http://www.kinscape.com/feed2js/

serving up feeds to JavaScript from a server in Michigan. Again, it was about a 30 minute install via ftp (mostly me finding my own typos and errors). We're ready for more takers, let's span the globe!

Also, I got a cryptic email from Sunil, a student at the International Institute of Information Technology in India, where it looks like theyh have set up some modified versions of Feed2JS to aggregate a bunch of student blog posts into a one page blogroll (a lot of local hits but it does not take forever)... Sunil and friends ("Intellectual Depravity") are running some Bloxsom blogs there but some, like "reality bites" are blogspot sites:

I'm someone who thinks Arundhati Roy is a spectacular blend of Michael Moore's wit, Noam Chomsky's intellect, and Howard Zinn's hands-on approach to activism. I'm someone who thinks Richard Stallman is a god, for he gave us the very concept of free software. I'm someone who thinks Rituparno Ghosh is one of the finest movie directors ever. I'm someone who thinks Yash Chopra and Karan Johar simply suck. And yes, I do think Aishwarya Rai is overrated...

I cannot say if I agree that Aishwarya Rai is overrated ;-)

There is some of that way out on the long tail sort of discovery here in student voices... and this network of IT students do a lot of back and forth commenting in their blog-scape.

We'd published internally before on RSS (Fall 2003) and wikis (Fall 2004) without much of a measurable ripple. But already in a few days:

(1) Our Blackboard admin has seen how Feed2JS and RSS feeds from the Maricopa Learning eXchange can be used to pipe content from our Blackboard Support materials MLX collection into a Bb site for the staff around our system that use/support Blackboard:

Yeah, this is not exactly new or earth shattering, but they went and did it on their own.

(2) Another group is using a new open wiki (unspecified, sorry) for creating a place for their People Soft Portal team to do some brainstorming.

(3) We convinced a few folks who attended this week's NMC Online oCnference on Visual Literacy to use a wiki to declare which sections they would review and to post some notes. We were able to send up to 10 people from our system to this conference, and at our first suggestion to use a wiki to collaborate, there was silence and an offer from one leader to have everyone "email their notes so he can blog them". I snuck ahead and created the wiki site, and that turned the bulbs on for the group. Maybe-- it appears that only 3 of the 10 actually got their fingers in the wiki. But we'll take any bits of progress we can get.

(4) And emails like this:

Dave _______ has been looking at the MLX section of the mcli site and had incorporated some of it for Blackboard.

He had an idea of possible doing something similar and harnessing the power of RSS for our Peoplesoft SIS Project web site.

Where can I find out more about how this works, what we would need to do to get it going, and some ideas on how to implement this?
 

We might be getting some traction finally in these technologies that to me, have budded passed "emerging".

So if you are struggling in your system to get some adoption, bring in a Canadian!

It takes me back 10, 11, 12 years ago when the first web sites were popping up. Every (almost) new site was nesworthy in its presence, announced in the NCSA Mosaic What's New Page. I recall combing through my multimedia magazines, noting the first companies that had a URL in their ads. I was collecting them like mad in manually edited collections. There was no Google, no Internet Explorer, not even a Yahoo (well maybe a baby Yahoo). It was a trickle, then a steady rain, than a constant flow, then it is just part of the scenery.

Will the same happen to RSS? Will its absence be more noteworthy for an organization than its presence? Is it still mildly geeky to use? Has it arrived? is arriving? will not arrive?

Meanwhile, according to my aggregator, Dr. Green today is performing a root canal, 2 crowns, 6 checkups, plus a golf match at 4:30 pm ;-)

It's interesting, curious, and quirky when the PR factories roll new verbs off the assembly line- Moreover's FeedRSSDirect Ads offer this savory description:

Moreover Technologies, the premier provider of aggregated online current awareness information, today announced FeedDirect RSS Ads, the first self-service integrated RSS feed delivery and monetization service...

RSS feed publishers will now benefit from the ability to insert content-targeted, revenue-generating sponsored links within posts or as an individual post, providing publishers with unparalleled flexibility to monetize their content.

Ohhhhhhhh, "monetizing" the content sounds so sexy. Magical. Alchemy. Turning plain old content into cash.

