Does the data shift as you might expect? Are two sliders too complex? Is a slider appropriate here, or should something else be used? Is the sorting algorithm right? What should we do about duplicate entries? .. The application is in two parts, a Perl script which consumes RSS feeds (using XML::FeedPP) and generates an embedded JSON array containing the stories from all four sources and their rank. Secondly there is a Javascript function to combine and generate the list(s) visible on the page. Since the time course of 'News' and 'Local Features' differ so widely [news changing by the minute, features dating back weeks] it was not possible to elegantly rank the lists strictly on their publication date - instead we chose to simply score them according to their rank position in the original feed. In this prototype the source feeds are hard-coded into the script - however this could easily be changed to use an external list. Unfortunately the BBC does not have a very RESTful interface to their local features XML, with no consistency in the URL format there is no simple programatic way to access all the BBC regions.
