Mirai Feeder

This is an RSS feed reader that reads items from RSS feeds like they were the character’s dialog in a game.

This is an example of the reader with mostly default settings at a size of 400 by 545 pixels.

The default character used is Danny Choo’s Mirai Suenaga, and she’s “speaking” his RSS feed, hence the name “Mirai Feeder”. That’s because the development of this widget was prompted by Danny’s post “Tokyo Freelance Jobs,” where he asked for someone to make such a widget.

If you click on the feed text in the speech bubble, it will take you to that item’s link from the RSS feed. The attribution text in the footer acts similarly, taking you to various links depending on which item you click on.

Here is another example, showing off the customizability of the widget.

As you can see if you view the source of this page, there are quite a few options for customization.

  • Feed URL
  • Widget width and height (it can be embedded at any size, and the content will resize with it, though I can’t guarantee it will look good at really small sizes)
  • Text display speed, expressed as a delay between characters in milliseconds
  • Custom character image (for best results, especially if you’re using a custom background as well, use a PNG or SWF with transparency), this must be an absolute URL, relative URLs do not work.
  • Attribution string for character image, will display in the footer of the widget
  • Link for the attribution string, an URL that the the user will be sent to when they click on the attribution string.
  • Callout (speech bubble) size, width and height, expressed as a percentage of the total width and height of the widget.
  • Custom background image (absolute URL)
  • Background image stretching:
    • None
    • Horizontal
    • Vertical
    • Both horizontal and vertical
  • An attribution string for the background image
  • A link for that attribution string that the user will be sent to when the string is clicked on.

Cropped images of Mirai used for this widget can be found here and here. Mirai is copyright Danny Choo and is used under a Creative Commons license.

The callout image can be found here and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

PNG2SWF was used to convert the default character image and the callout to SWF format.

Created using OpenLaszlo. An archive containing the compiled SWF, source code, and resources, can be found here in ZIP format. Also included is a JavaScript function for creating embed code for the applet, and simple example HTML files that use it to generate embed code that can be copied and pasted into an HTML page/blog/etc.

The source code files are dual licensed under the MPL and the LGPL, with other files being licensed under a Creative Commons license. See the LICENSE file and the license text at the beginning of each of the source files for more information.