RSS – OUseful.Info, the blog…

Even Though RSS Never Went Away, Could It Be Coming Back as a Facebook Sinker?

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 of it, are full of reports and recipes around various RSS experiments and doodles, although in more recent years I haven’t really been using RSS as a creative medium that much, if at all.

But today I noticed this on the official Facebook developer blog: Publishing Instant Articles Directly From Your Content Management System [Instant Article docs]. Or more specifically, this:

When publishers get started with Instant Articles, they provide an RSS feed of their articles to Facebook, a format that most Content Management Systems already support. Once this RSS feed is set up, Instant Articles automatically loads new stories as soon as they are published to the publisher’s website and apps. Updates and corrections are also automatically captured via the RSS feed so that breaking news remains up to date.

So… Facebook will use RSS to synch content into Facebook from publishers’ CMS’.

Depending on the agreement Facebook has with the publishers, it may require that those feeds are private, rather than public, feeds that sink the the content directly into Facebook.

But I wonder, will it also start sinking content from other independent publishers into the Facebook platform via those open feeds, providing even less reason for Facebook users to go elsewhere as it drops bits of content from the open web into closed, personal Facebook News Feeds? Hmmm…

There seems to be another sort of a grab for attention going on too:

Each Instant Article is associated with the URL where the web version is hosted on the publisher’s website. This means that Instant Articles are open and compatible with all of the ways that people share links around the web today:

When a friend or page you follow shares a link in your News Feed, we check to see if there is an Instant Article associated with that URL. If so, you will see it as an Instant Article. If not, it will open on the web browser.

When you share an Instant Article on Facebook or using email, SMS, or Twitter, you are sharing the link to the publisher website so anyone can open the article no matter what platform they use.

Associating each Instant Article with a URL makes it easy for publishers to adopt Instant Articles without changing their publishing workflows and means that people can read and share articles without thinking about the platform or technology behind the scenes.

Something like this maybe?

Which is to say, this?

Or maybe not. Maybe there is some enlightened self interest in this, and perhaps Facebook will see a reason to start letting its content out via open syndication formats, like RSS.

Or maybe RSS will end up sinking the Facebook platform, by allowing Facebook users to go off the platform but still accept content from it?

Whatever the case, as Facebook becomes a set of social platform companies rather than a single platform company, I wonder: will it have an open standard, feed based syndication bus to help content flow within and around those companies? Even if that content is locked inside the confines of a Facebook-parent-company-as-web attention wall?

PS So the ‘related content’ feature on my WordPress blog associates this post with an earlier one: Is Facebook Stifling the Free Flow of Information?, which it seems was lamenting an earlier decision by Facebook to disable the import of content into Facebook using RSS…?! What goes around, comes around, it seems?!

Broken RSS, and a Comment About Blog Comments

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 from non-standard character encodings, or incorrectly encoded item.description text. Links/URLs were occasionally missing or pointless (e.g. pointing to the root domain from which the feed was served, rather than anything relating to the particular feed item). Generating sensible URLs for feed items could also turn up issues with the way pages were served, eg on sites where session variables or other arbitrary keys were required.

The reason the problems were allowed to slip through was because of the context in which the feeds were published. Eg request goes in for ‘we need a feed’; developer adds feed, runs it through validator, job done.

But the job isn’t done, just as the job isn’t done when a someone publishes a public/open data set but doesn’t do anything more than that, or someone publishes an OER and considers that now it’s public, it’s useful.

I spend way too much of my time trying to glue things together, and finding more often than not that they don’t play nice. For example, Guardian datastore data often falls just short of being easily combined with other data sets, even other Guardian datastore published datasets, though this is getting better all the time as workflows are tweaked ever so slightly…

One possible solution, where things are published /with the intentions that others re* them/ is for the publisher to demonstrate a simple remix or combination with at least one other information source.

If you publish an RSS feed, demonstrate one or two off-the-shelf ways of consuming it. This is what any user is likely to try first, so save them the grief of finding out it doesnlt work by making sure it does.

When releasing data, if you’re publishing data relating to countries, for example, see if you can use one of the many services for generating map mashups to map the data. IF you can’t, what is it in or missing from your data that’s making it hard to do.

If you’re publishing an OER, big or little, /how/ might you see it being remixed/reused with other OERs. If your content includes lots of diagrams, how easy is it for someone else to reuse that image (with attribution and in compliance with any other license requirements) in their own presentation. If they want to embed it in a blog post (generating not only more views of the content, but also trackable data that you can measure) just try giving a few examples of embedded use. If it’s hard for use as publisher to do the baby steps, why should anyone else bother? (Saying you’re publishing something because you don’t know how other people will use it is not the issue… if it’s hard to do the easy stuff, very few people will bother. The publisher needs to demonstrate the easy stuff, and see it as a way of getting a couple of pragmatic tests implemented as well as a quick tutorial in getting started with re*ing the warez.

