I released a new product last weekend, Tetra, that integrates with my RSS to HTML conversion script (CaRP) to put RSS newsfeeds into a DHTML (JavaScript) scroller. Tetra supports AJAX, enabling dynamic updating of the scroller’s contents without requiring the webpage to be reloaded. A large number of feeds could be aggregated into one scroller, which would result in frequently updated content.

For browsers that don’t support AJAX and for search engines, Tetra’s data can also appear statically in the webpage–CaRP can put RSS feeds into the scroller both ways. The optimal arrangement is to pre-populate the scroller with data integrated into the page source, and then use AJAX on browsers that support it to update the data as desired. For browsers that don’t support any scripting at all, this setup simply displays the first visible item or items, so it works well for anyone.