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By popular demand, b5media is releasing an RSS feed of an (albeit manually updated) RSS feed of the medal counts. Some of our staffers and volunteers will be ensuring the medal count is no more than a few hours old.
Call it our contribution to you.
We’d love to see our data in use elsewhere so drop a comment in here and let us know how you’re using it!
The RSS feed can be found at http://everyjoe.com/olympics.xml
1422 days ago
[...] background, b5media sponsored the light the Torch site and generously offers a medal count feed.http://www.lightthetorch.net/2006/light-the-torch-medal-count-feed/trackback/Summerlin Judo Shines At Sunshine State Games – Polk County Democrat???I look for the camp to help [...]
I suggest you take a look at the signup script…
I put together a quick rss caching image that displays the US medal count for my company’s homepage. http://www.r-world.com/
The image is a bit of PHP that loads the base image, pulls the data out of a local database, and writes the current totals to the image.
If the data in the database is older then 15 minutes, the code then gets an update from the rss feed. I didn’t want to abuse b5media’s generosity, and thought that every 15 minutes isn’t that agressive of a download schedule while still being timely.
Thank you for the feed.
2279 days ago
[...] First a little background, b5media sponsored the Light the Torch site and generously offers a medal count feed. In their post regarding the introduction and availability of the feed, readers were encouraged to contribute regarding how they were using the feed. [...]
It has always only had the top 5. There’s no plan for more as that would get mildly unweildly to maintain. :)
Sheesh…I fired that off to quickly… Use $1, $2 and $3 after matching the description element for Gold, Silver and Bronze respectively. (sorry for the spamy posts.)
First, thanks “admin”.
Second, here’s a perl regex, /^Gold\-(\d+)\s+Silver\-(\d+)\s+Bronze\-(\d+)/io for anyone that’s interested (hope this comes through in the comment.)
Third, will the feed only have the top five or will it include the full medal rankings?
I’ve just updated the RSS feed. I’ll work on plain XML next but if you want to parse the RSS, you’ll have to run an explode() or other similar function to break apart $item->description.
Matt’s medal tracker is working great .. I have it on 4 of my sites now … Curling Blog if you want to see it ..
It was a two part installation directly to my template .. the script and I just added some stylesheet codes to the bottom of my stylesheet for my wordpress template. This would have let me modify it the way I wanted to .. (but the way matt did was fine with me!)
Is the country thing fixed on the RSS feed yet?
It pretty worthless without it!!
Aaron and Nathan, hope you two don’t mind me horning in on your xml/rss conversation. I just sent Aaron an email on the feed and an xml format. Aaron, feel free to forward to Nathan if you see fit or, smack the delete key if that’s a more satisfying reaction. ;)
I understand fully, Aaron. I wasn’t really faulting you, I was just commenting on how it could be better. The world is always up for improvement, isn’t it? Im about to send you an e-mail.
You have a point, Nathan, and I’m sorry for not doing it better than I did. It was half-assed, I admit, but I was also trying to manage a huge b5media server migration. I’ll try to get this fixed up better tonight.
In the meantime, if you wanted to help me, please email me the format that you would like the RSS and XML files to take. It would be easier for me to work off a model than to try to invent it on a caffeine and adrenaline-charged buzz, y’know? :-)
aaron@b5media.com
Jeremy: If you read Aaron’s post about it, though, he clearly says that “[you]‘d love to see [y]our data in use elsewhere”. It seems that if you’re looking for it to be parsed you would be looking for it to be used on other sites. These other sites would presumably want to have a table similar to the one here on lightthetorch.net, not just raw text. And no, XSLT could not be used to parse text into XML (unless you meant it could be done in XML, and then XSLT’ed to RSS, in which case yeah, easily).
Aaron: Why not both? Most (probably all?) RSS readers are going to display HTML. Simple additions of div/span tags with identifiers (which would have no semantic meaning what so ever) would allow RSS readers to show it identically to its current form, and allow parsers to easily get at the data.
AND why is there just “Light the Torch” in the html title tag and not the post’s real title???? It should be there if you excpect to get any Google hits.
Any eta on when the feed will be functional again?
To be fair, I was torn in how to do it. I could do pure RSS which would be more useful for blog readers or do XML and make it more useful for consumption by web sites, etc. I chose RSS as this is a blog and that’s what blogs do. I knew and know that decision will be second guessed but when you’re making decisions on the fly in a compressed space of time, it is what it is.
Nathan, it’s an RSS file, for subscribing to. It’s not really an XML file for parsing out into an app. I’m sure that’s possible as well (to be fair, XSLT could do all of what you’re asking for fairly easily), but it isn’t the purpose of what Aaron did.
In order to use the data in a useful way (ie. integration into one’s own site) one would have to do two steps: 1. Parse the RSS feed to get the first of three identical “description” tags, and 2. Use regexp or the like to actually get the information. It seems as though step two should be eliminated by the whole principal of XML. I’d rather parse a CSV file than regexp.
The XML is still being developed. I made a bunch of changes very late last night but had to put it aside do the sleep requirements. I’m curious why you say it’s not really XML.