CogBlogged Tagged ‘Feed2JS’

cc licensed ( BY ND ) flickr photo shared by h.koppdelaney I have great news to share- given the generosity of people who have donated financial support, and one anonymous donor in particular, I have sufficient funds to keep Feed2JS running at least through June 2013, and maybe longer. For those not following this untrending topic, Feed2JS is a service I developed way back in 2003 while at the Maricopa Community Colleges- it exists as a platform for people to set up cut and past code to create a dynamic display in their own web sites of content generated by RSS. As a matter of historical note- the idea for this was inspired by a site David Carter-Tod had created- the Wytheville Community College News Center. It was that example where I saw how via JavaScript a server script could could be called, passed a URL for an RSS feed, [...]

cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by howvin I have gotten an impressive stream of support, donations with my request to help support Feed2JS, enough to keep the site up and running (which apparently has been stable). But I’ve not been comfortable depending on a future path of donation support, although y’all have demonstrated the potential here. It ought to be free. I had a few nibbles of interest of offers to support the costs (in exchange for some visible sponsorship on the main site), with one that looked very viable, but still up in the air. But a new one is on the table, and it would pay for the ongoing server costs in exchange for text links ads in the footer of the Feed2JS site. I felt a bit squeamish, but it seems pretty minimal; I would get to know the site listed since [...]

cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by Wavy1 This has been beyond my expectations as a response to my call for help to keep Feed2JS going. I actually had never looked much to see where it was being used (D’Arcy would claim its mostly spam), since the site does not track anything (working on a log to count the number of feed cached each day, estimated at 15,000) but Google reports 190,000 results for a search string that indicate usage from the main server alone. Then there were the messages people shared when donating to help with the server costs. I’ve been collecting the advice, suggestions, offers etc, and after a really helpful discussion yesterday with Scott Leslie, can outline a few plans for the future. They are ones in which I am asking for some help, especially in advancing the code development. But first as [...]

It’s been running as a free web service for over eight years, from my little humble PHP script hacking in 2003. Feed2JS (http://feed2js.org/) provides a tool where anyone can enter a URL for an RSS feed, choose some options, and generate a bit of cut and paste JavaScript code they can use in their own web sites. Once in place, this provides a widget that is updated automatically as the RSS feed it refers to changes. The idea owes its origin to the early work of Stephen Downes in RSS and the model of a ASP script I found created by David Carter-Todd (who I hope to find when I get to Blacksburg) In doing this, a lot of traffic is routed through the Feed2JS server. More than I may have even guessed. I developed this and ran it from 2003 to maybe 2005 on a server at the Maricopa [...]

modified from cc licensed flickr photo shared by Lord Jim I’m looking for someone, some group to take over the development for Feed2JS; I’ve taken it as far as I can possibly can. It gets used a lot, more than I think I want to know. The server empties its cache nightly, but I just checked, and since the last nightly dumped, it has cached feeds from 38746 RSS sources. If you google the right bit of code (that part that is inserted into web pages to make it work, I see 50,000 some finds: Yikes. I have to give a huge shout out and thanks to Modevia Web Services, who have graciously provided free hosting for Feed2JS since early 2006, when luckily I moved it off of an aging Xserve at Maricopa Community Colleges (where it would have died after I left Maricopa in April 2006 and the old [...]

I am at the same time honored and deeply scared that a lot of people use my Feed2JS tool created like in 2003 or 2004 for helping people embed RSS feeds in their site using cut and paste JavaScript. If my stats are right, in the 6 hours since the cache was cleaned out (daily), 45,000 some unique feeds have been run through here, which is about 60 feeds per minute. I hardly do anything to the code and I hope it does not blow up on anyone. There may have been some issues since the time I was trying to implement a new parser (which killed the server which for years has been kindly donated for free by the kind folks at Modevia Web Services)…. in restoring it I may have put a deprecated version of MagpieRSS; I just re-adjusted and the old FeedMachine seems to be working. For [...]

I struggle to find the solid chunks of time to take care of some pending updates to Feed to JavaScript (Feed2JS). I am about half way through setting up a code site on eduforge, and need to create a web front end. This will be the primary source for the current code release (at least a few intrepid folk have found it), and soon the documentation, history, FAQ, etc. I hope to see the questions I get go to the forums there, along with feature requests. I hope some developers might be interested in signing up to help plug the holes and ad some new features. I am still learning about all the tools available on the site, but its a great resource place to hang code. What is still half baked in my lab is: * a way for the users of the primary and soon to expand mirror [...]

The feed cat is coming out of the bag. A few weeks ago I bought a domain, and with some hosting donated by Aaron at Modevia Web Services, the Feed2JS service that lives now at http://feed2js.org/ has its own home at http://feed2js.org/. All I’ve done is more or less move the current site in whole, made a few edits, and set it up for some stress test. What does it mean? If you want to give it a try, this new server is going to be watched over and given technical support if needed. All you need to do is to either rebuild your cut and paste feed code or simply edit your JavaScript to replace the 2 occurrences of http://feed2js.org/ with http://feed2js.org/ I am not making any changes yet at the Maricopa server, but likely within a week or so, my access to it will vanish. If all goes [...]

While mulling over how to move Feed2JS to a more stable, friendly, supported home, especially sparked by the comments by David, I am thinking a whole new framework is in order. Don;t worry, I will leave the legacy… er, curent code as is. My own prime directive is not to break anyone’s previously constructed pasted JavaScript, so no parameters have changed name or purpose since 2004, or whenever it was I rolled this out. But David’s comments hit home, that having a handful, 10, 20, 50 other sites one could use to generate a feed, were not really “mirrors” as I called them, suggesting if one doesn’t work, the code would tried the next… they are more like dumb clones. I re-called that I had done some test cases, and got working, a time out script, so if a server did not respond (e.g. like when the Maricopa site blinks [...]

Following up yesterday’s mess, just getting rafts of emails from people (rightfully) worried Feed2JS makes me heave large sighs. This was a nice little project, that started as something to fill my own needs, that I lofted out on the net… and all of a sudden people around the world are riding on it, small lonely bloggers and a few corporate types. Scary. Bottom line- in less than a month, I will not even have access to the server at Maricopa where it sits. the folks there may look after it, but they do not even know much about it, and have other things to worry about. And despite some people’s “cute” attempts, it’s not part of my job at NMC to leap into action when the server borks, or help people figure out why their output is aligned left or… So in some sense I want to let it [...]