rss

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Wicket is one who believes RSS is dead. He thinks that Twitter has replaced RSS as a means of receiving information. Just about every site out there has an RSS feed, which can be delivered to you via your Email if you choose. Did you know that every Twitter user has their own RSS feed? At one point, I swore that Email was dead, and was being replaced by RSS feeds. So it’s funny that Wicket claims RSS is now dead!

Read more on How to Get RSS Feeds via Email…

I held off on transferring my feeds to FeedBurner, but was eventually convinced that it was going to help more than hurt.

Today, I’m strongly considering taking my feeds back – out of the hands of FeedBurner / Google. I’m definitely not the only one who is discontent with FeedBurner’s service. There have been several reports of problems, but very little reassurance that FeedBurner has stayed true to the users that helped build the service.

Read more on Google’s FeedBurner Problems on the FrontBurner: You’re SOL…

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Years ago, my Dad sold magazines for a living. I really haven’t subscribed to any for a long time. Do any of you actually subscribe to any magazines, and actually have them delivered to your house? It seems that with some of them, even if you stop paying for them… they keep showing up! I’ve had several in the past that I just quit paying, because I no longer wanted to receive them. Yet they still keep coming! Usually, by the time news reaches your mailbox in a magazine… it’s already old news. You’ve read it online, or watched it on television. Even weekly periodicals can be out of date by the time it gets to you.

Read more on What Kind of Magazines do You Like?…

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On my recent trip home to Iowa, I was able to meet up with several business and personal friends at a Des Moines Tweet-Up. We discussed RSS Feeds and how Twitter has replaced them for me. Nathan played “interviewer” on this video with me.

Read more on The State of Tech Culture in Iowa…

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When RSS first hit the web, no one really knew about it. It started to become a little more popular as more people started to post content. All these blog platforms started to publish these syndicated feeds. I give full credit to Dave Winer. If it weren’t for Dave, RSS and Blogging wouldn’t even exist in my mind.

Read more on RSS and OPML for Feed Subscriptions…

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Aaron Johnson talking tech with Molly Stanberry at Gnomedex 2007.
Aaron claims to be writing with 50% less caffeine now. How the heck any Geek could do that is beyond me!

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Okay, bLaugh is up and running – including a great gag on the Friendster patent today. I’ve been using FeedBurner to manage the feed, which has (for the most part) been a good experience. To make bLaugh fully PSP compatible, I had to create enclosures for the comic images – which can only be done with a direct hyperlink to the image itself. In doing so, some of my non-Friendster friends are telling me that two images are showing up in each bLaugh feed item. The reasons are simple: (a) the news aggregator is ignoring the HTML I’ve set to hide the image link from plain view; (b) the news aggregator is rendering the enclosure inline for your convenience, as well as the image that’s pulling in directly via the IMG tag. So is anybody really to blame here? Wish I knew. FeedBurner has allowed me to infuse the Flickr images tagged “bLaugh” with my regular ol’ blog feed – allowing my tens of thousands of subscribers to get the day’s gag without having to subscribe to the separate bLaugh feed. Still, others are saying that my feed in Bloglines is giving them fits. Argh! Can I just blame the dog?!

Read more on The Blame Game…

Until a few more legal loopholes get closed, I won’t be able to expand much further upon the whole “I’m offering you a stake in TagJag” concept; I’d rather underpromise and overdeliver on this idea. I’m on the lookout for some kind of hip lawyer who can help us get it wrapped up. It’s a community-building effort, so I’m hoping to find someone who understands what that means. I should probably talk to Buzz and/or Denise, eh? No matter, I have to show you a couple of emails before I explain why I did what I did with Brad, Jeff, and Rick (the VCs) at Gnomedex.