PS one of the things I’m considering doing more next year is comment on other people’s posts directly. The danger with taking such an approach is that those responses get lost (i.e. I can’t easily search for them, and as the major user of this blog as personal notebook, searching over things I’ve previously written is an important feature). Of course, I could blog a response to other peoples’ posts, but this fractures the conversation somewhat. I also know from experience that whilst folk may read comments on a blog post, they may not always click through on trackbacked links, if such links exist.

So, I’m considering adding a new category to this blog – CommentedElsewhere – that captures the longer comments as reposts here, with a link back to the original comment, and the original context. Good plan, or not? Will it just make OUseful.info even harder to follow? Should I set-up a separate ‘OUsefulComments” blog, repost substantial comments there and then maybe draw a feed into the sidebar here? Your comments would be appreciated…:-)

Single Page RSS Feeds – So What? So this…

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 a little secret: I’m not really that into content, open educational or otherwise. What I am interested in is how content can flow around the web, and how it can be re-presented in different ways and different places around the web by different people, all pulling on the same source.

So if we consider single page RSS feeds, what this means is that I can re-present the content of any of my WordPress blogged posts anywhere that accepts RSS. So for example, I could view just that post as a Wordle generated word cloud, or subscribe to the RSS version of single blog post on a Netvibes page (maybe along with other related posts):

and view the post in that location:

(At the moment not many other platforms appear to offer single page RSS feeds. I was hopeful that the Guardian might, because they have quite a well developed feed platform, but I couldn’t find a way to grab a single page feed trivially from a page URI:-(

To see why that might be useful, you need to know another of my little secrets. I don’t really think of RSS feeds being used to transport new content, such as the latest posts from the many blogs I still subscribe to. For sure, they can be used for that purpose, and a great many RSS readers are set up to accommodate that sort of use (only showing you feed items you haven’t already read, for example), but that is a special case. The more general case is simply that feeds are used to transport content that has quite a simple structure around the web. And this content might be fixed, static, immutable. That is, the content of the feed might never change once the feed has been created, as in the case of OpenLearn course unit full content RSS feeds.

AS AN ASIDE… I generally think of RSS feeds as providing a way of transporting simple content “items” around where each item has a quite simple structure:

If you think of a blog post or news article as an item, the title is hopefully obvious (the title of the post/article), the description is the content “body” of the item (e.g. the text content of the news article) and the link is the URL of where that post or article can be found on the web. The other elements are optional: what I refer to as annotations correspond to things like latitude and longitude co-ordinates that can be used add geographical information to the item so that it can b plotted on a map for example; and what I term a payload would be something like an audio file that gets delivered when you subscribe to an RSS podcast feed from somewhere like iTunes or IT Conversations.

Once you start viewing RSS feeds as a general transport mechanism, then you start to see the world in a slightly different way… So for example: the a href=”https://ouseful.wordpress.com/2009/07/08/single-item-rss-feeds-on-wordpress-blogs-rss-for-the-content-of-this-page/”>Single Item RSS Feeds post reveals how to create single item RSS feeds from the URL of a blog post hosted on WordPress. Now if I bookmark a series of WordPress hosted blog posts to somewhere like the delicious.com social bookmarking site, and tag them all in the same way, I can get an RSS feed out that contains a list of posts that can be obtained in XML form (that is, as single item RSS feeds).

Hmmm….

So maybe if I find a series of posts from WordPress blogs all over the world on a particular topic, I can create my own custom RSS feed of those posts that I can use as the basis of a reading list, for example, or to feed a Netvibes page on a particular topic, or even to feed an RSS2PDF service*?

* these needn’t be really horrible and divisive… For example, the Feedjournal service will take in an RSS feed and produce a rather nice looking newspaper version of your feed… ;-)

Now it just so happens, I’ve prepared one of these earlier. In particular, I’ve posted a small collection of blog posts on the topic of WordPress from a variety of (WordPress) blogs at http://delicious.com/psychemedia/singlefeeddemo:

You’ll notice that I can get an RSS feed of this list out too: from http://delicious.com/rss/psychemedia/singlefeeddemo in fact.

Now the links I’ve bookmarked are links to the original HTML page version of each blog post; but all it takes is the simple matter of rewriting those URLs by adding ?feed=rss2&withoutcomments=1 on to the end of them to get the RSS version of each post.

Hmm… Yahoo Pipes, where are you? Let’s just pull in the RSS feed of those WordPress hosted blog post bookmarks, and rewrite the URLs to their single item RSS feed equivalent:

Now we can loop through each of those items, and replace it with the actual content of those single item RSS feeds:

The output of the pipe is then a real RSS feed that contains items that correspond to the content of WordPress blog posts that I have bookmarked on delicious.

