Guild Wars RSS Feeds

These are links to my Guild Wars feed scripts. Any and all feedback is welcome.

If you don't know what RSS is or how to use it, check the two links at the bottom of this post.

GuildWars.com RSS Feeds

Guild Wars :: Current News
Guild Wars :: Game Updates BETA
Guild Wars :: Guild Ladder BETA
[XML] Guild Wars :: Network News BETA

GuildWars.com RSS Feeds: Switches and Variables

showSource: Used in your web browser address bar. Set to 'TRUE' to view the source code of the RSS feed.
cols: Guild Ladder feed variable. Can be set to a numerical value from 1-127 to control the display of columns. Add the numbers together from the chart below for the columns you wish to display and set that value to cols. 127 is the default value.


Feedreaders/News Aggregators:

What they are: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aggregator
Where to find them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_news_aggregators

The feed works great, and the pictures within each new item works too.

I am using SharpReader v0.9.5.1.

I figured, you'd might want some feedback, even if it isn't a problem.

I did have a random crash, with the feed open, but my reader crashes occasionally, probably because of the older version that I am running.

Thanks for the feedback. I'll try out SharpReader and see if I experience similar problems. Might be just a version problem, as you said.

Also, beta-testers...the beta feed is still up, but won't be shortly. So if you haven't switched over to the new link in the OP, you might want to do that soon.

I'll try and get my other feeds made and posted within the next few weeks.

Eugaet,
the feed works great i've center staged it at my guild site www.faithkil.com and a side note do you run guildwiki?

Thanks for the feedback. Only thing I might mention is that the 'read more' link at the bottom of the feed section on your site is linked to my domain. I'm assuming the RSS plugin you're using is just pulling the domain from the URL of the feed. You might want to check to see if there's a way to change that so it goes to the official GW site instead of mine...mine's not all that helpful in a 'read more' capacity.

Nope.

I do get Abilon crashing on occasion but not frequently. I think it's more of a bug with the program then the feed.

I have problems using Opera 8.51: The first character of each message is cut off. I thought I'd let you know.

Still great coding though, thanks for the effort.

It's a security feature in Opera, here's how to disable it:

I created a feed for the game updates section during lunch, so now all you feedsters can monitor it for any hint of the Christmas update. Unlike the first feed, this one is a public beta, so have at it.

Currently, it pulls all the entries except the very last one...pulling the first 9 of the 10 that are currently on the site. I'm working on fixing that, but I may not be able to with the way ANet's got that page coded. I figure if it drops the oldest entry, then that's probably OK...but I'll see what I can do.

Sorry it took me so long to get around to working on my projects again (yeah, no new panoramas, either...but maybe soon). I got readdicted to playing GW and, well, that's what I've been doing instead...

This is a somewhat "taboo" question... but would you mind sharing your code? :P

I'm just a big open-source person, I apologize for asking the question at all...

Anyway... just wanted to ask... hehe

EDIT: I somewhat necro-d a dead thread... <.<

Well...I always hate to inflict my uncommented, messy code on others...but in the interest of open-source, I suppose I can be cajoled to drop trou. Keep in mind, any link marked BETA is indeed messy, as I am not done futzing with that particular file.

Copy/paste any of the php links in my original post into your browser and tack on '?showSource=TRUE' to view the code. Without the single quotes, of course.

Let me know if you have any questions about the code. Or if anyone sees something I could do to make it more efficient, feel free to make suggestions.

im running both feeds through thunderbird along with my mail, it all works fine

Slight addition to the Current News feed. It will now display extra information about the current event if it can find it. Saw it on the GW site, didn't see it in my feed, got irritated, fixed it. I'm happy now.



The next feed I'll post will be for the Guild Ladder. This is probably only useful if you want to have an up-to-date Ladder listing displayed on your website by plugging the RSS link into your CMS. Thought the PvP crowd might like that option, though.

Also, no one has reported any errors with the Game Updates feed, so I'll go ahead and clean up the code and take it out of beta.

Guild Ladder beta feed is available. Any guild web sites want to help test this one out for me? Currently, it displays the top 20 guilds on the ladder (the first page) in the following format:

01: The Last Pride [EvIL] (Kr) 1902/196/23
02: Eternum Pariah [EP] ...etc.

You may be able to list only the top 5, 10, whatever, if your CMS allows you to set how many titles to display from the feed. I'll be tweaking how the feed displays the information, so if anyone has any suggestions, please let me know.

Also...and this is the part I really like...this feed is customizable. You can have it display only the columns you want. Just want rank, guild name, and tag? No problem. Rank, guild name, and rating? Easy. I'll discuss how to do so after it's been through some testing.

