Long time readers will know I was – am – a huge fan of RSS and Atom, simple feed based protocols for syndicating content and attachment links, even going so far as to write a manifesto of a sort at one point (We Ignore RSS at OUr Peril). This blog, and the earlier archived version … Continue reading “Even Though RSS Never Went Away, Could It Be Coming Back as a Facebook Sinker?”
A quick recipe prompted by a query from Joss Winn about getting data out of an apparently broken Atom feed: http://usesthis.com/feed/?r=n&n=150 The feed previews in Google Reader okay – http://www.google.com/reader/atom/feed/http://usesthis.com/feed/?r=n&n=150 – and is also viewable in my browser, but neither Google Spreadsheets (via the =importFeed() formula) nor YQL (?!) appear to like it. [Note: h/t … Continue reading “Extracting Data From Misbehaving RSS/Atom Feeds”
Originally posted as a comment on Brian Kelly’s Is It Too Late To Exploit RSS In Repositories?: I used to advocate the adoption of RSS a lot, and came across some of the problems you mention repeatedly, such as the inability to consume certain pages in off-the-shelf feed consuming apps. Many of the problems resulted … Continue reading “Broken RSS, and a Comment About Blog Comments”
Picking up on Feed Autodetection With YQL, where I described a YQL custom query for autodetecting RSS and Atom feed URLs in a web page given the web page URL, here’s a complementary YQL custom query function which polls a feed URL through the YQL feed normaliser and returns the title and URL of the … Continue reading “Blog Details from an RSS/Atom Feed”
I’ve held off playing with BeautifulSoup, the Python screenscraping library, so today I thought I’d have a little play. Here’s a first attempt – RSS feed autodetection. I think the following autodiscovers the the first feed in an an HTML page, if one exists… though with provisos… (the title element must exist in the page, … Continue reading “First Attempt at RSS/Atom Feed Autodetection With BeautifulSoup”
Skimming through my feeds a few minutes ago, I saw a post by Karen Coombs on the OCLC Developer blog about QR Code hacks to “mass generate QR Codes for all the web addresses of the applications in the [OCLC] Application Gallery”. The technique uses a bit of PHP to parse a feed from the … Continue reading “5 Minute Hack – QR Codes from an RSS Feed”
Looking over the UK Gov Transparency Board’s draft Public Data Principles, one of the suggested principles (#) proposes that: Public data underlying the Government’s own websites will be published in reusable form for others to use – anything published on Government websites should be available as data for others to reuse. Public bodies should not … Continue reading “Public Data Principles: RSS Autodiscovery on Government Department Websites?”
Which makes more sense to you as a call to action? Doing: Hence: RSS subscription hasn’t worked in the browser, or on the Windows desktop… are we trying to syndicate the wrong sort of content? Or using the wrong tone? Certainly, I suspect the RSS icon means little or nothing to most people; and even … Continue reading “RSS is Dead… Long Live RSS”
Having posted about Single Item RSS Feeds on WordPress blogs: RSS For the Content of This Page, it struck me that whilst this facility might be of interest to a very, very select few, most people would probably have the response: so what? To answer that question, it might help if I let you into … Continue reading “Single Page RSS Feeds – So What? So this…”
At Mash Oop North yesterday, Brian Kelly askd me how I got the “RSS for the content of this page” link onto my (hosted) WordPress blog: Clicking the link on an arbitrary blog post page turns up an RSS feed containing just a single item: the content of that blog post. The trick is quite … Continue reading “Single Item RSS Feeds on WordPress blogs: RSS For the Content of This Page”
OUseful.Info, the blog... 