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…

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 something intermittent? Something related to Feedburner?

Also, this is posted using the new ecto 3 alpha - I haven’t used a standalone blogging app in years, but if this works, it’s about as close to the perfect app as I can figure. Even offers searching and sorting of Categories, and resizing/uploading of images…

Update: Cool. It worked. I’ll be buying a license for ecto 3. Haven’t used it since back in the Kung Fu days (wasn’t the original version of the app called KungLog or something?)

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 based structure to showcase Feeds, Reading Lists and Podcasts to employees in your company, or members of your organization. It will be the ’store’ where users can browse and search for recommendations of content to read with their Aggregators. And, here’s the important point: these are recommendations by people in your organization for people in your organization.

It’s a directory. Of feeds. That can be distributed across the internets, and organized in any fashion. It’s been running the Expert Guides section of Blogbridge’s website for several months, and has provided a pretty cool resource for finding and subscribing to feeds. It’s very cool, in that it doesn’t try to do too much. It doesn’t pretend to be an aggregator. It’s just a directory. It provides friendly ways to preview feeds right in the directory, and to subscribe to groups of feeds via OPML representing folders within the directory. Aggregation is left to the individual’s taste in applications. Any feed reader that groks OPML will play nicely with the great directory OPML features. And any app can, of course, subscribe to the individual feeds.

It’s a really great directory application, and has been running well in production on BlogBridge’s server for some time now. But it needs some love if it’s going to thrive in an academic environment.

Currently, there is a small group of trusted stewards, or “Experts” that are given folders of feeds to manage. That’s fine when there may be a dozen or two contributing “Experts” - but how does that scale to a class with 20, 60, or 300 students? How does that scale to an institutional level with 30,000 students and hundreds of faculty playing in the pool? How do you refine control so that a student can add their feeds to the appropriate places, without having to go through a central gatekeeper?

Read the rest of this entry »

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 items. But, the always-on, available-anywhere design of GR makes it worthwhile.

The long version is, well, longer. I still much of the niceties of BlogBridge (BB). Things like having a “photo gallery” view, for viewing images in feeds (I subscribe to a fair number of Flickr tag feeds, so this is quite handy). I’ve got a workaround for the star ratings that BB uses - I’ve created two “tags” in GR: “5-stars” and “4-stars” and have applied them to appropriate feeds. That definitely helps prioritize reading important stuff from all of my feeds/tags without having to hunt for them. Because it’s browser based, I can use native del.icio.us interfaces, so that feature from BB isn’t missed. The most annoying thing I’ve found with GR isn’t directly GR’s fault. I have to do a fair bit of clicking to get through all of my tags. I need to do some more work to add appropriate feeds to “5-stars”, “4-stars”, “3-stars” etc… so I can focus on levels of importance rather than subjects.

I do like the “trends” view in GR. Not because it is helpful in organizing or accessing information (it isn’t), but it’s kinda interesting in its own right. Here’s a screenshot as of 5 minutes ago:

I’m a bit surprised at just how much I’m reading. Almost 18,000 items in a month? I’d have never guessed that. Actually, almost half of that isn’t really “reading” per se, but “viewing”. Photos from Flickr. Which is why the “photo gallery” view would be great.

There are some shortcomings.

1. I’ve got a nagging feeling that by using GR, I am continuing to “feed the beast” - by teaching Google about what interests me, and by providing guidance about relationships between feeds and items.
2. There isn’t a “blogroll” or live OPML view of my tags/folders. BlogBridge lets me publish tags as live OPML documents, which is how my edublogs directory is managed. There isn’t currently a way to replicate that from within GR. Yes, I could periodically export a tag as an OPML file, and post that somewhere. Not the same.

All in all, I think I’ll keep using Google Reader for now. I’ll have to figure out how to reconcile my feed subscriptions with BB so that I can keep maintaining the edublogs directory, but that will work itself out somehow.

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 the plug on them and take control of the feed if needed.

Another bonus (for me, anyway) is an estimate of stats - how many folks are subscribed to the feed. That’s always been a total crap shoot, with nothing more than edumacated guesses and darkened dartboards providing numbers. Now I might get a better idea, and am braced for the emphatic “5 subscribers” that it will be flashing at me shortly.

