Answer by Dylan Valade for Parse RSS with jQuery

I agree with @Andrew, using Google is a solid, reusable way to do it with the huge benefit that you get JSON back instead of XML. An added advantage of using Google as a proxy is that services that might block your direct access to their data are unlikely to stop Google. Here is an example using ski report and conditions data. This has all of the common real world applications: 1) Third party RSS/XML 2) JSONP 3) Cleaning strings and string to array when you can't get the data exactly the way you want it 4) on load add elements to the DOM. Hope this helps some people!

<!-- Load RSS Through Google as JSON using jQuery -->
<script type="text/javascript">

    function displaySkiReport (feedResponse) {

    // Get ski report content strings
    var itemString = feedResponse.entries[0].content;
    var publishedDate = feedResponse.entries[0].publishedDate;

    // Clean up strings manually as needed
    itemString = itemString.replace("Primary: N/A", "Early Season Conditions"); 
    publishedDate = publishedDate.substring(0,17);

    // Parse ski report data from string
    var itemsArray = itemString.split("/");


    //Build Unordered List
    var html = '<h2>' + feedResponse.entries[0].title + '</h2>';
    html += '<ul>';

    html += '<li>Skiing Status: ' + itemsArray[0] + '</li>';
    // Last 48 Hours
    html += '<li>' + itemsArray[1] + '</li>';
    // Snow condition
    html += '<li>' + itemsArray[2] + '</li>';
    // Base depth
    html += '<li>' + itemsArray[3] + '</li>';

    html += '<li>Ski Report Date: ' + publishedDate + '</li>';

    html += '</ul>';

    $('body').append(html);    

    }


    function parseRSS(url, callback) {
      $.ajax({
    url: document.location.protocol + '//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/feed/load?v=1.0&num=10&callback=?&q=' + encodeURIComponent(url),
    dataType: 'json',
    success: function(data) {
      callback(data.responseData.feed);
    }
      });
    }

    $(document).ready(function() {              

        // Ski report
        parseRSS("http://www.onthesnow.com/michigan/boyne-highlands/snow.rss", displaySkiReport);

    });

</script>