Xagronaut

Revisiting the Virtual Press Room.

Phil Wainewright

I’ve just subscribed to Phil Wainewright’s archive of press releases at looselycoupled.com. (PR folk take note: I subscribed voluntarily to this feed.) An analyst and writer focused on Web services, Phil has built an application that publicists can use to post their press releases to his website, which in turn flows them out as an RSS feed. … [Jon's Radio]

SharpReader is awesome.

Ok, SharpReader is freaking awesome. It supports categories, has multi-threaded updating of feeds, and the entry threading feature is amazing. It tells me when someone else I read refers to the post I’m currently reading. Really fantastic. Even more reason to include entire posts in your RSS feeds. People, you listening??

Hopefully I won’t wind up hating SharpReader after using it for a little while like I did with the last RSS reader I tried. One good sign is that pieces of SharpReader have grown on me after using it for a little while. For example, the way it keeps old posts around. It works more like an e-mail client, where you have to explicitly delete old items, rather than having them expire in some way. At first I didn’t like this. Syndirella kept a configurable number of old items around (I think it defaulted to 50). NewsDesk only kept items around that were in the current feed. After using it though, I think SharpReader does it the best, because posts simply stay around for as long as you want them to. Seems like the best plan to me, even though you do have to explicitly delete old posts (but there are a lot of keyboard shortcuts to help you delete a lot of old posts at once ).

Ooh, cool. It exports feeds in the OPML file in the same order as they appear in your SharpReader window. Makes sense, right? Now I don’t have to sort my OPML file before displaying it. In fact, now I shouldn’t!.

[Keith's Weblog]

Since Keith seems so intent on promoting entire posts in RSS, I hope he doesn’t mind me posting his entire post.

I’m not sure how these statistics were compiled, but this article at Curiouser and curiouser! breaks down the top 40 aggregators by mindshare, download size, and number of (users?).  Several popular aggregators appear more than once because they are tracked by version number.

Our friend Syndirella #2 in the mix, but NetNewsWire heads up the pack.  Go figure, a Mac Os X application is the leader by almost double!  Are the majority of bloggers Mac users?

I haven’t had much luck with this so far, but it appears that you can subscribe to your Yahoo Groups as an RSS feed by using a query string similar to this one:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/iccm/messages?rss=1

In the above example, the “iccm” part would be replaced with whatever your desired group name is.  I haven’t gotten this to work with all of the groups, but it appears to work  for at least the radio-dev group.  Ironic isn’t it?

I hate getting tons of email that just collect and then I never read them.  This way I’ll only have recent items in my RSS aggregator.

Dublin Core Metadata Initiative.  Sounds very “heady,” but I’ll keep the link.

URLs are what matter.

You know, I’ve realized that the only thing that’s really important to me is meticulous control over my url-space. That’s the only thing that really matters. As long as your URLs stay constant, you can rip out your backend as many times as you want and it doesn’t matter. So, I might just say screw it all, move over to Drupal, and set up a simple gateway that’ll translate named URLs into Drupal nodes. Hmmmm…

[Keith's Weblog]

Drupal seems to be built PHP, XML, and perhaps other technologies.  Need to read more here.

Another problem is feed update error handling…I’ll need to make sure that fatal errors (like 404 errors) are reported as message boxes and not as status bar notiications. [yole's devblog]

One thing I noticed is that, behind a proxy server, I couldn’t find a way to specify credentials for background updating.

James Robertson pointed me to BottomFeeder - another free news aggregator currently on the market. The interesting part about BottomFeeder is that it is written in Smalltalk, which is not quite a common language nowadays.

[yole's devblog]

An important achievent today: My.Yandex, the only RSS syndication service in the Russian Internet that I’m aware of (maybe the only one that exists), now exports its list of feeds in the OPML format. This is especially exciting because this finally makes Syndirella useful for Russian users…

So tomorrow I’ll implement my part of the agreement with Yandex - support for importing OPML files from HTTP sites, with the possibility to preview the feeds and select the ones that should be imported. This will, of course, open the doors to other major RSS feed directories like MoreOver and NewsIsFree.

[yole's devblog]

File under: OPML, Syndirella, RSS News Sources

Yet Another Geek Anniverary - the BBS. The TEXTFILES.COM BBS Timeline: 1978 - Snowed in during the Great Chicago Snowstorm of 1978, Ward Christensen begins preliminary work on what would eventually become CBBS (Computer Bulletin Board System), the first Bulletin Board System Read more about it at… [Heal Your Church Web Site]

Yeah! I got it!  Snowed in…some great creation emerges.  Well, that settles it!  I’m off to code my next great invention.  It may take a year, but it will happen, Lord willing.