I am not predicting gloom and doom, and will likely exercise my right not to read content that has been created in the pure goal of "monetization". It's bad enough that in this pursuit some web sites have web sites with 7% of weight (or 20% by volume) of content among the ads. But can you imagine wading through loud billboards when you are trying to digest information?

While I would never begrudge anyone to make a living off the web, is the "clown pants" visual impact of ads something you really want to wear?

And here I as hoping that Monet-ization was some sort of Impressionistic graphics design approach. Viva la difference.

Create a wist account, load a browser bar tool, and when you are surfing and want to track a site in your "collection" (a del.icio.us task), wist offers to create an icon based on any image it can find in the page (quasi flickr-like). Slap on some tags, and see where your tags lead you. There is a friend of a friend thing there too, but I lack friends (apparently).

You end up with a collection of tagged icons representing sites you have "wisted".

Since it syndicates, this is another one in the pack of Rip. Mix. Feed.

I am wisting but I have no idea what I am doing.

Today she sent me an e-mail describing what she had created, with an attachment of her assignment. Since she has a good sense of humor, and I am just so tired of people in our system only sharing via e-mail (the syndrome I refer to as "e-mail attachment disorder"), I relied with this message:

WARNING WARNING This email program has returned the message to you as the owner of the account prefers that all such items be sent as URL links to content in the Maricopa Learning eXchange. Wouldn't great ideas live longer and wider if they were not confined to e-mail?

She laughed, and sent me the MLX link 10 minutes later.. so, here hot off the press, is MLX Package #1503: Using RSS Feeds in ENG102.

Now id her "bite" can only infect a few more colleagues ;-)

My Views on the Cheese Curdling Controversy

Today's podcast on the big stink about cheese.

Download file (6.4MB mp3)

Now regular cheese enthusiasts might automatically listen to my daily cheese diatribes, but if I am casual visitor, trying to make a decision if I ought to subscribe, I would be looking for a perhaps three sentence summary in text form, to accompany the feed.

Not only that, if a visitor wishes to write their own blog entry referral to me, citing my eloquent argumentative style on this important issue, without a good summary for copy/paste posting, they have to try and make up a summary.

Podcasters, take note- you put a lot of time and effort into the recording, but you are not serving a wider feed audience without a decent text summary in the feeds.

feed://www.somedude.com/blog/feed/

That is correct, note the feed:// protocol on the URL. This was interesting as many newbies wonder what all the wonder there is about RSS after they click a "syndicate" link or an organge icon and see a screen full of geek code (raw XML).

I did some googling but found nothing definitive on whether this was reliable, so I played a bit on my own site. At home, it worked perfectly on Mac OSX in Safari, FireFox, and even the protozoic Internet Explorer 5.2. Looking good!

Not so good when I got to work on my PC laptop. No go in Firefox (well it asked for an application, then I picked a RSS reader, and now links do nothing. Worse, on IE, it just generates an error. And sadly, that is the tail that wags the web, so for now, fuggedaboudit.

At least, quickSub still works cleanly on all browsers, platforms, and RSS readers I've been able to test. It is still a bit of a side hack, as it leans on JavaScript. Basically, a hover over the RSS link brings up a floating window (CSS div) where you can select which reader you want to subscribe the feed with.

And if you really want to see the geeky XML (I admit it, I have an often need for that to see the structure), well, you cans till click the link. It's one of the cleaner approaches around now...

Hi

Your rss2js service is first class. I love the code generator and the service itself - what a great job!

I have a web site 'www.asturex.com' about Asturias in Spain. It has lain pretty dormant for a few years.

I don't have time to produce lots of content for the site, but what I have wanted to do for a while is be able to at least pump news through the site, but without having to re-work the site too much or build myself a backend news database.

Anyway a couple of days ago I saw that Ask Jeeves had bought out Bloglines, and when I took a look it was so easy to set up a blog that I went ahead. Then I thought if only I could get the blog rss into my web site I'd have the news issue sorted. Then I found your site and - hey presto!

Many thanks for a great service.

Great job Ian! Score another one for Rip. Mix. Feed.

Just add a sidebar photo feed from flickr and you are set!

P.S. Kind of interesting that the Jeeves buy is funneling more people into the mix.

