I really have enjoyed using FeedForAll as a nice, customizable way to insert ANY RSS feed into a web page. I use it with some of my wordpress sites to get relevant news (relevant to the page in question) published without the toil of multiple daily updates. It’s a nice “set it and forget it” style tool.
Recently though I wanted to make some tweaks to the layout of some of my feeds:
In the last couple months I’ve been “farming out” several domains from the averyjparker.com site. I previously hosted my South Carolina Genealogy, North Carolina Genealogy and Online Radio TV sites all in the same virtual server as averyjparker.com. Well, I’ve noticed some strange behavior from Google Reader as a result…. read on.
I’ve just been using miro the last few days and I ought to mention it here. It’s a multiplatform program (windows/ mac/ linux) that let’s you subscribe to video feeds (much like a podcast catcher does for audio.) It also plays video within the player (you can organize your local video clips through it as well.) You can also search/download from youtube/etc. and you can add custom rss feeds such as those from tvrss.net for instance. It’s also bittorrent aware, so it can make use of bittorrent for downloading.
Yes, I’m still around and even though I haven’t posted, it’s been a busy few months. In some ways it’s been very nice to not force myself to read through a couple hundred news feeds a day to keep up with what’s out in the world. (Before Christmas I had started forcing myself to close the RSS reader after I “cleared” new stories and only check one or two times a day.) For a news junkie like me…. that was a bit difficult. But, right this minute I don’t know how many days it’s been SINCE I opened the news reader. Although I suspect I will in a day or two here, if for no other reason than to clean the slate… and maybe prune my feeds a bit. Some are just TOO frequent.
Let me take this opportunity to send a belated Happy New Year to anyone that’s wandering through.
Not too long ago there was an article about how people reveal too much about their lives in Google (or other web) calendars AND MAKE PUBLIC…. well I think this takes it a step further. Gmail let’s you access your mail through an RSS feed…. well there are online services that let you subscribe/watch feeds and apparently the feeds are put in the public access folder…. (oooops.) Be careful what you make public….
I saw this over the weekend and saw it as marginally more useful than traditional package tracking…. This is called packagemapping.com and is a mashup of package tracking and google maps. I don’t know, I mean, when I read that a package is in Cincinnati, I have a pretty good idea of WHERE that is, Knoxville, etc…. the idea of an RSS feed for your tracking number is interesting – that could be useful. (Although I wonder how quickly that feed would be updated.)
Some time back I complained about the Google indexing of the site after the Big Daddy upgrade. For a good while before Big Daddy, there was usually about a week delay between me posting and there being a full crawl of the posted page which was fairly impressive. Post Big-Daddy the coverage of even previously indexed articles was lousy for a good while. As recent as a week or two ago there were only 900-1100 pages (including feeds which are of arguable value for google to index (maybe I should block those to googlebot?…hmm…) Anyway, I just noticed that they’re up to 1600 pages (still including those rss feeds.) It seems spotty still, but they’ve finally got a post-big daddy article. The inurl feature is still annoyingly buggy though.
The computer security landscape today is such that pretty much ALL software, whether it’s Operating System, Office Suite, Web browser or device driver is at any given time “the weakest link”. One of my dreams as someone that does IT is “what IF there were an easy way to keep track of updates for software?” In fact, I would LOVE to see some sort of open source, rss based way of distributing news of updates. The way I see it working is as follows… The software writer has an rss feed reserved for product updates (one feed per product possibly?) This isn’t cluttered up with anything else, only things like…. Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0.6 – stability update – download link. Nice and simple, so that you could setup your feed reader to check the feeds of software that you use in your situation.
There were demonstrations of some nasty javascript attacks at Black Hat as well (as if the wireless driver issues wasn’t a big enough problem…) Javascript is a powerful language and can be used for many things, but in these demonstrations, it was used to track recently visited sites (by the browser victim) and identify the IP address of the victim on the internal LAN AND to alter firewall settings. From the way I read the article at the Security Fix – this is changing HARDWARE firewall settings.
Linux systems give you many possibilities and one of them is good scheduling (cron), another is good scripting capabilities. I’ve done things with linux fairly easily that with Windows would have been next to impossible and required me to download several other things to make it happen. Anyway, I recently saw mention of a linux, bash scripted podcatching client. Basically you tell what podcasts you subscribe to and it downloads them on a schedule. It reminded me of a couple scripts I’ve got running that do similar things, but not from a true rss/podcast feed.