just a lowly edtech geek, mumble mumble university of calgary
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If you can read this, then the FeedBurner feed redirection is working properly. If your feed reader didn’t update your subscription automagically, the URL to the main feed for my blog is
http://www.darcynorman.net/feed
Hopefully things won’t get confused or lost in the shuffle…
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I got an email saying there was something wrong with my feed, as it’s apparently borking in Sage. I can’t seem to reproduce the error here (Sage is borking in general for me, and the feed validates and renders in the aggregators I’ve tested).
Anyone else having problems? Something I should be worried about? Maybe just [...]
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I’ve been experimenting with a copy of BlogBridge Feed Library, to test it out for possible deployment for use by students and faculty here at UCalgary. It’s not an official project, but I think it’s important enough to warrant investigation. What is BlogBridge Feed Library (BBFL)? From their website:
Feed Library (FL) creates a flexible web [...]
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I can’t believe it’s been a whole month since I started trying out Google Reader (GR) full time. I wanted to see if I could live in a browser-based aggregator, and was curious about how far it had come since the early days.
The short version is: it’s less efficient at reading boatloads of feeds and [...]
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I just enabled FeedBurner caching/serving of my blog’s RSS feed. The goal is to dramatically decrease the load on the server by redirecting RSS requests through FeedBurner’s server rather than mine (well, Dreamhost’s). Google just bought FeedBurner, so they’re not going anywhere. I’m trusting in Google not to do anything evil. I can always pull [...]
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I've been a raving, drooling BlogBridge fanboy for some time now. It's the best darned desktop aggregator I've used. That hasn't changed.
But, with all of the cool kids using Google Reader, I decided it's time to really give it a chance again. I dropped it like it's hot the last time I tried it because it doesn't have a feed star rating system, nor smart feeds. But, it's got a pretty flexible feed tagging system, which can be easily cajoled into performing these duties.
So, I just imported my feeds from BlogBridge to Google Reader via OPML, and I'll try giving it a shot for a week or so. I'm liking it after just a few minutes, but I'm not sure I can really switch away from BlogBridge.
I added a new tag called "5-stars" and tagged a bunch of feeds with it. By viewing new items in that tag, I can simulate the 5-star smart feed in BlogBridge. I can add 4-stars and 3-stars etc… as needed. Here's what my 5-stars tag looks like right now:
)
I'll keep trying it out for a week or so, and if I'm still using it then, I'll likely stick with it. So far, the single biggest reason to move to Google Reader is that it can actually parse the feed from OLDaily, which I've been missing for a couple of months now (BlogBridge has had trouble dealing with some of the slightly off-spec portions of that feed, but GR chews through it without complaining).
Update: Firefox has locked up on me twice now, forcing me to restart it. Safari is downright jittery when using Google Reader, so I'll have to deal with it. On the up side, synchronicity dropped this guide to "Getting Good with Google Reader" into my reader…
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I recorded my morning RSS checkin with BlogBridge 4.1 (well, I recorded it with iShowU, but the checkin was done using BlogBridge). The power of the feed star rating feature is really hard to describe – it’s much easier to just show it.
I wound up with a 16 minute recording, which is about how long it takes for me to check in on 443 feeds first thing in the morning. I took some time to describe the BlogBridge interface, but skimmed slightly more than usual so it probably worked out about the same duration.
I skipped reading many posts in detail, because that would make for an even more boring recording. The BlogBridge application was running on my second display, with the browser running on my main display – I switched regions for recording near the end (you can tell when).
Oh, and don’t read too much into the star ratings. I can’t rate every feed as being 5-stars, otherwise the ratings become rather useless. There are a lot of great feeds that I subscribe to but have left them unrated (or under-rated). That’s OK. My 5-star feeds of trusted people help me filter everything so I don’t miss anything.
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Since we switched to Drupal to power the department website recently, we're able to have RSS feeds to keep up to date on stuff as it gets added to the site. It hadn't been exposed previously, but I just took a few minutes to expose 3 of the "main" feeds for the site.
I also used my blog within the site to describe what I'd done. My first non-hello-world blog post on our site (although only marginally non-hello-world, but still, it counts).
