Adobe (formally Macromedia) Dreamweaver is a very powerful platform to build web sites and web based applications. One of the benefits of using Dreamweaver is the extensibility of the application itself, and the community of programmers who write extensions for the it.

These extensions do a lot of things, one of which is make life a little easier. Sometimes they cost money, sometimes not. RSS Replay, by RNSoft, is a commercial Dreamweaver extension that easily allows you to integrate RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds into web pages — with only a few clicks. Dreamweaver MX, MX 2004, and 8 are supported.

RSS Replay installs a small AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) application that is configurable with the Dreamweaver Properties palette. Depending on how your web server is configured, RSS Replay can use PHP, ASP, or just JavaScript.

If you are displaying RSS feeds from external sites, you will need to use the PHP or ASP methods, but as most web sites support one or both of these options, this should not be a problem for you.

You can also define CSS classes for headline and story body sections of the feed, this makes it easy to integrate the feed into the existing look and feel of your site. RSS Replay comes with many formats to display RSS feeds, such as bulleted lists, podcast entries, and photocast thumbnails.

There is also a "Custom" dialog to create your own format for displaying RSS content to your liking. Other options include setting how many headlines to show, and advanced settings such as TTL (Time To Live).

One of the more unique options adds the ability to combine multiple feeds into one listing.

Since this is Dreamweaver, adding RSS Replay does not take a lot of work. After inserting the RSS Replay object, you add a source feed, select the display format, how many stories to show, and the method (JavaScript, ASP or PHP). That may sound long and involved to you, but explaining it takes longer than making it happen.