• 3,182,586 hits (96% of the total)
• 455,000 hits per day
• 18,943 hits per hour
• 315 hits per minute

The server is fine and there is no intent to shut this down. I monitor the CPU usage and am trying to unravel some periodic swings where it maxes 100% of the CPU. There are some patterns there to try and detective my way through. We run another server at a different address off the same XServe, and that site was getting way too much crawling action, so knocking out all the bots with a robots.txt exclusion seemed to help the whole box out alot.

As mentioned before, at sometime in the next month or two, I will be moving Feed2JS to its own dedicated server (a new PC laptop has freed up a PIII box in my office-- every second hand PC in our office gets the Linux touch and is put to work). Have no fears, there will be ample warning and clean server redirects from where FeedJS sits now.

So it started with an email notification of a Trackback from my post first on A Cup of Connotea: A New del.icio.us Flavor of Social Bookmarking (and now a 4 in 1 bookmark tool) and a new site created to be a "Delicious-Furl-Connotea-Bag" bookmarklet tool, now abbreviated to Site Submission MultiTool-- Alan's Marklet Maker.

Now although Trackback is now a spam problem and many smarter than I think it is the wrong mode of communication, I still get somehing out of it, because almost daily, Trackback connects me to some other blog author I had never heard of.

Well, this one lead me to German site I could not read, but it had an RSS feed displayed of a "furl" tag in del.icio.us (isn't that an interesting mix!): http://del.icio.us/tag/furl where I saw my little page listed (and it was but 2 weeks old), with an indication it had been tagged by 142 other people (yikes! better check the spelling on that page!):

And clicking that pink link gives me a URL for all the other del.icio.us users who had tagged it:
http://del.icio.us/url/758f42df568733d6ceb2e9eab0b9a197

Now my hunch is that the long numeric string on the end of the URL is a "hash" or a conversion of the URL to a unique string to identify it, so there is no direct way to build it via a URL alone. You see that a majority of posts are made without extended descriptions, and the ones there are perhaps from people who have modified their bookmarklets to include the selected text from a highlighted web poge (a feature built into my Marklet Maker). But there are some ways, I have yet to do more than ponder, to look at who is delicious-ing particular sites.

So I jumped over to Furl to see if it has something similar, lo and behold it does, and even easier to use. The "About This Link" page has a form field to type in a URL-- http://www.furl.net/urlInfo.jsp, so plugging my URL in there gives me a listing of 81 Furl members who have "Furled" this URL, listed first by ones that include comments, and then links to others lacking comments.

I am not writing this solely to toot my own porcupine horn and say, "Wow, 81 people Furled me", but to suggest to look into your tools and see if there are less subtle ways they offer to examine their large holdings. Data is just data in a database, and lacks meaning until we interpret, analyze, conjecture it. I find a more interesing curiosity into who is Furling, why, what they got out of it.. Back to Small Pieces Loosely Joined

Hyperlinks are not just an incidental feature of the Web. They are what turn the Web from a library of pages into a web... nothing on the Web is independent of us and our meanings and our interests... On the Web, there's only passion, words, and the presence of others, in grand, shifting, ineffably messy relationships. Those connections bind us into something more than we are as individual pieces of organized matter; the are what's most real on the Web." [SPLJ pp170-171]

Here is the issue. The whole magic works because your web pages are looking to link to an extneral file of JavaScript commands that output the content. Typically this is done as a link toa file, say of some common routines used on many pages, so the JavaScript is linked via a command like:

<script language="JavaScript"  
  src="../js-lib/cool-functions.js" 
  type="text/javascript"></script>

Feed2JS does the same, except the src= points to a script which dynamically builds the JavaScript output statements. The problem is what if the URL in the src= tag is not available? It does not seem to time out the browser, like an unfound link, and for many users, their browser is stopped from displaying any content. Bad mojo, indeed.

