One of the new features that will be making an appearance in Pebble 2.1 is a generic feed reader component that you can use to pull feeds into your sidebar. You can use it like this.

<jsp:include page="/WEB-INF/fragments/sidebar/feed.jsp">
  <jsp:param name="name" value="del.icio.us"/>
  <jsp:param name="url" value="http://del.icio.us/rss/simongbrown"/>
  <jsp:param name="maxEntries" value="3"/>
  <jsp:param name="showBody" value="true"/>
  <jsp:param name="truncateBody" value="true"/>
</jsp:include>

This component uses ROME under the covers and thanks to its ability to deal with any type of RSS/RDF/Atom feed, you can pretty much pull in anything you want, providing it exposes a feed of some description. Couple this with some flexibility in the way that the entries within that feed are displayed and you have quite a useful little component. If you're reading this on my blog, scroll down a bit and you'll see that I'm using it for displaying my del.icio.us bookmarks, my Twitters and a handful of sites that are currently linking here (courtesy of a Technorati search). Other uses include aggregating another blog/news site and stuff you're selling on eBay into your sidebar. The possibilities are endless.

Simple but very effective.

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Posted by Simon Brown on 02 April 2007 22:39:00 BST #