Very nice job with the RSS feeds, Eugaet.

OK, seems like the Guild Ladder feed is working well. Thanks to EternalTempest, Faithkil, and Sniperz53 for trying it out on their respective sites.

So here's how to customize it. There's a variable named 'cols' you can set and pass to the script to tell it which columns to return. If I wanted the script to return only the rank, guild name, and tag, I would use the following URL:

http://www.eugaet.com/rss/gw_guild_ladder.php?cols=7

So where did I get the 7 from? Each column has a numerical value associated with it as shown in the chart below.



Simply add the numbers up for the columns you want and set that value to cols.

Examples:
Rank + Guild Name + Tag = 1 + 2 + 4 = 7
Rank + Guild Name + Territory + Rating = 1 + 2 + 8 + 16 = 27

You can give cols a value from 1 to 127. Anything passed to the variable outside of 1-127 will be set to the default of 127 (all columns). I know this gives you more combinations than could possibly be useful (or even meaningful), but I've always been one to try to give as many options to the user as possible. Besides, it was easier to script this way.

I'm toying around with the idea of adding a header switch you could set which would create the header for the ladder as the first title in the feed. I'm also still messing around with the formatting of the titles. Any and all suggestions are appreciated. And if you have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask.

i use firefox ^^ uhm how do i do it as a live bookmaRK? cuz i did a live bookmark thingy in my firefox but yeah...

thX

I use Firefox, too...but not the live bookmarks feature.

Hmmm...I set up a live bookmark for the current news and game updates feeds with no problem, but the guild ladder feed won't load as a live bookmark. I'll see if I can find out why it doesn't work and get back to you...

EDIT: OK, fixed. Seems that Firefox doesn't like live bookmark entries if they're not linked to anything. Also works fine in Firefox with the cols variable.

Thanks for posting feedback. Let me know if anyone else has any problems with any of the feeds.

This is a superb project, and one close to my heart. Im, well trying, to develop an RSS feed using XML for my University engineering project.

Congratulations on a cool thing, btw any help you could point me to on developing proper working feeds would be super, via forum pm or such.

Hi Eugaet,

I'm running a php nuke evo site and just wondering if you know of a way I can make the news block look like your screen shot above with pictures and everything instead of just the links?

By the way, much better feed than i've found anywhere else. Atleast it doesn't include someone else's news. Anywhere I can donate to your work to show my appreciation?

Hi Eugaet,

It seems like others are doing it already, but I'm wondering if it is ok for people to add this feature to their own sites? I do a Guild Wars podcast at www.guildcast.com that also uses RSS and I'm thinking of adding this feature to the front page somewhere. Thanks!

I run Dragonfly CPG (aka Php nuke version 6 complete re-write) and It sounds like you would have to create a custom block. Your in the same situation as I am, http://www.gw-rotp.com (right side blocks).

I would look to see if someone created a rss / web view module to display that result. Considering how many mods there are for php nuke, I bet someone has one somewhere.

Yeah, this is me not realizing there were replies to my thread...

Eternal did a good job answering this one (glad someone was monitoring my thread for me...). You'd have to find a custom RSS block for your CMS. The screenshot you're referring to is of my feed in the Sage feed reader extension for Firefox, using the default style. You can check out the CSS source for the style here, which might help if you decide to make one yourself.

Would anyone (besides xBEASTx, of course) be interested in an RSS block for your CMS that would display it similarly to a full-fledged feed reader instead of just the links? If there's enough interest (and it hasn't already been done), I may look into it.

Thanks. I guess I could consider putting a donate link somewhere, but you're the first that's offered...

Yep, anyone is free to add any of these feeds to their website. At least until my host or ANet complains...

Aaaand...it looks like ANet has published the new website design. I'll see about getting the feeds working with the new design.

EDIT: OK, the Current News and Game Updates feeds have been updated. The Guild Ladder feed has not been affected...yet. Please let me know if there's a problem with any of them.

Decided to take a look at the stats for each of the feeds. The numbers below are hits from unique IP addresses per day.

Guild Wars :: Current News feed
27/Jan/2006 71
28/Jan/2006 60
29/Jan/2006 73
30/Jan/2006 75
31/Jan/2006 86
01/Feb/2006 81

Guild Wars :: Game Updates feed
27/Jan/2006 55
28/Jan/2006 44
29/Jan/2006 53
30/Jan/2006 55
31/Jan/2006 60
01/Feb/2006 53

Guild Wars :: Guild Ladder feed
27/Jan/2006 11
28/Jan/2006 4
29/Jan/2006 9
30/Jan/2006 13
31/Jan/2006 19
01/Feb/2006 16

All I've got to say is...
I figured there were about 10 of you, maybe 15...but ~70-80 subscribers on the news feed? Sweet.

