Enable your site with Media RSS
Media RSS is an open standard for syndicating multimedia content. It extends RSS 2.0 to provide additional information, such as richer thumbnail and image metadata. Media RSS allows Cooliris (formerly known as PicLens) to understand the location of the media files that are displayed in the wall, as well as which thumbnails link to which high-resolution images. Click here for a complete description of Media RSS. To Cooliris enable your site:
1) Create a Media RSS Feed, and save it as photos.rss (or any name you want).
Make sure to declare the Media RSS namespace with <xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/mrss">. Click here for a generic example feed.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" standalone="yes"?>
<rss version="2.0" xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/mrss"
xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
<channel>
<item>
<title>Picture A</title>
<media:description> This one's my favorite.</media:description>
<link>pl_images/A.jpg</link>
<media:thumbnail url="pl_thumbs/A.jpg"/>
<media:content url="pl_images/A.jpg"/>
</item>
<item>
<title>Video B</title>
<link>pl_images/B.jpg</link>
<media:thumbnail url="pl_thumbs/B.jpg"/>
<media:content type="video/x-flv" url="pl_images/B.flv"/>
</item>
</channel>
</rss>
Note: The URLS can be relative (i.e. images/photo.jpg) or absolute (i.e. http://anysite/images/photo.jpg). <Title>, <media:description>, and <link> attributes are optional but recommended.
2) Upload your Media RSS feed to a directory on your web server.
Try the following applications to upload to your webspace (via FTP):
3) Place the code highlighted below in the <head> of the page you’d like to view in Cooliris to enable RSS Autodiscovery. Note that the href should specify the address (relative or absolute) of your RSS feed:
<head>
<link rel="alternate" href="photos.rss" type="application/rss+xml" title="" id="gallery" />
</head>
Website Examples
Click a gallery to view the HTML code or RSS to see the associated Media RSS feed:
Additional Features
In order to implement these features, declare your Media RSS namespace as:
<rss version="2.0" xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/mrss" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
You can do a lot of cool things with Media RSS and Cooliris (Click the Blue Link to find out how):
- Multipage Galleries – Have all of the linked content on your site appear on one continuous wall.
Instead of having one huge RSS feed of content, you can page it into as many individual feeds as you’d like. It’s quite simple to do.
In your Media RSS feed, just link each feed with <atom:link rel=”previous”/”next”…/> tags inside the <channel> element, e.g.
<channel>
<atom:link rel="previous" href="http://mysite.com/feed1.rss" />
<atom:link rel="next" href="http://mysite.com/feed2.rss" />
You can even link feeds from different domain names, if you’d like:
<channel>
<atom:link rel="previous" href="http://mysite.com/photos.rss" />
<atom:link rel="next" href="http://myothersite.com/photos.rss" />
- Custom Icon – Your icon will appear in the upper left of Cooliris!
To add a custom logo to your slideshow, insert the following tag beneath the <channel> tag:
<channel>
<atom:icon>http://www.mywebsite.com/images/logo.gif</atom:icon>
You may use any image (PNG, JPG, or GIF). A 26-pixel high logo will fit nicely into the top bar.
- Launch Cooliris – Launch Cooliris, (optional) with a specific feed or item.
Cooliris can be launched from an HTML page using the <a href="javascript:PicLensLite.start();">Insert Content Here</a> tag. Make sure to include http://lite.piclens.com/current/piclens.js in your HTML head, as specified in the PicLens Lite section.
- Launch with a specific feed:
<a href="javascript:PicLensLite.start({feedUrl:'http://www.mywebsite.com/feed.rss'});">Start Cooliris!</a>
- Launch with a specific item (make sure you have GUIDs specified for each item):
<a href="javascript:PicLensLite.start({guid:'img0.jpg'});">Insert Content Here</a>
Click here to find out more cool stuff exposed in the Piclens Lite API.
- Dynamic Feeds – Create Media RSS Feeds from any database (requires scripting knowledge).
http://developer.cooliris.com/
Thank you for posting about Cooliris! We truly appreciate it. We’re delighted to hear that you are enjoying Cooliris and we hope your readers will too.
Cooliris Developer is pretty awesome so we hope everyone will get the chance to check it out!
Interested readers can check out the full spectrum of Cooliris features at http://cooliris.com/demo and please stay tuned for more exciting developments.
Thanks again,
Luna and The Cooliris Team