CogBlogged Tagged ‘Feed2JS’

Right now the server running Feed2JS is down and out. I have only the most limited, around the corner and snake up a pole access, but the server is toasted until someone on their IT staff can go in the server room and hard start the server. It’s just a humble XServe getting yanked and pulled form around the globe, and I can only imagine the anguish as folks who have the code on their site see their pages getting hung in the air. I am long gone from Maricopa, looking ahead, yet I have many regrets about not getting that software out onto an open source site before I jumped ship. It grew in scope and use at a crazy pace (something like 15,000 unique feeds cached per day), yet most of the external mirror sites have blinked out, and the way it is organized now puts too much [...]

Rightfully so, people have been requesting the Feed2JS be able to display content referenced in RSS 2.0 or podcast feeds. Until now, these enclusore tags have been ignored because it is not supported in the underlying MagpieRSS library code. It turns out there is a fairly simple patch / adjustment to the Magpie code that seems to make it work and a few folks that have emailed have shown it can be done (Thanks Aaron Axelsen for the nudge and the sample code) I have a preliminary version of Feed2JS running on the Maricopa Jade server only that supports podcast media. I hope I can get a few testers to try it out before it gets rolled into the download versions. There is a new option on the Feed Builder form to indicate whether enclosure media should be displayed (default is “no” just so we do not present any surprises [...]

Next week brings a lot of changes for Feed2JS– just posted to our Updates are a number of things that affect users of our site: The first week of April 2006 brings a number of changes in Feed2JS, all to make it bigger and better. First of all, anyone using the primary “jade” server at Maricopa, this server will be going offline for a few hours starrting 8:00am Tuesday, April 4 (MST), as the server will be moving from my office up to the main server room in our bulding. In the long run, this will increase the speed and uptime of our server. Also, due are some new code changes in the Feed2Js script. The first is to fix an issue in the generated content for the way CSS classes are declared (my mistake, we use invalid “_” characters). When this change happens, it only affects your site if [...]

I’ve been bothered by the issue of inccorect displayed time stamps for Feed2JS, so I diverted from a few tasks at hand to take a new approach. The MagpieRSS library has a nice function that returns the date/time stamp of any item, in its myriad formats and tag names, as one of those values of number of seconds since January 1, 1970. The problem is that this value is offset by my server’s local time. So my time becomes your time. So first I have a new logic that determines our server’s local offset from GMT (it changes on time of year since we boycott Daylight Savings Time in Arizona), so our offset is either GMT-7 or GMT-8. So internally, I am converting all those date/time stamps to GMT time. And now, Feed2JS has a new option that allows you to enter your local offset from GMT. The Build a [...]

Thanks to some keen observers who have recently noted a long standing problem with Feed2JS– for the display of the date and item was posted, we had been using some Magpie and PHP functions to convert the date/time stamp of an item to a milliseconds value and then using the php date() function for the screen display. Yet I was overlooking the fact that the functions were converting the time into one relative to the local time on my server. Of course, when testing against this blag, the date/time stamps were okay since its on the same server and in the same timezone. Doh! To calculate the time zone offset will take some effort since the date/time formats of feeds have about 5-10 different variations. One option is to include a new parameter that will allow a user to indicate the timezone offset from our local time– this can be [...]

Maybe some readers are all over RSS and massive amounts of syndication of content, but I am jazzed whenever I discover some small, useful, time saving way to make use of the Small Technologies Loosely Joined. Using free web content services like flickr, del.icio.us, Technorati that can travel the RSS road to dynamically update content elsewhere, moving from static hand spun web pages to live ones, is powerful stuff. So here is a roadmap of a change I set up in about 30 minutes time to rescue some stale links. This approach is something teachers can easily do to populate their own web sites with new web resources for their students, and can be done so efficiently, and without much effort. It fits in to an instructors own discovery process of resources, and boils down to: (1) Find interesting sites (2) Bookmark (using browser tool link) to del.icio.us (3) Tag [...]

Out of some idle curiosity, I checked up on the mirror sites of our Feed2JS site that allows folks to embed RSS content into their own pages. Currently there are 7 mirror sites and it looks like we may open up a few more. Checking up on these by going to the examples page– it lists the number of cached feeds as a crude measure of usage: The Original Feed2JS (Phoenix, Arizona) ~20,000 cached feeds per day (note, we flush our cache every 24 hours, but average about 13 new feeds cached per minnute) OpenGUI (California, USA) 89 total cached feeds Astra Systems (U.K.) 90 total cached feeds trendnetters (The Netherlands) 373 total cached feeds firebase software (Dallas, USA) 20,083 total cached feeds KinScape (Michigan, USA) 105 total cached feeds incsub.org (California, USA) 188 total cached feeds UNITEC (New Zealand) 137 total cached feeds It is really useful when the [...]

Yesterday I added two new mirror sites for Feed2JS, bringing the full list of mirrors to seven. The two new kids on the block include: OpenGUI serving feeds from California Astra Systems serving feeds from somewhere in the U.K. All sites have been updated to the same functionality (latest update; al;l are listed as the full frenzy history) as the central hosted one (version 1.5 since I started numbering). I need to come up with a better way of sending code updates, as now I am just uploading them to the various sites. I know one molecule next to nothing about managing software projects beyond my own stuff, so it is being made up as I go. I do have things organized that once given ftp access to a new mirror site, I can get one running and tested in about 15 minutes. FWIW, we provide all the code one [...]

The morning session for Friday at the 2005 NMC Summer Conference was a combination of the Center for Excellence awards and the NMC special Five Minutes of Fame session. The Center for Excellence are awarded to three institutions as a recognition for their efforts (we were fortunate to get on one 2003)- this year recognizing UC Chico, University of Texas, and Wesleyan University. Each center gets their unique lucite statue, and during the ceremony each shows a 5 minute video providing more information about what they day. The stuff in the videos is just outstanding, and many of them have a lot of fun in creating the videos (the best were the “ribs” scenes from University of Texas, as well as the outakes of their provost yelling in surprise, “you’re going to HAWAII! No one told me you were going to HAWAII!”). The projects from UC Chico were impressive- a [...]

So it was time to put my money where my snout was… After waffling about screencasting, I decided to give it a go. Downloading the Windows Media Encoder was not too bad. I played a bit, not really sure of the various settings for the encoding. Anyhow, I recorded an 11 minute quick attempt at showing wide range of RSS feeds we provide in the Maricopa Learning eXchange, and then how you can copy them over to our Feed2JS site, create a cut and paste JavaScript, and then put them into a site. I sketched out my topics, figured out which URLs to have open in Firefox (you have to love tabbed browsing, apparently that has not boarded the cluetrain in the MSIE shop), and gave it a go. I am not nearly as smooth as Jn Udell, and one of my demo links was kafloooey (bad), but oh well. [...]