Does anyone else use Rave for emergency alerts? We are switching to it and are trying to add their RSS to a feed widget to display emergency notifications on our homepage. We got the feed to work, but there seems to be no way in Rave to clear an RSS feed. Their support is telling us this:
RSS is persistent, which means that anything in an alert stays in that URL until it is overwritten by the next alert. Most schools utilize a parsing mechanism, like a key word or phrase, such as “STOP POSTING RSS” or “CLEAR WEBPAGE”, so that when a parsing agent like that is seen in the RSS URL, the downstream delivery platform recognizes it, and stops posting and reverts to “normal”.
Anytime something other than this parsing agent is seen in the feed, the screens are taken over and post accordingly. This means a quick RSS ONLY alert can be sent after an event to revert the screens to “normal” status.
Is there a simple way to accommodate this behavior in a widget? I don’t see any filtering options for Feed widgets.
I wonder if a simple onWidgetFormat handler might help here? You could try detecting in the body for “STOP POSTING RSS” and if so, do something like empty out the variable(s) being displayed to prevent LW from showing them in the widget? Or maybe add some variable that triggers a CSS class to hide it?
I just wrote a PHP script to ingest their RSS and re-ouput it unless it finds the stop words, in which case it just outputs an empty feed. It’s working. I just can’t believe we have to do that.
With our RAVE alerts (which like you we bring into an alert banner), I have a time-out on the widget for 12 hours. I adjust this on a weather event like a snow day to 24 hours.
Additionally, I have the RAVE administrator send out an “all clear”-type message when most alerts have passed. This will then sit on the LiveWhale alert widget for 12 hours, and in most cases, that is fine (and sometimes even quite helpful). In cases that it is not, I adjust the widget timer to something shorter, like 30 minutes for example.