Since moving my web development to PHP a few years back, I avoid where ever I can using JavaScript- it is just too browser dependent, prone to idiosynchrocies, and always feels like a "kludge" approach. But sometimes, it is the only recourse. So the end around I am trying would go through a process like this as a Feed2JS page loads:

1. Javascript first turns a flag variable to "off" to indicate we have not heard back yet from the Feed2JS server.
2. Javascript starts a timer that goes off in say, 15 seconds. If the flag variable has been flipped "on", we de-activate the timer, If it is still in the "off" position, it means we have not heard back from the server. So we pop up a confirmation box, asking the user if they want to try another 15 seconds, or to cancel the request. Here is where it gets tricky-- there does not seem to be a 100% reliable way to have JavaScript tell the browser to abort the transaction, the equivalent of hitting the "stop" button on the browser. The methods I dug up include:
   1. For NetScape/Mozilla/FireFox: window.stop()
   2. For IE, there is an undocumented but-sits-on-Microsoft's-site command: document.execCommand('Stop');
   3. For Safari, well neither seems to work.
   So The confirmation box let's the user know it will try and stop the browser, but it may fall on the user top do it manually. At least the get a message that feed2JS is OOC (out of commission).
3. The current Feed2JS script is set now to return to all requests, a JavaScript command that sets the variable in step 1 flip to the flag variable to the "on" position (see an example of the raw JavaScript output) -- this has no effect on anyone's current use of Feed2JS.

So below is some HTML to test this functionality out:

I am providing a zipped template of my test file. I am just looking to try this out before rolling it in as the standard template (it would not be required, but optional). Or if anyone has some JavaScript insight as to a better way to do this, please let me know. Thanks!

Before today, the feeds we generate as fixed static files (updated every hours as a cron script) on the MLX where the 10 newest items over all, the newest items and random items per Maricopa College, newest items in a set of subject areas (Biology, Humanities, ...)-- and available as both RSS 1.0 links and JavaScript include files (unlike FeedtoJS, these are static files that just echo the output created from the hourly updates, cheap caching).

I just updated that set of "fixed" feeds to include ones that are random selected items in the discipline areas. That was an easy update, and something that just fell off the radar. This is dependent, of course, that our MLX package "creators" provide an academic area when they create their packages. It was un-reasonable (IMHO) to create a "fixed" vocabulary, so it suffers from some of the slop of folksonomy, or user supplied free form tags. But it is not bad, e.g. the MLX items for Nursing, Biology, Humanities, etc. all have new and random feeds.

We had before the ability to generate a URL link and an RSS feed of the 10 newest items form ANY search result, dynamically generating the feed (meaning doing the database query, and returning the results as XML). What I just added today are new options to generate a randomized result of specific queries.

So for an example, a listing of all MLX items containing "critical thinking" and associated with Chandler_Gilbert Community College is linked by a specific URL:
http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/mlx/search_results.php?college=CGCC&scope=5&srt=1&words=critical+thinking

And you can get RSS feeds for the 10 newest in this same query:
http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/mlx/get_rss.php?college=CGCC&words=critical+thinking

As well as a feed for 10 random in the same query:
http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/mlx/get_rss.php?college=CGCC&words=critical+thinking&rand=10

As a bonus for CDB readers, the random number parameter on the end can be any number of desired results (well not any number, it is capped at 20 as there are pranksters out there).

Now that we have these sorts of feeds, one could, in theory, use them with FeedtoJS, but keep in mind, these results follow this path:

* query sent to MLX database
* results parsed to XML output
* XML processed by Feed2JS script
* content echoed to web page as JavaScript

It might be a lot of traffic, so I may explore, someday, a strategy for caching the dynamic generated search results.

Anyhow, it was fun to get my fingers in the MLX code again. Much more work there is coming next month, as well as a new face lift (CSS Design).

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 "best".

In an hour, I got an email from a web developer at one of our colleges as one of their committees wants an "RSS feed on their committee page featuring 3 random MLX items related to instructional technology."

Good signs indeed.

Next thing I know, someone will want to use a wiki.

Wait a minute! That request came 2 days ago,

This only affects feeds from del.icio.us.

I've been in communication with the del.icio.us folks and it is confirmed that they were getting repeated requests through our site for either randomly generated feeds or repeated non-cached requests. It's their site, and if they want top ban us they can, and I support it.

I am researching some new approaches that can try and throttle repeated requests (any ideas, PHP pros out there?) and I need to look more closely at Magpie's caching or where it may slip up.

One avenue that may have been a culprit is use of our older predecessor RSS2JS which has now been closed and retired.

Sorry.

Update: They are giving us another chance to behave! You can again try and use our code for del.icio.us feeds. To be better consumers of feed, please note that we are now caching feeds for a 2 hour period.