Here's the goods on our main feeds:
It's the first time I've had RSS available from my employer's website. It's a small thing, but a huge shift.
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There are posters and stickers all over campus right now, pointing people to the new UNow.ca site. The goal is to provide easy ways for people to keep up to date on news and events on campus. There's even a downloadable widget available.
But, this widget isn't a Widget. It's a Windows .exe application. Leaving us MacOSX users out in the dark.
Except, we already have Widgets, and they're easy to use and create. I recreated the basic functionality of the Windows widget in under 2 minutes, including the time to find, download, and figure out the configuration of the Widget. Here's how:
UCalgary Dashboard Widget
I could have taken some time to customize a new Widget based on RSSBean, including UCalgary colours and graphics, but that isn't necessary. And might have taken an extra 10 minutes. Also, this Widget is free, required no committees, and involves no licensing fees or software maintenance contracts with consultants (I'm not sure if any of those apply to the Windows widget).
Update: I took a few minutes to whip up a more robust Widget. It's based on the News Reader Widget, and all I did was replace the default feeds. I've added a few of the Gauntlet student paper feeds as well, but 2 of them are currently invalid RSS so they won't display. I'll leave them in, just in case the Gauntlet folks fix the feeds. Here's a screenshot, and the downloadable version is attached to this post.
UCalgary News Reader Widget
By the way, by FAR the longest part of this process was just finding RSS feeds for stuff on campus. Hopefully that will change as more sites get using Drupal (and the template is fixed to expose RSS feeds).
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I’m trying to pick up a Newton Messagepad 2100 (still by far the best PDA ever created) via eBay, and was trying to find a way to track the item I’ve bid on via RSS so I can keep up to date on the auction.
But, eBay doesn’t offer an RSS feed for item auction notification? That seems like a HUGE oversight! It’s such a natural fit – I use RSS for notification from other things like Subversion, Basecamp, Tracks, etc… eBay would just fit into that. Every time something changes on an item, or on my watchlist, or my bidlist, there should be an entry in an RSS feed for me to monitor.
Or, have I just missed something obvious?
Update: Wow. Is eBay ever poorly designed. Waaay too cluttered. Stunningly ugly. It’s still got text rendered as images for some of the key areas, which is a decent enough option to make sure it looks good everywhere, but they did the rendering on some fugly system that looks worse than what Safari does with real text. If you’re going to go to the effort of pre-rendering text so it looks good, at least antialias it so it doesn’t look like it was coughed up by Windows 3.1!
And, sure, the eBay app does a heck of a lot of stuff, but the controls have been totally NASCARed, looking like the design team sat in a room thinking up all kinds of widgets that absolutely had to be less than one click away. Why not use some intelligent javascript/xhtml to selectively display these widgets? Things like the auction tracking options could be disclosed when you click a “Track this auction” button, which would provide you with the email, IM, and perhaps RSS auction tracking controls.
There’s a lot of required functionality, but 99% of it does NOT have to be only 1 click away. Also, it doesn’t appear as though much filtering has gone on for search result controls. It’s possible to sort lists by the Picture column. What does that mean? How do you sort by a picture? By dimensions? Number of pixels? Average brightness of the image? If it’s a “only show items with a picture” control, that’s what it should be designed to do, not simply repurposing a columnar sort.
Man. The more time I spend in eBay, the more my eyes bleed, and my brain aches. This is one of the biggest/most successful sites in the history of the internet, and they obviously don’t care much about the actual experience of regular users. I’m sure that once you take the 3-day “eBay Power Users” workshop, the cluttered UI is much more desirable. But for the rest of us, it just hurts…
Case in point: Change the email address for your eBay account. You have to provide a credit card to verify something (what? that you’re an actual person? that you can afford to use eBay?), and then it sends an email with a verification link. That’s all that should be required. Prove that the email address is really associated with someone that has control over this eBay account. Why on earth do they invoke a credit card validation? I’m borrowing Janice’s eBay account, and provided MY visa for verification, so it has nothing to do with testing identity. Silliness. The process involved several very clumsy steps that didn’t need to be implemented that badly. The company has revenue that equals many small countries, but they apparently/effectively don’t spend much on visible portions of the app…
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