<-- on all 3.. using sage

great rss feeds

thought the new site might of given u some trouble but i was wrong

Wasn't as bad as I thought it would be...the news and updates pages were structured pretty much the same as before with minor changes to the HTML/XHTML tags. I had to redo most of my regex strings, though. Waiting to see what they do with the ladder. I imagine any changes to it won't take place until after the GWWC.

So they may roll their own in the next few weeks/months...although I'm sure they don't mind using my bandwidth to provide these.

Have you thought about making a network status feed. As for as RSS it really doesn't provide usefull info as the others, it would be a great server status mointer for web pages (and restrict to only 1 news feed shown at the time - if thats possible).

http://www.guildwars.com/aboutgw/net...ws/default.php

Just an idea, not sure if this is doable warrent the time to do the work.

Again, great job, and thank you for all your hard work. Espically after the gw page change.

Actually...yes, I had planned on making one, but decided it wouldn't make for a good feed because of the rarity of an update. But, yeah, that would be good for a website if you wanted to display the network status. I'll see if I can get one put together this weekend.

I also considered doing one for the Community News page. Does anyone want a feed for that page?

Any other pages that deserve one?

EDIT: OK, Eternal, you've got your Network News feed. We'll have to see what it looks like if/when the page is updated...hopefully they just change the info and not the structure of the page. And I really wish I could add more than 4 images to my main post. I like those orange XML tags.

Okay this will sound wierd.

since gwguru has there pvp ladder part. but doesnt seem to be updating
and since my guild is nowhere NEAR l33t enough to be in top 20.. is it possible to change the rss for the ladder or make an alt one to display all guilds on the gw ladder site (top 1000)

Not weird at all. I had actually considered something like this a while back, just never got around to it. So I guess I'll do it now.

I added a 'page' variable to the Guild Ladder feed that takes an integer between 1 and 50 and displays the 20 rankings on the specified page. Not quite what you were looking for, but all I had time for during lunch. I'll look at doing a full top 1000 list later (if you really want it).

The page variable is used as follows:

I'm going to add some variables so you can chose by which column to order the list and whether the order is ascending or descending. I'm also still looking at a switch to set that'll make the first item a header row.

sounds good..
the optional page thing isnt too bad an idea.
however i think getting all 1000 onto 1 page might require an rss OF an rss for the pages *shrugs* not too sure how all that stuff works.. but its informative and saves alot of clicking

I've finally added a donation link to my wiki, which you can find here.

I haven't received any complaints regarding bandwidth usage (yet), but there's a handful of people out there who have their websites/feedreaders set to poll every 1 minute. They're pulling 50-75MB of bandwidth in one day for feeds that add up to about 15KB-50KB or so, depending on how many you are subscribed to. I'm not going to worry about it unless my hosts starts complaining, but seriously...do you really need to have it set to poll every minute? Kinda funny...

I've been away from most all my projects for a while now (aside from the RSS updates for the new GW website). I'm planning on working on the RSS feeds some more in the near future, though, so if there's any feedback on them in their current state, now's the time...

And I'll be taking a look at a Top 1000 Guild Ladder feed, skretth.

Hey, can you help me? I have tried figuring out how to use the RSS feed, but I am very new to the HTML and stuff like that. I was wondering if you would just add what needs to be added to the HTML below?
Guild Name: Keeper of the Void [Void]

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
<title>Guild Wars HQ - Guild Ladder</title>
<link rel="Stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen, print, projection" href="file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/user/Desktop/File%20Folders/Website/CSS.css"/>
</head>

<body>
<body background="http://www.allfreebackgrounds.com/backgrounds/backs/metal/metal003.gif" text="orange" link="yellow">
<div id="top">
<center><img src="http://img49.imageshack.us/img49/8117/9505kd.png"></center>


<div id="Links">
<em><b>Community Links</b></em>
<ul class="list">
<li><a href="http://www.guildwars.com" title="Guild Wars Official Site" class="listlink">Guild Wars Official Site</a></li>
<li><a href="http://s15.invisionfree.com/Guild_Wars_HQ/index.php" title="Community Forums" class="listlink">Community Forums</a></li>
<li><a href="http://guildwars.gameamp.com/game_map/game_map/125.php/" title="World Map" class="listlink">World Map</a></li>
<li><a href="link.html#/" title="Coming Soon" class="listlink">Coming Soon</a></li>
<li><a href="link.html#/" title="Coming Soon" class="listlink">Coming Soon</a></li>
</ul>
</div>

