Everything that does not have a home, just a big old stinking pile of posts.
The CD is here! As the tale told previously goes, a rock band in Germany named The Sealevel somehow found my photo of my 1972 Ford Maverick parked next to a “Sea Level” sign in Death Valley and asked if it could be used on the cover of their CD. I just popped by my […]
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 […]
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 […]
Taking the cue from Stephen Downes who took it from Jay Cross, I quickly checked out SuperGlu a new Web.0 tool that aggregates anything that you may have stored elswhere that provides an RSS feed… SuprGlu is about bringing the pieces of your web content together into one central place for you, your friends, and […]
Without mentioning the Web X.0 cliché, Reader2 is a site definitely in the mix with elements of folksonomy, social networking, RSSing for people to build collections of books they have read or want to read.
It’s pretty quick and easy to add book titles- the add form allows to enter a title and use an Amazon search- it Ajaxes the results right in the page, copelting the author, ISBN etc. You can add your own series of tags, a descipription of the book, or a review. It has dropdown categories of books that is awfully limited (please make it more extensive or something we can configure, why cannot this be tagged as well?); as well are the “status” you can assign to a book- again, make it more open or extensive.
I’ve been playing with it off and on for a week…
Where else but the internet could this happen? More than a year ago, I got an email from someone in Germany working with a music group called “Sea Level”. They had somehow managed to find this photo I had lumped somewhere in an old photo directory: This photo was taken in Death Valley California with […]
flickr foto impulsive optimistavailable on my flickr One of the images tagged in flickr as physicalmetadata. Wow, much better than cryptic “labels on soup cans”! With this metadata, we know this is a good dog, an optimist! I think (rather I Google) this is connected to the Flickr Peep Show exhibit. Wow, to be in […]
I’ve been tinkering with my simple approach of using MovableType as a publisher engine to create podcast feeds and content listings for audio content that is used across several different web sites. While there are many ways one could go about this, I am finding this to be efficient and fast. I only have about 7 feeds set up, but they are pushing across multiple web sites, with different design layouts.
This allows me to create a single directory of content and RSS files that can be accessed by any of our other PHP web pages. So the main podcast entry page lists all the casts on our site, and th elistings provide links to web sites connected to the audio, a description, a URL for the MP3 file, and now, stealing the idea from the EDUCAUSE blogs, the slick niftyplayer, and embedded flash audio player, e.g.:
But by setting up categories, I can have content filtered to feeds that are associated with specific project, such as our Dialogue Day podcasts, Ocotillo podcasts, and our Online Learning Group podcasts.
MovableType generates the correct RSS 2.0 feeds with proper enclosure tags, as well as generates the small text files that are used to provide the content to these pages. There is also another template that provides the content used to display as “What is Podcasting” info on these different pages. It works well because it is not publishing a full blog, just some small bits of content files.
For example, a snapshot of my current directory includes:
where *.inc are the main podcats listings, *_nav.inc are shorter listings that are just links to the sites that include the audio, and *.xml is a podcast feed.
Below I will describe in a bit more detail how it is done and provide a download of the template files. To use these you will need to
* have a web site that uses PHP for its content pages
* have an understanding of linking to web directories up and down a web server structure
* use or be able to set up MovableType on your server (I use the last free version, 2.661, but it ought to work on the 3.x versions)
My experiments with new services that offer tools to mix a set of different RSS feeds into one was interesting, and the comments brought in a few more. I’ve updated the original post to include: Aggrssive lazytom’s feedjumbler FEEDcombine Feed Findings FrankenFeed Feedjumbler had likely the easiest setup and mix of good output features, FrankenFeed […]
Thanks to an email from Ralph in Austria, I updated the bookmarklet tool for Simpy on my Multipost Bookmarklet Tool, the cheesy script I made for combining multiple social bookmark tools into one. Since these days I have pared my tool set down to one tasty tool, I have no idea if the others have […]
