Roll your own Google feeds
Great stuff….
Today I want to introduce you to three Google query solutions that are accomplishing incredible feats with RSS and Google search technology.
1) Google Alert – Track any search query from your favorite news aggregator. A variety of cool settings are available once you are signed up. My only gripe is that it is primarily focused on email alerts and I had to dig around before I found the RSS settings in the “toolkit”.
2) “It’s Google.rss” – I like this tool for query tracking better than Google Alert because I can get to making my RSS feed right away without the login interface and other annoyances. It is a great example of “no frills” ingenuity at work.
3) Gnews2RSS – The holy grail of RSS news feeds, in my opinion. You can finally get Google news without being bound to using MyRSS.com or any other ad supported RSS generator. The webmaster of Gnews2RSS encourages users to host their own version of this tool with his script. A link back to the script’s author would be appropriate if used for personal use. [Lockergnome]
Feed on Feeds…
Why is a server side aggregator better than a desktop aggregator?
Desktop aggregators are great. They sit there all day, pinging away at sites, and as soon as they notice something new, they pop up little windows on your desktop, and let you read items. But what about when you go home from work? Or what about when you are on a trip? You get totally out of sync, and don’t know what you’ve read and haven’t read. You are enraged.
Check out Feed on Feeds… you just need PHP and SQL running and you can have your own agggretor running within a few minutes. I easily pointed to my existing OPML file from the blogstreet info aggregator and was using my existing subscriptions with little effort.
Aggregators Attack Info Overload
Internet news addicts are turning in droves to so-called aggregator services, which relieve information overload by condensing multiple sites into a single feed. [Wired News]
Aggregators and RSS are certainly on the hit list of editors everywhere these days…
PocketFeed
PocketFeed is an RSS/RDF news aggregator that runs on the Pocket PC 2002/2003 PDA’s. Uses OPML too! [The Scobleizer Weblog]
Where’s the Palm app…? I’ve tried Friday, which works only with Syndic8. Remus might work but you have to use Plucker to feed your Palm.
I can get my feeds to come through with IMAP thanks again to the blogstreet info aggregator, but huge numbers of unread messages seem to cause errors in VersaMail. It works, just not all the time.
The Problem with Mainstreaming RSS
For RSS to catch on and be embraced outside of technology focused content, using it will have to become much more user friendly. Your Mom will need to understand it. To be honest, it will probably take someone like Microsoft, Apple, or AOL to integrate the flow of RSS documents into their internet tools to ever get the non-tech masses involved. Unfortunately, businesses need justification to modify themselves and embrace new technology. That justification often comes by analyzing the number of potential customers they can reach with any given technology.
Right now, I think we stand at the brink of a “chicken or the egg” decision. We need big business to embrace the technology to make it attractive to a large number of people, and big business needs a groundswell of supportive people to justify investing in this technology. [Lockergnome]
RSS Hitting Critical Mass
Every morning I learn the latest from a variety of news organizations, weblogs, newsletters and other online information sources. But I don’t use my e-mail program or go surfing from Web site to Web site.
Instead, I use a piece of software called a news aggregator or newsreader — in my case, it’s called NetNewsWire and runs on Mac OS X — to scoop up headlines and summaries, along with links to the places where they originated.
I can do this because of a technology known as RSS, which stands for (among other things) Really Simple Syndication. It’s been around for years but is still largely unknown outside the techie community. That’s going to change, and soon. [Dan Gilmor]
Cyberduck
Cyberduck 2.1b2 is an open source SFTP (SSH Secure File Transfer) and FTP browser licenced under the GPL. Cyberduck features the same intuitive interface for both FTP and SFTP browsing. Cyberduck is now Mac only, with a completly rewritten user interface using the Cocoa Framework. You can open connections to multiple servers thanks to its document based interface. A simple favorites manager allows you to store freuqently used servers. [Open-source FTP and SSH Browser for Mac OS X | MacNN News]
Great looking and free …
Subsriptions Harmonizer
I’m working on the Subscriptions Harmonizer this weekend. One of the things I want is for the central app to give me a way to view all my subscriptions, to add and delete subs, and to offer a way to aggregate subs. [Scripting News]
I see this as the equivalent of IMAP for RSS… and would be a great way to always be able to read your subscriptions from any reader. I’d love to be able to read my subscriptions across readers now that I am centrally managing things with the RSS Info Aggregator from blogstreet.
Forget California, It’s Time to Recall Microsoft
Code Red, Love Bug, Slammer, Nimda, Pretty Park, BubbleBoy, Melissa, Code Red II, MSBlaster, and numerous other high-profile Microsoft-sponsored incidents…many view them as “the price of doing business in the Information Age” and cheerfully spend (or lose) increasing amounts of money with each new incident arising from poorly designed software. But rather than face reality by conducting a dollars-and-sense risk assessment of their IT operation to see how much Microsoft’s vulnerabilities cost their enterprise annually, these sheeple – at all levels of government, industry, and society — prefer tolerating mediocrity to efficiency and reliability in their software assets, because they’re either too lazy to investigate alternatives or don’t want to propose changes to the comfortable status quo.
