I would suggest using Yahoo! Pipes (http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/) for something like this.  You can feed it your RSS feed, and add in some logic to strip out extraneous information and the grey boxes.

-Sean

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Sean Hannan
Web Developer
Sheridan Libraries
Johns Hopkins University

On Apr 9, 2010, at 10:07 AM, Laura Harris wrote:

> Hi, all - I suspect something like this is being done already, so I thought I would check in and ask. 
> 
> Essentially, what I would like to do is display the library's new books on a web page in a graphic format - I'd like it to look very similar to the sorts of widgets that GoodReads or LibraryThing users can create. I threw up a few quick examples here:
> 
> http://gvsu.edu/library/zzwidget-test-171.htm 
> 
> Now, we have an RSS feed for our new books (Millennium is our ILS if it matters), and as I understand it, the images we get from Syndetic Solutions are parsed as enclosures to that RSS feed. Is there a way to take the RSS feed, and only show those enclosures (if they exist, and are not the default "grey box" we see if the book doesn't have a cover image) somehow? 
> 
> Or perhaps there's a really easy way to do this that I'm overlooking. 
> 
> Would appreciate your insight! 
> 
> Thanks,