Archives For rss

Apple shows more RSS awareness

10 Jan 2006

The Mac faithful were tuned to MacRumors and their IRC chat today for the Steve Jobs keynote at MacWorld. There were a number of surprises that will be blogged about everywhere. A couple things that caught my eye were the new version of GarageBand and a new product called iWeb. Many people had predicted that Apple would release an app that would make podcast creation and publishing easier, and now we have it. I will install the new iLife as soon as possible and give this new Garageband a whirl. iWeb appears to be a Apple’s attempt to create a basic blogging tool that can publish photos and all sorts of digital media. Apple is touting the RSS capabilities of everything including iPhoto and a new feature they’re calling “photocasting.”

Who knows how well these tools will actually work, but it sure looks cool so far.

ilife, osx, iphoto, iweb, macworld, garageband, rss

In Blogging, Podcasting and iPod ,
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RSS and podcasting still relatively unknown

22 Jul 2005

A recent survey from the Pew Internet & American Life Project reveals that most Americans are not familiar with some terms that many of us toss around pretty regularly. Of those surveyed only 13% “have a good idea” what podcasting is. RSS got only 9% and “phishing” was a bit higher at 29%. By contrast, 88% of respondents have a good idea what spam is. I think it’s safe to say that RSS and podcasting have a lot of room for growth.

In Emerging Technologies ,
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Custom podcast feeds

22 Jul 2005

If you haven’t discovered Technorati yet, you should. It’s one of the best sites on the Internet to track what’s being said in the blogosphere. Last week at the Apple Distinguished Educator Summer Institute in San Jose, those of us who were blogging the event agreed to use the “ade2005″ tag to facilitate aggregation of all of our blog posts, Flickr photos, and Delicious links. It worked great and you can see the results at http://technorati.com/tag/ade2005. Even better, the site provides an RSS feed for each tag allowing anyone to subscribe to a Technorati search. For example, the URL for the ade2005 tag is http://feeds.technorati.com/feed/posts/tag/ade2005.

That’s a lot of background information to get to the main point of this post. Currently there’s no way to generate a Technorati feed of podcasts. Even if the Technorati RSS feed points to blog posts that contain enclosures (podcasts), the feed doesn’t have the <enclosure> tags that podcasting clients like iTunes and ipodder look for. So here’s what I want: a special Technorati feed that will actually include the enclosure links. The feed URL might look something like:

http://feeds.technorati.com/feed/podcasts/tag/ade2005.

By subscribing to that feed I would automatically receive any podcasts that were tagged “ade2005″. You wouldn’t really know what you’d be downloading in advance, but at an event like NECC where the quality of the posts and podcasts are consistently top notch I think it would be worth a try. And it doesn’t seem like it would be that hard to do. Technorati, are you listening?

In Podcasting and iPod , , , ,
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RSS feed now valid

4 Jul 2005

How do you know you’re a geek? I’d say that if you get home from a long trip in Philadelphia, New York, and Winona, MN and you stay up until 1:30 a.m. trying to figure out why the RSS feed from your blog is invalid, you’re a geek. I noticed recently that NetNewsWire wasn’t automatically detecting my blog’s feed, and when Tim asked me about it at NECC I thought I’d dig in a little and figure out what was wrong.

Here’s the solution for the record (and I’d be curious if others have seen the same problem). If you’re using WordPress and have enabled gzip compression for your Web pages, then you’ve probably got invalid RSS feeds. If the new iTunes or some other RSS aggregator isn’t detecting your feed automatically or is complaining about your feed, go into your blog management screens, go to Options >> Reading and uncheck the box next to “WordPress should compress articles (gzip) if browsers ask for them.” That should do it.

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In Blogging, Podcasting and iPod
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Generating RSS enclosure feeds

16 Jun 2005

Hugo has a post today with some interesting information about tools to generate RSS feeds that support enclosures. I posted about some educational uses for the RSS enclosure element back in February, but I still haven’t found a decent tool that would allow a teacher to create such an RSS feed without resorting to a full-blown blog. (Not that having teachers create blogs for this purpose would be a bad thing, of course.) It looks like Hugo has found several, but none are free and only one works with OS X.

Dan Bricklin’s ListGarden looks like a great piece of software, but it doesn’t support enclosures. Since it’s free software I could add enclosure support myself if I was a better Perl hacker. Maybe this is just the excuse I need to dig in and improve my Perl chops.

In General
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Free RSS plug-in for Outlook

13 May 2005

Being more of a Mac and Linux guy and a loyal NetNewsWire user, I don’t track the RSS aggregator options for Windows very closely. But if I was stuck using Microsoft Outlook I’d probably use RSS Popper, a free aggregator that plugs into Outlook and makes tracking your favorite blogs as easy as checking your email.

In Blogging
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RSS readers for Windows

20 Mar 2005

I sat down to start planning my itinerary for this year’s NECC conference and noticed that there’s an RSS feed featured prominently on the conference homepage. Their “What is RSS?” page has a link to an article from PC World entitled “News on Demand” that provides a handy introduction to RSS for PC users and a handy comparison of 18 RSS aggregators. As a Mac user I don’t pay much attention to the market for PC-based RSS readers, but now I’ve got a place to send PC users when they ask me for a recommendation.

In Blogging, Conferences , ,
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Serialize books via RSS

18 Jan 2005

RSS technology continues to inspire creative ideas. Russell Beattie wonders what it would be like to read long texts a chunk at a time by having portions delivered regularly to your favorite RSS aggregator:

I just had an idea for a system where you could choose any one of the public domain eBooks out there and have a small chunk delivered daily via RSS. Many of us are too busy to read classic books out there, instead choosing “page turners” or books that are more applicable to our every day lives (like a some new marketing book). But we do have time to zip through our aggregator daily, right? So by taking a 500 page novel and distributing it, a few pages at a time, via RSS, we could read a new book in a month or so without even trying.

I wasn’t familiar with Russell’s blog or work until now, but he’s created a site called Mobdex which appears to be a more user friendly interface Project Gutenberg etexts. You can subscribe to all of the Mobdex texts via RSS. I just subscribed to The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. DuBois.

In Blogging
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