Russell Beattie

Not wanting to give up just yet on mOlympics, I got inspired just now while checking out RSS Calendar - a new calendaring service that uses RSS feeds to distribute the scheduling info. One of the cool features is the ability to include your calendar on your web page just by including some JavaScript.

I thought of something like this for mOlympics a few days ago, but had forgotten about it. Seeing how the RSS Calendar guys did it made me realize how simple it is to do, so I once again, copy/pasted the basic query page, slapped some document.write('') lines in there and *poof* I have a web-service! Unlike RSS Calendar, though, I didn't use tables, but just the XHTMLized divs I already had hanging around.

To put mOlympic headlines on your site, include the following code:

 <style>
 <!--
 .molympics{width:200px; border: 1px solid #000000; padding: 5px;}
 .molympics_header{text-align:center;}
 .molympics_footer{text-align:center;}
 .news_item{margin: 5px; border-top: 1px solid #adc830;}
 .news_title a{font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;}
 .news_subtitle a{font-style: italic;}
 .news_description{font-size: 80%;}
 -->
 </style>

 <script language="JavaScript" src="http://www.molympics.com/banner.jsp"></script>

Yeah, I know the style stuff is a bit verbose, but it's also a lot more flexible/powerful. You can put the banner anywhere you want. And if you want to just have headlines about a specific topic, just put a search param in the url like this: "banner.jsp?q=archery".

I'm going to add it to my site right now, if you're reading this in an aggregator, come check it out!

-Russ