IE11 / Windows 8.1 live tile with photos

3
votes

All:

I'm trying to configure a website I administer to be pinnable in Windows 8.1/IE11 with a live tile. The first time I went through http://www.buildmypinnedsite.com and it's documentation and provided the RSS feed, I noticed with some surprise that one of the articles in the RSS feed (the only one which had images in the content) actually used one of the images as a background for the live tile (when that article was displayed), with smaller text at the bottom of the tile, over a translucent dark background.

Check the last image at http://blog.laptopmag.com/how-to-create-a-windows-8-1-live-tile-for-your-website for an example. That article mentions, "as long as your RSS feed has images in it, the tile will rotate through your most recent five articles with images".

I really liked the look of using images instead of a solid color and plain text, so since all my articles have a banner image associated with them in our CMS (though not necessarily actually in the content), I updated the RSS feed to include an <img> tag at the top of the content (<description>) embedding the banner right at the top of the content. I also added the banner as an <enclosure> on each <item>. I added some padding characters to the GUIDs so that it would see the content as "new", but the live tile continued showing four articles with just text and a colored background, and the single article with the same background image.

Several weeks have now passed, lots of new articles posted, and yet still the live tile continues to cycle through the articles just showing text.

Windows 8 prepare site for pinning has lots of good information and links to documentation, which I've gone through, but I can't find any more information about how the images should be "included" in the feed in order for them to be pulled in as backgrounds. Am I missing it somewhere?

Thanks for your time and help!

P.S. The <description> field in my XML contains the full article HTML (just the article, no sidebars, headers, etc of course), wrapped in a <![CDATA[]]> tag, in case you're wondering.

2
rsslive-tilewindows-8.1internet-explorer-11pinned-site
Found some sample pages (samples.msdn.microsoft.com/iedevcenter/PinnedSites/…) I hadn't looked at before- with the control I have over my RSS, it seems like it might just be easier to create my own msapplication-notification feeds instead of letting buildmypinnedsite.com do it for me. – james3mg

2 Answers

0
votes

I'm looking into this exact problem too (the main difference: I've a partial feed, not a full-content one).

The only reference I could find is msapplication-TileImage http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ie/dn255024%28v=vs.85%29.aspx#msapplication-TileImage :

<meta name="msapplication-TileImage" content="images\tileimage.jpg">

This, of course, is just a suboptimal "one image for all" solution.

0
votes

Ok, I finally got it right.

enter image description here

enter image description here

The key (thanks @james3mg ) was to drop the RSS-based approach completely and go for IE11 specific XML of the tiles feature.

So I used this:

<meta name="msapplication-notification" 
content="frequency=60;
    polling-uri={$SiteURL}tiles/1;id=1;
    polling-uri2={$SiteURL}tiles/2;id=2;
    polling-uri3={$SiteURL}tiles/3;id=3;
    polling-uri4={$SiteURL}tiles/4;id=4;
    polling-uri5={$SiteURL}tiles/5;id=5;
    cycle=1"/>

You can see those XML here :

turbolab.it/tiles/1

turbolab.it/tiles/2

turbolab.it/tiles/3

turbolab.it/tiles/4

turbolab.it/tiles/5

The complete list of the available template is here: The tile template catalog (Windows Store apps)