<div id="Links">
<em><b>Guild Wars Tools</b></em>
<ul class="list">
<li><a href="http://www.ventrilo.com/download.php" title="Ventrilo Download" class="listlink">Download Ventrilo</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.1stfistoflight.com/html/modules.php?name=RPG_Names" title="Character Name Generator" class="listlink">Character Name Generator</a></li>
</ul>
</div>

<div id="Links">
<em><b>Guild Wars Information</b></em>
<ul class="list">
<li><a href="http://www.xennon.co.uk/eliteskills/" title="Elite Skills List" class="listlink">Elite Skills List</a></li>
<li><a href="http://ladder.guildwars.com/" title="Guild Wars Ladder" class="listlink">Guild Wars Ladder</a></li>
</ul>
</div>

<div id="Links">
<em><b>Community Links</b></em>
<ul class="list">
<li><a href="http://s15.invisionfree.com/Guild_Wars_HQ/index.php?showtopic=28&view=getnewpost" title="Latest News and Updates" class="listlink">Latest News and Updates</a></li>
<li><a href="http://s15.invisionfree.com/Guild_Wars_HQ/index.php?showtopic=17&view=getnewpost" title="Guild Of The Week" class="listlink">Guild Of The Week</a></li>
<li><a href="link.html#/" title="Coming Soon" class="listlink">Coming Soon</a></li>
<li><a href="link.html#/" title="Coming Soon" class="listlink">Coming Soon</a></li>
</div>


<div id="Links">
<em><b>Guild Information</b></em>
<ul class="list">
<li><a href="link.html#/" title="Coming Soon" class="listlink">Coming Soon</a></li>
<li><a href="link.html#/" title="Coming Soon" class="listlink">Coming Soon</a></li>
</div>


<div id="Links">
<em><b>Need Help?</b></em>
<ul class="list">
<li><a href="link.html#/" title="Coming Soon" class="listlink">Coming Soon</a></li>
<li><a href="link.html#/" title="Coming Soon" class="listlink">Coming Soon</a></li>
</div>
<div id="footer">
| &copy; Drake Lewis 2006 | All Content On This Site Is Copyright To The Respective Owners |
<br>
<img style="border:0;width:88px;height:31px"
src="http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/images/vcss"
alt="Valid CSS!"/>
</a>
</p>

</div>

</body>

</html>

Last Paladin, you might check this site for some free tools that will create a javascript block you can place in your HTML to display the feeds.

Most of the other sites displaying the feeds are using RSS plugins for their respective CMS system. You are coding your site by hand? Admirable...

LOL, the only way that I know how to make a website is by hand. Never tried and webpage editors....
Thanks for the link

Most of the other sites are using pre-built CMS systems, like e107, Dragonfly, etc. You can find just about any one of them here. In case you decide not to start from scratch or if you want to dig through the source code of some of them to figure out how they work.

I'm aware that none of my feeds except the Guild Ladder one are working and I plan on trying to update them throughout the day if I can find the time. So please bear with me, I've been very busy with other responsibilities lately.

Well...I updated the Current News and Game Updates feeds. But I'm experiencing an intermittent problem. Every 3rd-4th time I check my feeds, they come up blank, no items listed. I click on them again and all the items show up correctly. Another 2-3 checks later...blank.

Not sure if it's my feedreader/browser, if it's my host...I'm monitoring some of the guild sites that are using my feeds and some looked good, others I'm still waiting to refresh. No sites seem to be having the problem I am.

Anyway, let me know if anyone is having any problems with the Current News and/or Game Updates feed. Hopefully, it's just me.

EDIT: OK, well, http://www.gw-rotp.com finally refreshed and it's not showing up correctly. So I'm trying to figure out what's going on. This is...interesting, to say the least.

EDIT2: Hmmm...other sites that refreshed the feed after RotP show it correctly. Think I'm going to let it ride for tonight and check all the sites again in the morning. This may be related to some issues that my host has been having recently. So bear with me for a day or so.

Eugaet, want to thank you again for your hard work in this.

No problem, glad to help out the GW community.

Looks like the two updated feeds are working well this morning. Let me know if anyone is having any problems.

I'll try and fix the Network News feed this weekend and maybe (finally) get around to those Guild Ladder feed updates that skretth wanted.

GuildWars seems to be rolling out some RSS feeds but not as many as you've done. http://www.guildwars.com/support/rss/

It appears that the GW Ladder is not implemented from Anet's Feed. Just the news and patches.