I’ve been mildly curious about some of the new attempts at making RSS feeds more human readable at first click- rather than seeing ugly XML code, these “new” feed displays use CSS (Style sheets) and some sort of magical transform method called XSLT — basically it means if you click a link that points to an XML file, it has some nicer formatting applied.

I want to believe.

The problem is that I think a lot of folks doing this are not widely testing, because while it has pretty formatting on a PC with MSIE, or perhaps Mozilla/Firefox on Mac or Windows, it works. I’ve seen less then stellar appearance on Safari, which I had assumed (wrongly) was one of the more standards compliant browsers. Is it a limit of Safari? Am I doomed to switching browsers?

But then I peeked at a feed from a Blogger site, on Safari, and it had the feed + CSS + XSLT cooking. So what have they done right?

Back to code. I modified the download-able version of our Feed2JS to provide local installations the same build and CSS select/modify tools we offer on the main site. The primary reason is getting it set up on a server in New Zealand for my pending visits there for workshops in November. This was a fairly […]

I’ve been using my CDB Bloglines site mainly to run a master copy of my regular RSS feeds (keep my home and work computers in synch). But playing with grouping of feeds, I’ve found some new tricks to play with.

I had just been dumping all feeds into one Bloglines folder, organized alphabetically. I run them on the sidebar of the main entry to CogDogBlog— yes, “blogrolls” are like, so, 2002, but I have used it myself numerous times to share the URL of a blog I read. And when I visit new blogs, I very much like to scan who they read and it has helped me to uncover new blogs. It was the low tech Friend of a Friend approach.

Anyhow, Bloglines provides a JavaScript cut and paste that puts my current RSS list on the blog page. I had noticed James does something similar, but his generated feed has labeled groups, which is what I found Bloglines does for you know for the different folders you create on the BL site. So I made a few general feed categories.

But the fun stuff came when trying to use this with my desktop RSS reader…

No Need to Click Here – I’m just claiming my feed at Feedster

I have just twiddled some new tools to help users of Feed2JS to create their customized styles for output created by this service/script. In a total and polite rip off of the css Zen Garden site, I am hoping some designers out there might mess around with the new style tools and submit some new […]

FeedCreator.class.php– File this one away for future or near future code use. FeedCreator.class.php provides an easy way to create RSS feeds from within PHP using ease to use classes. * creates valid feeds according to RSS 0.91, 1.0 or 2.0 as well as PIE 0.1 (deprecated), OPML 1.0, Unix mbox and ATOM 0.3 format. * […]

Browsing sites registering as users of Feed2JS I discovered this morning that there is now a feed to provide updates on the Cocktail of the Week. Who would know there was such a thing? Apparently David Berghouse has been publishing this site from Australia since 1995, quite a nice stretch! Good on ya! FYI, the […]