What recourse do you have in such cases? You can’t just sue the software vendor for problems with their product like you can the maker of a vehicle or appliance since you’ve given up those rights by using the product under the terms of its license agreement. The only option you have is continue using the software in question and scrambling to update your systems whenever a new problem presents a danger to your information assets. In other words, when Microsoft says “patch” you salute and say “how soon?”
Or, you can vote with your pocketbook and move to an alternative software product that works better, costs less to buy and maintain, and won’t burn out your network support staff. Nobody’s saying you must use any one particular product or operating system, and they all tend to perform the same basic functions needed in today’s working society – although some are better at it than others. It may take a little bit of effort to switch and get used to the new product, but the long-term payoff will be worth it. [Richard Forno – Infowarrior]
Me? I’m just glad I use a Mac.
Rich editing in Mozilla for Moveable Type
A quick search via the google bar in Mozilla and bam – rich text moveable type editing in Mozilla!! Loving it – just posted this entry… clicked to add a URL…
Scalable RSS Aggregators
Dave endorses the view, stating that “the three-pane `feed reader’ is a disaster, it’s merely recreating a mess I want to run away from. I like having a new queue every few hours.”
I think I have hit upon the ideal solution: a single folder with all the RSS items in an email client, like what our Info Aggregator does for the following reasons:
– it allows me to work within an application I know very well (the email client) and not learn (or download) something new
– the IMAP support ensures that I have a sync-ed RSS store irrespective of the computer I access it from
– the single folder elimintaes the wastage of working through differetn folders. Email clients have a sort on the source, so in case I want to view (or delete) all feeds by date or source, it is a matter of a couple clicks.
– search within the feeds is possible via the email client search itself [E M E R G I C . o r g:]
I have to agree… only a couple of days into Info Aggregator and I’m hooked! I do include a few rules, though for things I know I generally want to read later (BBC and NYT) and certain blogs I know I want to see immediately as they are updated.
I don’t think the three-paned interface is broken… bad habits are bad habits so if you can
t deal with volumes of email, than perhaps slowing down the number of subscriptions in your aggregator would be a better idea.
Searching for the personal touch
A stealth start-up out of Stanford University is hoping to raise the heat on one of the toughest problems in Web search–and possibly out-Google Google in the process.
Kaltix was formed in recent months by three members of Stanford’s PageRank team–a research group created to advance the mathematical algorithm developed by Google co-founder and Stanford alum Larry Page that cemented Google’s fame.
PageRank has helped steer people to Web sites like no other search technology before it, harnessing the link structure of the Web to determine the most popular pages. Now, Kaltix hopes to improve upon PageRank, with an attempt to speed up the underlying PageRank computations.
That, in turn, could lay the groundwork for a breakthrough in a cutting-edge area of Web search development known as “personalization,” which aims to sort search results based on the specific needs and interests of individuals, instead of the consensus approach pioneered by Google. [Searching for the personal touch | CNET News.com]
Sounds like acquisition time for Google…
illustrated MT templates
helpful hints for understanding the layout of templates [anil dash’s daily links]
Updated list of RSS readers
Updated list of RSS readers I have updated my list of RSS readers. I’m sure there are some missing, so please let me know and I’ll add them [Blogroots]
This is a great list and I am now testing a few more ways to read my RSS files including an RSS to IMAP path courtesy of blogstreet which is very cool. I’ve also discovered a few new readers that I had no idea even existed…
UPDATE! I just realized and tested this… Through the blogstreet system, I can now receive my RSS feeds on my Tungsten C in VersaMail! This totally rocks! The posts that have come through on my computer and palm so far are very clean and easy to deal with. This system could really be a winner – especially since through IMAP, everything is nicely synced!
101 Uses for Apple IChat
People are finding many versatile uses for Apple’s iChat AV software, like sharing video across town or finding dates. Thing is, they’re not using it much for video conferencing, the task for which it was built. By Leander Kahney. [Wired News]
With Google News Alerts you…
With Google News Alerts you get filtered stories that can be posted to a cateogry weblog via a “mail-to-weblog feature.” This in turn generates an RSS feed that can be subscribed to. Simple. This is going to be an ongoing thing. Google slowly rolls out services they think they can control and end-users find ways to route around them. [John Robb’s Weblog]
Interesting though as JD has already pointed out and I can confirm from my own alerts, it is tricky to get these to be as accurate as you might like. Perhaps after the beta… I like the idea of looping the content through RSS, but also like getting this stuff directly as it happens via email. Email just feels more immediate to me.
PhotoReviewer
PhotoReviewer doesn’t try to be all things to all people. It is not a replacement for iPhoto or Preview. It won’t remove red-eye, or crop your photos. It won’t generate thumbnails, make HTML pages for you, or put your photos into albums. It does only one thing, really; but it does it well. It helps you wade through the stream of incoming images that you get from your digital camera or your internet connection, quickly and efficiently. It belongs between your digital camera and iPhoto. Between your scanner software and iPhoto. Between your news reader and iPhoto. [PhotoReviewer : Photo & image organization and slideshow display
]
photoblogs…
AOL gives a shout-out to Communicator
America Online releases its Communicator system, offering refinements for handling e-mail accounts and multiple screen names. But will broadband users get the message? [CNET News.com]
Not yet for Macs… though there is a beta you can try via the AOL service.