Using the Website Action Stream

The Action Streams plugin includes a “Website” stream for easy adding of your blogs and other websites with feeds to your action stream.

Adding a website

You can add any web site with discoverable Atom or RSS feeds as a “Website” profile. Viewing these sites in modern web browsers such as Internet Explorer, Firefox or Safari causes an “RSS” or feed icon to appear in the location bar.

To add such a web site as a profile, go to the Add Profile dialog as with any other Action Streams profile, select “Website” for the service, and enter the URL of the web page in the “URL” field.

Unlike most streams, you can still add additional “Website” profiles to collect posts to other web sites.

Customizing the display

By default, entries in the feeds are displayed as though they are blog posts you posted:

Melody posted <a href="...">Kittens!</a> on
<a href="...">Melody's Cute Blog</a>

As with other streams, you can customize this display through template code. Two common changes would be to display sites’ favicons and to customize the text for a non-blog web feed. Consult the Template Author Guide for additional tags and options available to you when writing action stream templates.

Showing favicons

If the web site’s favicon is discoverable from the web page content, the Website stream will collect it for use in your templates. (The Website profile won’t collect favicons that are at the default favicon.ico location but not declared in the web site’s HTML.)

The favicon URL is in the icon_url action variable, so you can display it with this template code:

<mt:ActionStreams>
    <li class="icon icon-<mt:Var name="service_type">"
    <mt:If name="action_type" eq="website_posts">
        <!-- move the icon_url action var to a regular var -->
        <mt:StreamActionVar name="icon_url" setvar="website_icon_url">

        <mt:If name="website_icon_url">
        style="list-style-image: url(<mt:Var name="website_icon_url">)"
        </mt:If>

    </mt:If>
    >
        <mt:StreamAction>
    </li>
</mt:ActionStreams>

If you are customizing your templates for particular sites, you can also use CSS in your stylesheet. Use the source_url or source_title action variables in a CSS class name, and style the actions in your stylesheet however you wish.

<mt:ActionStreams>
    <li class="icon icon-<mt:Var name="service_type">
        <mt:If name="action_type" eq="website_posts">
        icon-website-<mt:StreamActionVar name="source_title" dirify="-">
        </mt:If>
    ">
        <mt:StreamAction>
    </li>
</mt:ActionStreams>

Customizing text for non-blog content

Despite the default text, the Website stream can be used with other feeds besides blogs. You can customize the text on a per-site basis by checking the source_url action variable, like so:

<mt:ActionStreams>
    <li class="icon icon-<mt:Var name="service_type">">
    <mt:If name="action_type" eq="website_posts">
        <!-- move the source_url action var to a regular var -->
        <mt:StreamActionVar name="source_url" setvar="website_url">

        <!-- example book review site -->
        <mt:If name="website_url" eq="http://books.example.com/">

            <!-- book review -->
            <mt:AuthorDisplayName escape="html">
            reviewed
            <a href="<mt:StreamActionURL escape="html">">
                <mt:StreamActionTitle escape="html">
            </a>

        <mt:Else>
            <!-- some other website -->
            <mt:StreamAction>
        </mt:If>
    <mt:Else>
        <!-- some other stream -->
        <mt:StreamAction>
    </mt:If>
</mt:ActionStreams>