CogBlogged Tagged ‘rss’

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 [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by ejhogbin Calendar data has always stumped me- on one hand it seems rather structured — something (data) happens on a date (data) maybe at a place (data) but it is something people much more savvy than I struggle with as it gets more complex… but I am not writing about the micro issues of micro data. In the last few years of many travel trips, I’d dabbled with two web based calendar services, which at some level are very similar– both dopplr and trip.it allow you to add events without the manual typing in of things to form– very elegantly by forwarding via email your airline, car rental, hotel reservations — that is oh so smart. For a while I was using both, but ran into some issues with dopplr accepting a second email sender address (I get travel stuff sent to both my [...]

cc licensed flickr photo by Wade from Oklahoma … in which the technology blog author bares his ignorance by discovering a tool that is several years old…. With a new sense of urgency, I implore that some big web company buy and save Yahoo– if not just to preserve the most valuable important vital web 2.0 app in the universe but…. Yahoo pipes must be kept alive. I’ve not of the concept of Pipes for a long time, but for some reason, never ventured inside (although I have the a personalized use of Social Media Firehouse in my reader). I follow with amazement how deftly Tony Hirst pipe work weaves together feeds from disparate data sources, performs complex transformations, tosses them out to some Google spreadsheet, and produces some geo-data mashup with photos on a map. It seems magical. But its not. Yahoo pipes really allows you to perform programming [...]

After all these years (like maybe 7? 8?) RSS is still so hot some regimes may wish to ban it, but it is the magic magic magic glue that makes content move around the web. Here is one little story. At NMC, I run a WordPress powered site to publish stories our Second Life work at the NMC Campus Observer, but we have only a handful of authors, and I must publish 98% of the content. Last year I had an idea to cleverly (I thought) embed a second WP site inside, as a NMC Campus Community Calendar, where people who were part of the NMC SL Community could post events. It is actually a second WP install in a sub directory, branded and designed to look like the main site (I wrote this up last year as Blog in a Blog). That is just the set up for the [...]

In my everyday technology browsing I see a fair number of interesting tools, sites, ideas, that come my way via RSS, twitter, etc. A lot of them I give a quick look, say “Hmm”, tag ‘em, and move on. Besides almost every post of unbelievable wizardry and in depth explanation of Tony Hirst, not often are there things that just knock me over breathless. Maybe I have been drinking the Web 2.0 Koolaid for too long. I had one of those “wow” moments tonight with something that came out of the blue. I’ll share it all, and am curious if my excitement is misplaced or not (would not be the first time) Like many others, I have had my

Ah, my poor RSS Reader, not nearly given the devoted attention once reserved for it. Maybe a year, maybe two ago, I’d focus on at least scanning all my sources and marking them read by end of the day, even if it was in one fell keyboard stroke. That was BT (Before Twitter), BSL (Before Second Life), Bd (Before drupal), BR5WPS (Before Running 5+ WordPress Sites). That’s not to say IO dont regularly mine the feed pile, but there are heaps of unread, unseen items down the list. I have noticed my Feed Readin’ pattern has shifted, some to the features of Google Reader. Before, I would organize my subscriptions into folder categories, but still pretty much process one feed’s (one blog, one news source) titles at the same time. I was reading DOWN the feeds. Nothing wrong with that, but it is in some ways a legacy of the [...]

Someone should be worried. With just a few sniffs, I might be getting hooked on Google Reader for my RSS habits. I’ve not really like using web-based RSS readers for scanning, as checking each site’s news required a wait for a web transcation, whereas a desktop reader grabs allt he stuff quickly, or in the background, allowing me t paw through it quickly. But Google Reader’s ajax scented interface is fast. And the keyboard shortcuts make going through items even quicker than my desktop reader. First off all, there is easy in and easy out via an OPML input/export of your feeds. So I was able to grab my list from either my Bloglines collection or my desktop reader’s export functions, toss them into Google Reader, and was off to the races. And it kept my folder structure for organizing my feeds. And you can select an entire folder to [...]

I’m not sure where or why I would ever do this, so put this in the category of “curious, but some day I will slap my hand on my forehead and say, ‘I have a need for this’!” RSS2GIF can render, dynamically (I guess) the headlines of an RSS feed as an image, so you could have it on a web site as a way to generate a graphic based on an RSS feed. Here is my cheesy example (of course, using my own feed!) It gives only the recent post titles, and there are no links to each post, just the main blog. So where, how, why would you use this? I am scratching my head and wondering. A linktribution to ResearchBuzz for mention of this site

I feel moderately good about our experiment of “tagging” the NMC Summer Conference this year. We put it in the printed program that we were asking participants to tag blog posts, flickr photos, and del.icio.us bookmarks with an “official” tag of nmc2006. I used a local copy of Feed2JS and flickr’s Javascript badge to bring them together into one page at http://www.nmc.org/events/2006summerconf/tag.php. I was going to SuprGlu ‘em too, but had trouble getting to their site the night before the conference. So how did it go? Well, of course, I had a fair bit in there since it was my idea and I wanted it seeded with “stuff.” And I appreciate the numbers of people who did jump in. The aggregation is quite nice. In summary: Tagging with Technorati is the most complex of them all. Unless you have added a plugin to your blog software, getting the content o [...]

flickr foto Holding Handsavailable on flickr A fascinating sculpture outside a Department of Education building in Calgary My other web experiment today for the NMC Conference is setting up a page to provide some persuasion and aggregation for my goal of having participants “Tag This Conference”. The site I set up: http://www.nmc.org/events/2006summerconf/tag.php is aggregating the public tags of nmc2006 from Flickr, Technorati, and del.icio,us… and is using 3 different services for doing so. For flick, I use the JavaScript Flickr badge to display all photos tagged with nmc2006 (of which there are a grand total of 2, both mine planted as seeds. For technorati, to catch