Plugin of the Week: Framemaker RSS news reader
Back in the day, Emacs was the heavy duty editor on the block– in fact, it grew beyond an editor into a whole development and debugging environment, news reader, terminal emulator, all manner of things. I’ve even seen it used as a database of sorts.
I always thought, however, that turning Emacs into the be-all, end-all environment was wrongheaded. Even if it was an environment in which people were productive, it was still… Emacs. And there were limits to what could reasonably be shoehorned into it. In fact, I began to suspect that it was some kind of sinister cult.
Framemaker has inspired similar devotion, even though (unlike Emacs, so trivially extensible in a friendly language like Lisp) it takes a C developer to really customize its behavior in a significant way. And while it must be granted that it’s an XML-friendly environment, and XML is all the rage, there are limits to what you’d want to use Framemaker for, or at least so I think…
Obviously the folks at Zenserve don’t see it this way, though. They’ve managed to graft an RSS reader onto Framemaker– though if you spend so much time in Framemaker that you can’t fire up a web browser and use Google Reader or some such, you must be working too hard.
Anyway– here’s the blurb about it, as seen on Frameusers.com:
The RSS News Viewer plugin from Zenserve allows you to view RSS feeds from inside the structured version of FrameMaker 7. You can store up to five RSS channels, and the viewer window provides page reload, hyperlink, and navigational functionality.You can view a screenshot, and download the plugin from www.zenserve.com
RDF Site Summary (RSS) is a well-established web protocol that allows web developers to publish content on their web site in a manageable format. RSS repackages the content as a list of XML data items, such as the date, summary, or hyperlink to a news story. For more information about RSS, click here.
Zenserve has developed a utility that leverages FrameMaker’s structured documentation environment in order to parse formatted RSS XML information and present it to the user in an accessible form. The XML is displayed in a navigable FrameMaker window that can be refreshed, or used to jump to a linked story (if one is present). Although the utility is very useful for reading off-site news feeds, it could also be used to serve internal information to FrameMaker users within an organization.