I apologize in advance for any RSS noise as this kicks in. Hopefully it won’t republish all posts in the feed, but if it does, “mark all as read” or in Google Reader parlance “shift+a”.

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… 

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.

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:

• All content
• Workshops
• Resources
• All blog posts

It's the first time I've had RSS available from my employer's website. It's a small thing, but a huge shift.

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:

1. Download RSSBean from Apple's Dashboard Downloads site.
2. Configure it with this RSS feed, taken from the new UofCZine site (which is what I think the Windows widget is using as at least part of its data source).
3. There is no step 3.

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).

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…

Guesstimating the size of an RSS feed audience is always a huge shot in the dark, but sometimes I get curious about how many people subscribe to this silly blog. If I was willing to surrender my feeds to Feedburner, I could get some pretty detailed stats. But, I don’t want to hand over that.

So, I thought about digging into the accesslog that’s stored in Drupal’s database. I’ve set my copy to store access logs for the past 2 weeks, and it dutifully records which pages are viewed, as well as the IP address the request came from. It’s just a subset of a typical webserver log, so there isn’t any privacy issue here (if you’re really worried about being tracked online, you’re already using an anonymizing proxy…)

A quick MySQL poke-and-test session, and I came up with a quick query that spits out a WAG about the number of feed subscribers. It’s not accurate, because people might be accessing the feed from multiple locations (recording different IP addresses), and services like Bloglines might be sending many readers in under the cover of a single IP address (at the moment, Bloglines claims 334 folks are subscribing to various feeds published by this blog). Also, it makes no distinction between bots (Google and friends) and actual human-proxying-agents. Whatever.

Here’s my brain-dead-simple query. It just looks for all requests for feed-related paths, and counts up the number of unique IP addresses.

select count(distinct hostname) from accesslog where path like '%/feed%'

YMMV. IANAP. YHBH. Wait. Not the last one.

According to my Drupal log, there have been 955 unique IP addresses requesting the RSS/atom feeds on this blog in the last 2 weeks. That may be higher or lower than the number of actual humans reading the blog. Still, ballpark order-of-magnitude WAG at roughly 1,000. That kind of boggles my mind.

Update: Oops. My rudimentary query forgot subscribers of “rss.xml” - which turned out to be more than the various /feed subscribers! Also, thanks to a tip from Bér Kessels, I added the cool XStatistics module, which takes care of the guesswork. According to it, there are 2062 subscribers to the various feeds on this blog. Wow.

BlogBridge, my most favoritest RSS aggregator app, was bumped to version 3.0 this week. Lots and lots of small improvements, but most of the big changes are under the hood. Performance rocks (it totally doesn’t feel like a Java app - it feels like any other native application), and things like syncing feeds and preferences with the BlogBridge service (for accessing from other machines, or publishing guides as OPML, or just as backup) is nearly instantaneous.

It’s also got support for notifications - using Growl on MacOSX and whatevertheheck Windows uses on that side of the fence. Handy. Now… If only they’d get that open-link-in-background-browser-window thing working, so my browser wouldn’t pop to the front every time I open a link…

I totally recommend BlogBridge to anyone looking for a way to easily/effectively manage a LOT of RSS feeds. I’d simply drown under my subscriptions without things like star ratings and smart feeds. And the built-in OPML/reading-list feature is simply killer.

They’ve released regular installer versions for MacOSX and Windows, as well as versions for Linux and Java WebStart (if you use the WebStart version, it can auto-update for you).

If you’ve already used BlogBridge, be sure to sync all of your guides with the (free) BlogBridge service before upgrading, as they’ve optimized the local database file format, which may blow away your previous database. Syncing seems quite bulletproof, so it’s a good habit to get into anyway…

I’m toying with the idea of doing a screencast to show just how quickly I can check all of my feeds. I can seriously check all 400+ feeds in about 10 minutes (or less).

I’ve been struggling with how to best manage the constant flow of non-critical information that flows around me. RSS feeds. Email. Technorati references. Podcasts. The list goes on. I am going to try an experiment for a couple of weeks, prompted by a reinstall of the OS on my Powerbook.

