Edit: The widgets seemed to be interfering with each other so I split the original post up so that each widget displayed on its own page.
Scopus
As I mentioned in my UNYSL talk last week, I am repurposing a search that I ran in Scopus, Elsevier’s science citation database, to generate a list of newly published articles by chemistry researchers at Syracuse University. Scopus offers a custom RSS alert option for every search you perform. I won’t repeat the steps I had to make to get it to work well — see the slides for that.
Here is the url for the RSS feed from Scopus for the faculty publication search. The url is ugly but functional and it reliably brings in the results I designed it for. As is, it can be sent to just about any RSS feed reader without any problem.
http://syndic8.scopus.com/getMessage?registrationId=EAHEFDPEFCHMMBLJGAHMFAHHFAIFIEKMGSJSTEHLIT
However, what I want to do is figure out a way to display it directly on my web site. It really isn’t difficult to display RSS feeds directly on a webpage. However, unless you are running your own server-side program, you will probably use some sort of third-party widget that you can embed on your page. Widgets of this sort use javascript or Flash or some combination of the two. You embed code stating the location of the widget and then tell the widget which RSS feed it should use, and it does the rest.
Display Using Grazr
Grazr is one of the first widgets that I used when I was first playing around with embedding RSS feeds on web pages. It is quite easy to use and configure. It is embedded using javascript and pulls a page generated by Grazr into an iframe on your own web page. It has been stable and reliable over the past several years.
Shown below, the Grazr widget displays the titles of articles from the Scopus field in a list. Clicking the title expands it to show the description for each article: author, journal title, year, and date the record was indexed in Scopus. Clicking the icon to the right of the article title takes you to the corresponding record in Scopus. Links are not proxied, so access to Scopus (a subscription database) is IP address dependent.