Publishing your alarms: RSS and web widgets

Introduction

News feeds (RSS) and website widgets are ways of sharing alarm data, typically for publication on or via your website. Active911 makes it easy for you to publish recent alarm data from your website using an embeddable widget or a custom RSS feed. In order to protect privacy, this service is not enabled by default. You must log into your Active911 account and make a settings change.

If you embed the widget in your agency website, you will see something like this:


What to do

To enable news feeds, click on the Agency tab and scroll to the option with the label "Enable news feeds and RSS?". Click Enable.

Warning: Once you change this setting, your alarm data will be exposed to the internet. Before you change this setting, make certain you are acting in accordance with your agency policy.

Once you have enabled data sharing, look for your newsfeed code under Account Details just below your agency address.

  • To access your RSS feed, use the URL: https://access.active911.com/interface/rss.php?CODE, replacing CODE with the code you wrote down

  • To embed a widget in your website showing recent alarms, paste the following lines into your website, substituting the code you wrote down for CODE, and also a google maps API key obtained from here for GOOGLE_MAPS_API_KEY (required if the domain has not previously had a Google Maps implementation prior to June 22, 2016):

<div id="a91_syndication"></div> <script src="https://access.active911.com/interface/js.php?CODE" type="text/javascript"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> try{a91.init({'api_key': 'GOOGLE_MAPS_API_KEY'}); } catch(e) {} </script>

You can also pass options to control whether the full address is displayed, and whether the full call title is displayed. For example, the following code will show full addresses but will replace specific titles ("Code 3 Fall Injury") with generic ones ("Medical").

<div id="a91_syndication"></div> <script src="https://access.active911.com/interface/js.php?CODE" type="text/javascript"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> try{a91.init({'show_alarm_titles': false, 'show_alarm_addresses': true, 'api_key': 'GOOGLE_MAPS_API_KEY'}); } catch(e) {} </script>

Additional options for editing the information shown are:

  • 'show_alarm_titles' - true shows the information as shown in the alert, false will replace the title with a generic title.

  • 'show_alarm_addresses' - true shows the information as shown in the alert, false will completely hide the address.

  • 'abbreviate_addresses' - false will hide the number of the address.