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Oh, Carp ...
June 23, 2005
With a little help from my friend Gail, I now have Carp installed and running on one of my sites. I'm pretty tickled about this, because I've been wanting to install Carp for quite a while but there was that whole learning curve thing again.
Carp (it's really spelled CaRP, for "Caching RSS Parser"), is a great little open source tool that lets you use php script to pull in newsfeeds onto any page of your site. Unlike using javascript to do the same thing, the end result is a lot of search engine friendly, fresh content. The basic version is free, and if you're just looking to pull newsfeeds onto your pages, the basic version is all you need.
Anyway, installing Carp turned out to be easy as pie. The hardest part of installing scripts, I find, is knowing what the PATH is. I almost never know if I'm using the right path. So I consider Carp a thing of beauty, because once you upload the thing, and you run the setup file, it tells you the path!
Gail helped me out with formatting the actual php code that runs the script on my site, and once I got a handle on what I was supposed to be doing, I found the documentation on the Carp site filled in the rest of the blanks.
Installation really was just a matter of following the installation instructions on the Carp site. For some help getting started in terms of configuring your feed displays, here's a handy forum post on using carp rss for news feed content.
But if you're nontechnical and would like to have videos to walk you through things, you can check out Guido Stiehle's Carp Video Tutorial. (As an SEO Website Builder owner, I got it free through the SEO WB forum, but it didn't come with the script content rotator that gets thrown in when you buy the tutorial.)
I didn't actually watch the videos, since I already had Carp installed, but I did read through the documentation and it looks pretty thorough.
The one thing I would advise, that is not mentioned in Guido's tutorial, is uploading the Carp folder (not the Carp setup file) in your home directory, above your domain.com folder - this is the directory where your log files are located, and the Carp installation materials advise you to place the main Carp folder here for security reasons. (This was also one of the main reasons I felt a bit daunted about installing Carp - that whole "what's the correct path" thing again. Which, as I mentioned above, the setup file solves beautifully.)
However, I did find the installation and display formatting instructions on the Carp site weren't too difficult, so if you're even a little bit proficient with stuff like this, you might want to just try to walk yourself through installation and configuring your display using these instructions first.
The thing I really liked about Guido's tutorial, though, was his section on using the Amazon feed, because the instructions on this on the Carp site, with all the talk about XML, made my eyes glaze over a bit. I will likely be upgrading my Carp licence so that I can include Amazon images when I use the feed, since this is the one thing that's not included in the free version. But if you aren't planning to use the Amazon feed with Carp, or if the images aren't that important, you'll be able to put up the feed using the free version alone.
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Posted by BJ at 09:53 AM in Free Resources and Tools | Permalink
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