This is one of a series of posts describing the new features in Carousel 5.2 which is currently in Beta test. Be sure to check out the other posts in this series so far:
Carousel’s RSS bulletins are a fantastic way to get dynamic content on your digital signage system. The one drawback is that they’re limited to textual content only… But not for long. In Carousel 5.2, RSS bulletins bust free from their text-only shackles and now display images embedded inside the RSS feed.
So how does it work? It’s all thanks to the Web Picture block, which was born in Carousel 5.0. Web Picture blocks take in a URL to an image, and display that image on a bulletin, just as if you had selected a picture from Carousel’s media management section.
This is definitely cool, but it does require you to manually enter a URL for any picture that you want to display. As it turns out, certain RSS feeds (like photostream feeds from Flickr) already contain URLs to images. What if RSS feeds could recognize those image URLs, and use the Web Picture block to display the image?
Well that’s exactly how it works. Here’s how to set it up for yourself:
Step one, find a feed that has image URLs. I’m going to grab a feed from one of my photosets on my own Flickr account.
I’ve been taking pics of my patio project at home, and I’d like to share the progress with the rest of the gang here at TRMS. So, I’ll use this photoset to create an RSS bulletin on our internal Carousel system.
Next, I’ll hop into Carousel, create a new RSS bulletin, and paste the feed URL into the usual spot:
By default, the RSS bulletin template doesn’t have a Web Picture block in it. So, we’ll need to add one by editing the template for this bulletin. Click the “Edit Template” button near the top right of the bulletin’s preview box:
A complete discussion of Carousel’s Template Editor is a bit beyond the scope of this post, so I’ll make this brief. I added a new Web Picture block, deleted a couple text blocks that I didn’t want, and moved some things around. In the end, I had a template with three blocks:
- A text block at the top with default text of “#ChannelTitle#”
- A text block at the bottom with default text of “#ItemTitle#”
- A web picture block in the middle with a picture URL of “#ItemImageURL#”
These will correspond to the title of the feed, the title of the individual picture, and the URL for the image.
Once the template is finished, we’ll be taken back to the bulletin edit screen. Each of my blocks should have the default values that I set up in the Template Editor. (Since this is an RSS bulletin, the “#FieldName#” values will be replaced by the corresponding value from the RSS feed.)
Make any further changes to the bulletin that you’d like, then hit the “Continue” button and schedule the bulletin like usual. And we’re done. Carousel will now start filling in the bulletin with data from the RSS feed.
To see what the bulletins look like, I can take advantage Carousel 5.2’s new Web-based Channel Preview feature.
And as a bonus, since Carousel continually checks the feed for new information, any time I upload a new picture to my Flickr set, Carousel will automatically fetch and display the new picture throughout our office. I never have to touch the bulletin. That’s pretty damn cool!
Note: I’ve set this bulletin up to only display a single item from the RSS feed at a time. But there’s no reason why you couldn’t display several feed items on a single bulletin. If there’s room, Carousel will simply copy the set of blocks, place the new set underneath the existing set of blocks, and fill in the new blocks with data from the next item in the feed.
Granted, I might be a bit biased, but I think this is an amazingly cool feature. Imagine the possiblities: Maybe there’s an RSS feed out there with weather information for the next several days, and it includes a little image of the forecasted conditions. Maybe there’s a feed with stock quotes for individual companies, and each item contains a chart of the stock’s performance for the day. Maybe your organization publishes an internal RSS feed of employee birthdays with their picture. Carousel can automatically display all of this stuff! Set it up once, and let Carousel do the rest of the work.
Truly, this is the stuff that makes my job fun. 
One Comment
this is cool