| One Stop Surfing |
I've been getting frustrated by visiting a bunch of websites that have ten stories, but where eight of them are identical and it's the two that are unique to each site that keep me coming.
So I've been following this site:
http://www.originalsignal.com/
for the last little while. It collects the RSS feeds of all the similar sites and presents them all in an easy to digest page and highlights the updates since your last visit (which is good for people like me who visit them throughout the day because it's better than working).
I first found Original Signal when it just had gadgets but it has just added Buzz and Tech. I'm hoping they add Science and Gaming signals soon. |
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| My Reading List |
I use a server based RSS aggregator to read most of the websites that I follow. It was already online, so I decided to link it up and make my Reading List publicly available (link also available in the sidebar). It's a pretty assorted collection containing content about technology, games, online business, art, mcgill improv people, mac os, java, Vancouver, and live searches for content of interest to me.
If you want to see the internet through my eyes (and/or you're bored) take a peek. It's a 'river of news' style aggregator (like blogfather Dave Winer loves), with the newest stuff coming in at the top and pushing everything down. It gets updated every hour (on the :40's). I don't really read everything that comes through. There's a lot of skimming involved to find the entries that I care about enough to invest some brainpower towards.
It's using a hacked up copy of an older version of the feed on feeds package, which isn't perfect, but it works well enough for me. |
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| RSSMailingList: a free combination RSS feed creator and mailing list manager |
For the Sillysoft Newsletter I wanted an email mailing list that also had an RSS feed of itself. This way users could subscribe whichever way they want. I didn't find anything that did what I wanted so I created my own using PHP and a MySQL database.
I mentioned it on the macsb mailing list offering to share my code. A few people seemed interested, so I cleaned it up a bunch and hereby release it as RSSMailingList!
If you want a combination RSS feed generator and mailing list manager then check it out. |
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| Create RSS feeds from PHP |
RSS is an exciting, yet not quite new standard that lets you publish news from your page for other pages to syndicate. FeedCreator.class.php provides an easy way to create RSS feeds from within PHP using easy to use classes. |
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| Bloglines the server side RSS aggregator |
So in response to Mariana's weirdo comment I would like to point out that anyone looking for a free and easy RSS reader should check out Bloglines. It's web based so you can use it from anywhere.
What's an RSS reader you may ask? Well, it turns out that most all blogs and news websites publish a computer readable RSS feed of their contents. You can then subscribe to feeds using your RSS reader of choice.
Why is this useful? It lets you easily keep track of lots of different websites in one central place. Your RSS reader will automatically show you what sites have new content and display or link to it.
So if you read lots of different blogs I advise you to look into an RSS reader. If you prefer a non-web based one there are plenty out there, just do a search. |
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| How to get Movable Type to output RSS with HTML |
For a while now I have been annoyed with the RSS feeds coming from some people who run Movable Type. Their feeds didn't include any HTML, so it looks like garbage in a web based RSS reader. The trick is that Movable Type actually outputs 2 different RSS feeds, one with HTML and one without. For unknown reasons (probably ideological ones) only the non-HTML one gets advertised. So all I had to do was change the URL I subscribe to to get HTML. For example...
non-HTML: http://www.tangmonkey.com/blogs/music/index.rdf
yes-HTML: http://www.tangmonkey.com/blogs/music/index.xml
Huzzah! |
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