The atlbike.org RSS News Scroller and SNAP preview panel.
The atlbike.org News Scroller is a powerful RSS news feed aggregator which contains hundreds of dynamic links to cycling related information on the web. These links are updated several times/day, with the refresh rate dependent upon the RSS resource and how it is processed by the site. The news scroller is split into five streams of information. To enhance the quantity of information shown I rotate three of these feeds four times per hour. Thus, about 300 distinct feeds are presented over the course of an hour. The feeds are structured as follows:
- BLOGS - two feeds extracted from Google BLOG searches, targeted at recent updates to cycling and triathlon sites
- PEZ Cycling News, one of the more interesting cycling sites with full racing coverage
- Rotated - four separate feeds rotated every 15 minutes. BikeRadar 53×12 Triathlete Dirtworld
- VeloNews - the Journal of Competitive Cycling, tech articles, interviews, news, perspective
- YouTube - four feeds, structured to provide links to recent and popular cycling related videos
How the SNAP preview looks in actual operation is demonstrated in the following two figures. To test and activate the SNAP preview simply mouse-over one of the links in the News Scroller. If it has been previewed before you will see a thumbnail view of the linked page, if it is a fresh link it will take 10–20 seconds for SNAP to create the image. To open the page, simply click the page title at the top of the preview pane. This is shown in Figure 1 below.
Figure 1
When SNAP connects to a media link, like YouTube, it creates a fully functioning embedded player for the media. Simply click the play button on the image. To expand the window size, click the (+) in the upper right of the preview panel.
Figure 2
