Archive for August, 2009

For Technorati

Friday, August 28th, 2009

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Listings that Roam Help Get Pets Home

Thursday, August 27th, 2009

Just a short little post to welcome the newest site kind enough to display the lost and found listings from us via the RSS feeds.  Its Tails n’ Trails, the brand new online club for those interested in outdoor activities with their dogs.  This  club/online forum is provided by the good people at Countryhounds.ie, suppliers of hiking, swimming and travel gear for dogs.

We are delighted to see the listings reach a wider audience and the icing on the cake is that its from a site promoting healthy active outdoor activities for dogs and we are certain the owners posting pets here will appreciate their help too.

We hope more sites will follow the great example set by TopDog.ie and TailsandTrails.ie and syndicate the feeds, either server-side or client-side.  Displaying the feeds is such a postive way to show that you or your organisation cares about the welfare of animals in Ireland and wants to help improve their lot; so what are you waiting for?

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Lost & Found Pet Listings On Your Site

Sunday, August 23rd, 2009

I have just put the finishing touches to some code here today to enable those interested to display our RSS feeds for lost and found pet postings on their own website in a relatively easy and straight forward fashion without the need for server-side coding.

I have built a small wizard which lets you choose the pet listings to show on any of your own web pages  by status (lost,  found or both), location (county) and pet type (currently dogs, cats or all pets are supported).  As our listings update, so will your’s.  This wizard uses your choices to build some Javascript which you or your web designer/developer can then copy and paste into your own page at the location you wish to display the listings.  Additionally, I have provided some CSS styling information which can be used to change the look and feel of the listings to best match your own page.

As always, I’m opening up use of the generated code to any site that wants to use it in the hope of exposing the listings to more eyeballs.  If you let me know that you are using the feeds and assuming your site’s content does not negatively impact on pet welfare, I will be happy to feature a link to your site on our popular Lost and Found Pets Ireland Facebook page and/or to add your own Facebook fan page to our favourited pages there.

So, what are you waiting for?  Get started generating the pet listings you feel would be best for your site right now.

Any requests for support for the generated Javascript and the implementation of CSS styling can only be made through the ‘RSS 2 Javascript” thread on the discussion forum on Facebook.  That way, others who may come across similar issues can refer to the information there rather than my having to answer the same questions multiple times as the amount of time I can dedicate to such support is unfortunately pretty limited.

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Lost and Found Listings Now On Topdog.ie

Friday, August 14th, 2009

I’m delighted to let you all know that the excellent Irish dog resource site, Topdog.ie are now displaying our RSS feeds in the lost and found section of their forum.  This means that as we publish new listings here, they will be automatically shown on Topdog.ie also, thus gaining them more exposure.

This is exactly the kind of thing I was hoping for when I coded up the RSS feeds and I am especially delighted that such a high profile and quality site has taken up the idea so quickly and enthusiastically.

RSS Feeds Now Filterable by Status, County and Pet Type

I guess this is also an appropriate time to announce that I have extended out the functionality of the RSS feeds so they can now be filtered by status, county and pet type.  For those interested in availing of them, all the feed URLs have the following general structure:

http://www.lostandfoundpets.ie/rss/status/country/pet-type

where status, county and pet-type can have the following values:
status – optional, lost or found (in lowercase)
county – optional, the name of the county you wish to display pets from (in lowercase)
pet-type – optional, dog or cat (in lowercase)

Example Usage

If you wish to display ALL lost and found pets posted here, you would use:
http://www.lostandfoundpets.ie/rss
If you wish to display ALL ‘Lost’ listings posted here you would use:
http://www.lostandfoundpets.ie/rss/lost
If you wish to display lost and found listings from Dublin only, you would use:
http://www.lostandfoundpets.ie/rss/dublin
If you wanted to display all ‘Found Pet’ listings only in Dublin then you would use:
http://www.lostandfoundpets.ie/rss/found/dublin
And finally, if you wanted to display just found dog listings from Dublin, you would use:
http://www.lostandfoundpets.ie/rss/found/dublin/dog

I will have more to announce about the RSS feeds shortly so watch this space.

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