Yesterday, before leaving the office, I fired up Software Update to grab the latest 10.4.6 update on both my desktop and ‘book. Came in this morning to find the G5 ready to go, but the Powerbook was sitting with an “Installer failed” type of message. I rebooted both, but the ‘book wouldn’t come back. So, I nuked it and reinstalled after wiping the drive.

I’m taking this opportunity to rework how I do things. I’m leaving my RSS client Blogbridge over on the desktop machine. No RSS at home, or on the weekends. I think that will make it easier, since 99+% of the stuff that comes in via RSS really can wait until Monday AM, and it doesn’t need to steal time from the family.

The Powerbook will have the Developer tools (XCode, Subversion, etc…) as well as email and iChat (and browsers, of course) but no RSS. I’ll see how that goes.

Also, Blogbridge runs WAAAY faster on the quad G5 than on the aging Powerbook.

The BlogBridge folks rolled out a cool update to their RSS reader. The biggest addition is a very handy search tool, strongly inspired by Spotlight. Here’s a sample of a quick search to find any posts in any of my feeds which have been published since yesterday, and contain the word “podcasting”:

Now that’s just plain cool. It was technically possible by creating SmartFeeds in previous versions, but that was a clunky process that wasn’t well suited to ad-hoc on-the-fly searches. They’ve been working on some UI refinements to remove or rethink or hide the geekier things, which is a good thing.

I’d actually tried to switch back to NetNewsWire (with the latest beta release last week) and lasted about 2 days. They’re getting closer, in that they’re trying to do stuff with “attention”, and have syncing with the NewsGator service, but it’s just not to the level that BlogBridge has it. I can chew through my feeds soooo much faster in BlogBridge than any other reader I’ve tried - and I’ve tried a LOT of readers.

The one thing that NNW does much better than BlogBridge is the ability to load pages in a browser in the background. BlogBridge insists on bringing the browser to the front, so every link clicked to view a post in my browser must be followed immediately with a command+tab to get back to BlogBridge so I can keep plowing through unread items. It’s a pretty minor nit, though.

It’s a really good upgrade to BlogBridge. I had a minor issue where it wasn’t happy with my database files or something, but nuking that and restoring from my copy on the BlogBridge server solved that.

I’ve been giving some thought to the “school aggregator” that grew out of the discussions around Northern Voice. What kinds of things will it have to be able to do? Types of interfaces? Explicit and implicit data and metadata? How to manage caching of items, and manage displaying the potentially hundreds of thousands of bits of content that will be pulled into the system over the course of a year? And how to present cohorts/classes/years within this? How to allow students to add multiple data sources, and tag it for use in whatever class context(s)? How to let students and teachers mine the aggregated data to get what they need/want? Lots of stuff to chew on here.

Brian’s students have been off to a great start in their AggRSSive project - and they have plans to make it even more kick-ass. Tyler’s described plans were pretty much spot-on to what is needed. Not complete, but a darned good start. Can’t wait to get my hands on that…

At Northern Voice, someone from a genetic engineering organization (didn’t catch the name of the guy or the agency - I was sure it was Genentech, but others were sure it wasn’t) was describing a mind-blowing RSS-based workflow that he’s using to tie research, automated lab results, individual publishing, and lots of other sources together into one interface. They have some AI ninjas crunching everything to make sure it gets to where it needs to go, and to start making connections between stuff. He mentioned that as a result of this AI-based aggregation, they were able to make a completely new discovery that linked two previously unrelated topics (proteomics and something else…) Very cool stuff. We should see if they can give a tour, and if they’d be willing to share with the rest of the class.

In the meantime, I just took a quick romp through SourceForge to see what else has been done in the area. Not a lot, unfortunately. But, I did come across a rather cool server-side aggregator that I hadn’t heard of before. sux0r appears initially to behave like others (Feed on Feeds, etc…) but - it doesn’t have categories. Well, it does, but not in the traditional sense. You create a set of tags, and then proceed to flag aggregated posts as belonging to any of these tags. After a while, the bayesian magic has enough to chew on, and it begins to automatically tag incoming posts. Latent semantic analysis to apply folksonomies?

Anyway, although the concept is cool, and will form an important part of EduGlu, the current incarnation in sux0r won’t scale to thousands of feeds in thousands of categories, over dozens of years.

OK. Enough thinking about this stuff for now. Back to work…