Read more on Happy TagJag’ed Publishers…

I’ve had a few people ask me what to tag their posts as for Gnomedex. I say (and have always said) just tag things “Gnomedex” and leave it at that. If you wanna get fancy, you can also do Gnomedex6, Gnomedex06, Gnomedex2006, or SirNotAppearingInThisFilm. For maximum flash efficiency, stick with “Gnomedex” and call it a day. The only other tag we’d like to recommend is “GnomedexDiscussion” – for the times when you’d like to make a comment on something that’s being said at the conference – specifically when we run out of time for a discussion on-site. If you want to watch what’s happening with any of the keywords, you can import any of the following into your news aggregator from TagJag:

Read more on Tagging Your Posts for Gnomedex…

We’ve got a single OPML file containing the links and feeds of every 2006 Gnomedexer, thanks to the code sleuthing of Kosso. This is good for importing “everybody” en masse into your news aggregator. However, it’s not always as efficient as a single feed. So, Shayne whipped out a 400-line script to convert OPML to RSS – and I think we’re going to call it “KissMyOPML” for fun. The PHP script will be open source, available for everybody soon, and is also a sign of things to come in the near future with Gada.be (which will mash feeds faster than the average install). Remember, Gada.be outputs OPML for every search query; think about it. You can subscribe to the Gnomedexer feed immediately – and if your name isn’t listed in the conference attendee OPML, please let us know ASAP so we can get the proper information in there.

Read more on OPML to RSS…

Don’t expect every one of these searches to yeild results, though. The output was generated by a single OPML file and the Optimal OPML WordPress Plugin. Looking for other easy ways to display the OPML from Gada.be right now. Hell, entirely new sites could be built on top of the OPML we produce – much like RSS, it’s a poor man’s API.

Read more on Over 300 Tag Searches in One Spot…

Okay, I’m not making this up, folks: Ask.com’s RSS Search isn’t outputting RSS properly. Actually, it is and was – according to the RSS 2.0 spec, the link element is completely optional – though I must admit this was the first time we had encountered an RSS 2.0 feed that lacked the link element altogether. I completely stand corrected As with any Web service that outputs RSS for search queries, I immediately integrated it into Gada.be results. You’ll certainly find Ask.com listed on Gada.be today, but the links to results aren’t working properly (a discovery pointed out by a few of our regular users). I looked at the source, and it seemed normal to me. When Shayne went to troubleshoot it this morning, he came up with an amazingly ironic discovery: “This may sound stupid, but when I tried to filter Ask.com to work using my methods… I came to find out, they’re not putting a <link> node in their RSS!!!” Okay, now that’s just too funny. ROTFLMAO funny. No, what’s funny is that I didn’t realize the link element was optional – because to me, it would seem to be obligatory, and I can’t help but wonder if other news aggregators had issues with Ask.com RSS feeds. I’ll be sending a note to my friends at Ask.com immediately, as I can’t imagine this being a difficult fix. Wasn’t really a fix, but they did update it to include the link element rather quickly – speaking to the dedication and understanding that’s happening behind the scenes over there. There ya go – Gada.be makes for an excellent troubleshooting tool sometimes (as it also discovered feed discrepancies in MSN’s feeds a few months ago). Boo-ya! Here’s a screen shot for posterity. Just to show I’m not completely nuts – only partially. If it’s possible to be right and wrong at the same time, I did it.

Read more on Ask.com RSS Search – NOT!…

I received an email from Daniel Goldman earlier today regarding Mozilla’s filing for a trademark on the feed icon, requesting that Opera Software sign an agreement before using it in their Web browser. Daniel asked me if I thought this was a good thing or a bad thing for the feed icon. Let me start out by saying that the blogosphere has to get over the whole “copyrights and trademarks are evil” jihad.

Read more on The Feed Icon Debate…

I started to compile a “wish list” of WordPress plugins. Turns out, many of my wishes have already come true – it just took a little digging on Google. Too bad there’s not an amazingly comprehensive WordPress plugin directory / wiki (and if there is, nobody really knows about it yet). One of my wishes was for an OpenSearch feed. Turns out Williamsburger already created a plugin, with a WP 2.0 compatible version linked from his comments thread. This got me up and running with my own OpenSearch feed easily enough, but I wanted to have it actually be autodiscoverable within a search query. Without bothering anybody in my personal circle, I found the variables I needed to insert between at the top of my header.php template:

Read more on OpenSearch RSS AutoDiscovery for WordPress Searches…