Here’s an application currently in use at Penn State. If you are a VoIP phone user at University Park, you’ve probably seen the News and Alerts service if you’ve explored your Services menu. It’s an RSS news feed reader with a predefined list of news sources that may be of interest to the Penn State faculty/staff community.

Download the scripts from repos/rss2cisco.

I can’t claim credit for writing this one; credit goes to Joshua Cantara of dontpokebadgers.com for the original source, released under the GNU Public License. Further enhancements to version 1.0 of the code were made by Dirk Jagdmann (I can no longer find his source listed on the web) to include caching, and finally I had my way with it to add word wrapping, better date/time presentation, and additional softkeys.

What’s cool about this? RSS blurbs are just about the right size for viewing on the IP phone’s display; full articles would be too much. Some of the feeds we chose, such as the ITS Alerts and the weather feed, are fully useful just on the phone. Others, such as the Research Penn State magazine feed, are there to give someone an idea of what’s in the magazine and encourage him or her to view it on the web.

rss2cisco.pl runs as a CGI program and requires several modules from CPAN. These are all documented within the code. I redefined the XML::RAI::Object::time_handler function because it actually had no concept of time (zones, that is). If you use only 3rd-generation Cisco IP phones (7906, 7941, 7961, 7971) you may be able to remove the Text::Wrap functions. The browser on these phones automatically wraps menu items at word boundaries at the end of a line.

Cantara has a useful setup how-to on his site if you are interested in setting up his version or our modified version of the code.