Following a recent a brief server outage I have been tinkering with an approach to solve problems that might occur on external sites using our Feed2JS service. I’m lookng for some folks willing to test some extra JavaScript aimed at preventing page hangs should we blink out on you. Here is the issue. The whole […]
I recently wrote some criticism of views that RSS feeds are “only for new stuff”, and given that I had a request today for a randomized Maricopa Learning eXchange feed, it was time to put my feeds where my mouth is/was. Before today, the feeds we generate as fixed static files (updated every hours as […]
I saw today that RSS might be starting to meme its way across our system. It takes time. This morning I got a call from a faculty member asking where she can get software to see RSS. I sent her googling in “Desktop RSS Aggregator” not recalling which of the 90 or so ones is […]
Oh, I feel like a bad net citizen. Either due to my own code blunders, or someone else’s overly aggressive page reloads or some force of the moon, our Feed2JS site has been banned from accessing del.icio.us feeds. Sorry about that folks, but you cannot display these feeds through our site. This is what you […]
It’s a bit scary when I make a change/edit/?improvement to our Feed2JS (Feed to JavaScript) code, as any glitches or gotchas might show up on the hundreds? thousands? 3? of sites using it (I am basing some large numbers on the 20,000 files that built up in the cache directory). My apologies for hiccups the […]
Robin Good’s recent “Why RSS Search Feeds Based On Web Searches Are Important” was an interesting read for what it says about syndicating the results of web searches, but I had thought it would go down a different track. The quote that leaped out the page, from Steven M. Cohen was: The point of RSS […]
Just days after marveling about a prototype of a combined del.icio.us + flickr service, technorati has rolled it all up into their new tagged service – combining tags from del.icio.us and flickr plus ones now extracted from feeds that Technorati crawls: Where does the stuff on Technorati Tag pages come from? The photos come from […]
I recently wrote of some experiments to improved Feed2JS (see the updates fed to the site, bottom of the main page). Specifically, based on the request from a user in Germany, I attempted to change the output to encode content as UTF-8 using the new features on Magpie RSS 0.7. However, I have gotten an […]
For those the care to feed, I have been doing more minor tweaks to Feed2JS, and inside you will find I use the very same to display the latest updates to that site, since it now has its own feed.
The main thing to look for (beyond coverups for my typos) was Seb Paquet’s suggestion to populate the hypertext links attached tp the feed item titles with the title= attribute set to a part of the item’s description. This is done, see the example below, so feeds could be generated with title only displays, but mouse overs on the links will reveal the first 150 chars of the item description (if your browser does that for title attributes on href links).
I do need some help as I have a request from someone who is asking that the output be able to support UTF-8 character encoding. My first attempt was merely to update this server as well as the default php.ini to use utf-8 as the default character set. I am CharSetIgnorarant– will that have adverse affects on other people? Also, it did not seem to help his site, which is all utf-8 encoded. So now I am thinking this is something in Magpie.. the 0.71 update is supposed to support different character encodings.
I’ll be diving in later.
Last week it was Tags on Speed. That was then, this is now… Richard S writes “More on Social tags” pointing to “taggregator” an experiment with allows you to provide one “tag” and it generates a side by side view of del.icoi.us and flickr results: Someone built a thing I wanted to but didn’t — […]
