I’ve finally decided to post another no-brainer JQuery plugin: a simple news box fed by an RSS feed. You can see an example on our project’s home page. I had found the idea on the JQuery mailing list but loving plugins (although not really good at it) I decided to wrap it up a bit.

The result is quite simple: just place a div somewhere and initialize it with a feed URL:

<script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript">
$('#rightcolumn').feedreader({
targeturl: 'http://blogs.atalayasec.org/atalaya/?feed=rss2'
});
</script>
...
<div id="rightcolumn">
</div>

There are two other configuration options available; how many posts to put in the news box and the length of the text to be displayed for each item. A complete initialization would be then like the following:

$('#rightcolumn').feedreader({
targeturl: 'http://blogs.atalayasec.org/atalaya/?feed=rss2',
items: 3,
descLength: 15
});

The code is pretty rough (and not really js-style) but functional. In case it’s useful to someone.

The original code, from Stoyan Stefanov, is here. I’ve simply wrapped it in a jquery plugin. It’s enough to wrap the canvas and table elements in a div:

<div id="pie">
	  <table id="mydata">
	    <tr><th>Lang</th><th>Value</th</tr>
	    <tr><td>JavaScript</td><td>100</td></tr>
	    <tr><td>CSS</td><td>200</td></tr>
	    <tr><td>HTML</td><td>300</td></tr>
	    <tr><td>PHP</td><td>50</td></tr>
	    <tr><td>MySQL</td><td>30</td></tr>
	    <tr><td>Apache</td><td>10</td></tr>
	    <tr><td>Linux</td><td>30</td></tr>
	  </table>
	  <canvas id="canvas" width="300" height="300"></canvas>
</div>

and to initialize the plugin:

 $(function() {
         $(‘#pie‘).canvaspie({table: ‘#mydata‘,canvas: ‘#canvas‘})
 });

The plugin hides the table and shows the pie. An example (and the plugin itself) can be found here, in case someone finds it useful.

P.S: yes, I do need a code highlighter, sorry.

P.P.S: Thanks Stoyan for pointing me to hiliteme.

Update: I’ve updated the test page to use ExplorerCanvas, so now the test page should work on IE as well.