Now just think about this for a moment: most RSS feeds are transitory – the content that appears in the feed on a blog post is a reverse chronological list of the 10 or 20 most recent items on the blog (or in a particular category on a particular blog). The feed we are pulling in to this pipe may be fixed (e.g. if we create a list of bookmarks tagged in a particular way, and then don’t tag any more bookmarks in that way) and used to create a very specific a list of blog posts from all over the web. By rewriting the URLs to get the RSS version of each bookmarked post, we can create our own full RSS feed of those list items. (Actually, that isn’t quite true – if the blog is configured to only emit partial RSS feeds, we’ll only get a partial version of a post, typically the first sentence or two.)

(Pipes’ homepages only show preview versions of a feed description, even if the full description is available.)

Just to recap, here’s the whole pipe:

We take in a list of bookmarked URLs that correspond to bookmarked WordPress blog posts, and generate the single item RSS feed URL for each post. We then use these URLs to pull in the content for each post, and this create out own, full content custom RSS feed. The pipe itself emits RSS, so w can take the RSS feed from the pipe and feed it into any service that consumes RSS, such as Feedjournal:

Alternatively, I could subscribe to the pipe’s output feed in somewhere like Netvibes (or even a VLE) and then view the contents of my customised feed in that location. Or I could import that feed into a new WordPress blog. And so on…

Now of course I appreciate that many people will still say: so what? But it’s a start… a small step towards a world in which I can declare an arbitrary list of links to content spread all over the web and then pull it into a single location where I can consume it, or process it further, such as converting it into a PDF (which is a preferred way of consuming large chunks of content for many people) or even delivering it in drip feed fashion over an extended period of time as a serialised RSS feed, for example.

An exercise for the interested reader: clone the pipe and modify it so that it will accept as user input an RSS URL so that the pipe can be used to consume any social bookmarking service RSS feed.

Note: as the pipe stands, the order of items in the feed will correspond to the order in which they were bookmarked. It is possible to tag each bookmark with its desired position in the RSS feed, but that is a rather more advanced topic. (See a soon to be(?!)* deprecated solution to that problem here: Ordered Lists of Links from delicious Using Yahoo Pipes.

* If @hapdaniel hasn’t already published a more elegant solution to this problem using YQL Execute somewhere, I’ll try to do so when I get a chance…

PS ho hum, maybe we don’t need RSS after all: Instapaper, Del.icio.us, Yahoo! Pipes and being Slack (via @mediaczar)

Single Item RSS Feeds on WordPress blogs: RSS For the Content of This Page

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 simple, and relies on a couple of things.

The first thing you need to know is that you can get a single item RSS feed containing an RSS version of a single WordPress blog page by adding ?feed=rss2&withoutcomments=1 to the end of the page URL.

So for example, the RSS version of the post that lives here:
http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2009/07/06/enthusiastic-amateurs-and-overcoming-institutional-inertia/
on Brian’s blog can be found here:
http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2009/07/06/enthusiastic-amateurs-and-overcoming-institutional-inertia/?feed=rss2&withoutcomments=1

The second thing you need to be aware of is how wb browsers handle links that appear in a web page, and in particular how they handle relative links. Relative links are most easily thought of as links in a web page that do not specify the domain of the link. So for example, on this blog, the domain is ouseful.wordpress.com. Links to posts on OUseful.info look something like the following:

https://ouseful.wordpress.com/2009/07/07/mash-oop-north-pipes-mashup-by-way-of-an-apology/

An absolute way of writing this as a link in a web page would be to write the link in an HTML anchor tag as follows:

<a href=”https://ouseful.wordpress.com/2009/07/07/mash-oop-north-pipes-mashup-by-way-of-an-apology/”>

That is, we specify the domain (https://ouseful.wordpress.com) and the path to the resource as well as the resource page itself.

A relative link would be written as follows:

<a href=”2009/07/07/mash-oop-north-pipes-mashup-by-way-of-an-apology/”>

with the browser filling in the gaps using the domain that the page itself is served from (https://ouseful.wordpress.com).

(For a basic grounding in how browsers handle relative links, see Absolute vs. Relative Paths/Links. If you want the hardcore standards stuff, you should read the original RFC: RFC 1808: Relative Uniform Resource Locators.)

One further thing to know about relative links is that in you use something of the form ?foo=bar in the link (e.g. <a href=”?foo=bar”>), the browser will add the argument to the end of the current page’s URL. So if the page mypage.html being served from http://example.com contains the relative link <a href=”?foo=bar”> that link will actually point to http://example.com/mypage.html?foo=bar.

Putting these two things together (how to create a URI for the single item RSS feed version of a post, and how to construct relative URIs), we are now in a position to add an ‘RSS version of this page’ link to a WordPress blog sidebar.

So, to get the single item RSS feed link, go to the Widgets settings area of your WordPress blog and add a text widget as follows: