Category
rss
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feeddemon, feeds, rss
Hit the Panic Button
02.15.08 | Permalink | 2 CommentsIf you’ve been reading feeds for a while, chances are you’ve experienced feed overload. It happens to the best of us. Perhaps we take a break for a day or two, and when we come back to our aggregator we find hundreds of unread items waiting for us. @ Nick Bradbury: Feed Overload? Hit the Panic Button!
I love the concept behind FeedDemon’s panic button feature. It sweeps through old posts marking them read, leaving in its wake a more manageable pile to read through. The concept here being that in general, with feeds, you don’t have to read everything. But a feature request for Nick and Greg: I wish there were an option to configure how it behaves– I want to be able to define which folders are included / excluded from the sweep. True, in most cases you don’t have to read everything, but in certain important circumstances, we really do care to read absolutely every blog post / news item on a specific topic. Update: someone else matking this feature request. Curious if there are any plans to add this in a point release?
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microformats, rss
Debugging hCalendar Feed
I’m back from vacation and catching up on things. Charlie Wood asks:
Since you were talking about microformats at the Gilbane show, I’m hoping you can help me. I’ve been banging my head against hCalendar support in some RSS feeds all day, and I’m hoping you can help me see something obvious that I’m blind to. There’s a demo feed that is valid RSS, and has everything (I think) needed for hCalendar support, but when I run it through Technorati’s Events Feed Service I get back a calendar with no events. What am I missing?
I recalled a time when I tried to do this as well— and remembered discovering the service only handles XHTML as it uses Brian Suda’s X2V, which he describes as “a BETA implementation of an XSLT file to transform and hCa* encoded XHTML file into the corresponding vCard/iCalendar file.” I verified that this still is the case, but considering Technorati’s continuing support of open microformats standards, I imagine that’ll change.
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cms, rss, simplicity, usability
Importance of Subtlety
It’s a small detail, but a significant one. A couple months ago, Microsoft agreed to standardize on a Mozilla’s RSS icon. It is significant because the letters “RSS†are meaningless to most people, and it’s a move in the direction of making the technology more accessible.Â
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