All posts tagged ‘RSS’

File Under: Web Services
Nov
1
2011

Google Reader Gets a ‘+1’ Makeover

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Google Reader's new, minimalist interface.

Google Reader, the company’s popular RSS feed reading application, is the latest Google app to integrate with the Google Plus social network. Google Reader, which hasn’t been updated in over a year, also received a facelift to match the new, minimalist interface that’s already available for Google Apps, Gmail and other Google services.

The new Google Plus functionality replaces Google Reader’s built-in sharing tools. The old Google Reader “Like” button has been replaced with a “+1″ button, and the “Share” and “Share with Note” features have been replaced with an option to share items with your Google Plus circles.

The sharing changes are good news if you’ve embraced Google Plus. They’re bad news if you haven’t because Google hasn’t just integrated Google Plus into Reader, it’s removed Reader’s functionality in favor of Google Plus.

Google Reader no longer offers friending, following, shared items or comments. Google’s message is pretty simple: The conversation that used to happen on Google Reader will now happen on Google Plus.

The Google Blog says that killing off Google Reader’s original sharing features “helps [Google] focus on fewer areas, and build an even better experience across all of Google.” In the Google universe all sharing will now happen on Google Plus. Google Plus’ primacy is also reflected in the new Reader interface where the “+1″ button is prominently located right next to the star button, while the Twitter and Facebook sharing tools are buried out of sight in the “Send to” drop-down menu.

It’s a smart move for Google — Google Plus needs more content and shared items from Reader means more content on Google Plus — but one that may leave some users in the lurch.

If you were a heavy user of Google Reader’s sharing capabilities, using it, for example, to follow friends and comment on their shared items, the revamped design is going to make you unhappy. To make matters worse Google does not offer an easy way to migrate your data over to Google Plus. That data — your list of friends and followers — is simply gone. Also gone is the list of all the items you ever shared or liked via Google Reader.

There is an option to export your shared and liked items, along with a list of friends and followers, on Google Reader’s settings page, but it comes with a big catch — the export format. There are two options for exporting your old sharing items, a JSON Activity Stream or a custom Google Reader JSON format. Neither format will do you much good. One was made up for Google Reader and the other is not widely used, meaning there isn’t much software out there that can read your exported data. Google likes to pride itself on its data portability, but in this case there’s nowhere to take your data, making Google’s export efforts disingenuous at best.

Of course Google Reader still exports OPML files, so it’s not hard to dump your subscriptions and move to another feed reader if the revamped Google Reader leaves you wanting. In fact, Google even acknowledges that many users may want to do this, reminding you that “if you decide that the product is no longer for you, then please do take advantage of Reader’s subscription export feature.” In other words, if you aren’t jumping on the Google Plus train, Google is no longer interested in you.

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File Under: Blog Publishing, Identity, Programming, Social, Web Services
Feb
3
2011

A DIY Data Manifesto

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The word “server” is enough to send all but the hardiest nerds scurrying for cover.

The word usually conjures images of vast, complex data farms, databases and massive infrastructures. True, servers are all those things — but at a more basic level, they’re just like your desktop PC.

Running a server is no more difficult than starting Windows on your desktop. That’s the message Dave Winer, forefather of blogging and creator of RSS, is trying to get across with his EC2 for Poets project. The name comes from Amazon’s EC2 service and classes common in liberal arts colleges, like programming for poets or computer science for poets. The theme of such classes is that anyone — even a poet — can learn technology.

Winer wants to demystify the server. “Engineers sometimes mystify what they do, as a form of job security,” writes Winer, “I prefer to make light of it… it was easy for me, why shouldn’t it be easy for everyone?”

To show you just how easy it is to set up and run a server, Winer has put together an easy-to-follow tutorial so you too can set up a Windows-based server running in the cloud. Winer uses Amazon’s EC2 service. For a few dollars a month, Winer’s tutorial can have just about anyone up and running with their own server.

In that sense Winer’s EC2 for Poets if already a success, but education and empowerment aren’t Winer’s only goals. “I think it’s important to bust the mystique of servers,” says Winer, “it’s essential if we’re going to break free of the ‘corporate blogging silos.’”

The corporate blogging silos Winer is thinking of are services like Twitter and Facebook. Both have been instrumental in the growth of the web, they make it easy for anyone publish. But they also suffer denial of service attacks, government shutdowns and growing pains, centralized services like Twitter and Facebook are vulnerable. Services wrapped up in a single company are also vulnerable to market whims, Geocities is gone, FriendFeed languishes at Facebook and Yahoo is planning to sell Delicious. A centralized web is brittle web, one that can make our data, our communications tools disappear tomorrow.

But the web will likely never be completely free of centralized services and Winer recognizes that. Most people will still choose convenience over freedom. Twitter’s user interface is simple, easy to use and works on half a dozen devices.

Winer doesn’t believe everyone will want to be part of the distributed web, just the dedicated. But he does believe there are more people who would choose a DIY path if they realized it wasn’t that difficult.

Winer isn’t the only one who believes the future of the web will be distributed systems that aren’t controlled by any single corporation or technology platform. Microformats founder Tantek Çelik is also working on a distributed publishing system that seeks to retain all the cool features of the social web, but remove the centralized bottleneck.

But to be free of corporate blogging silos and centralized services the web will need an army of distributed servers run by hobbyists, not just tech-savvy web admins, but ordinary people who love the web and want to experiment.

So while you can get your EC2 server up and running today — and even play around with Winer’s River2 news aggregator — the real goal is further down the road. Winer’s vision is a distributed web where everything is loosely coupled. “For example,” Winer writes, “the roads I drive on with my car are loosely-coupled from the car. I might drive a SmartCar, a Toyota or a BMW. No matter what car I choose I am free to drive on the Cross-Bronx Expressway, Sixth Avenue or the Bay Bridge.”

Winer wants to start by creating a loosely coupled, distributed microblogging service like Twitter. “I’m pretty sure we know how to create a micro-blogging community with open formats and protocols and no central point of failure,” he writes on his blog.

For Winer that means decoupling the act of writing from the act of publishing. The idea isn’t to create an open alternative to Twitter, it’s to remove the need to use Twitter for writing on Twitter. Instead you write with the tools of your choice and publish to your own server.

If everyone publishes first to their own server there’s no single point of failure. There’s no fail whale, and no company owns your data. Once the content is on your server you can then push it on to wherever you’d like — Twitter, Tumblr, WordPress of whatever the site du jour is ten years from now.

The glue that holds this vision together is RSS. Winer sees RSS as the ideal broadcast mechanism for the distributed web and in fact he’s already using it — Winer has an RSS feed of links that are then pushed on to Twitter. No matter what tool he uses to publish a link, it’s gathered up into a single RSS feed and pushed on to Twitter.

Dave Winer's RSS-centric vision of a distributed web image by dave winer via flickr

Winer will be first to admit that a distributed system like he imagines is still a little ways off, but as they say, the longest journey starts with a single step. For Winer EC2 for Poets is part of that first step. If you’ve never set up your own server, don’t even really totally understand what a server is, well, time to find out. Head on over to the EC2 for Poets site and you’ll have a server up and running fifteen minutes from now. The distributed web awaits you.

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File Under: Browsers, Web Basics
Jan
19
2011

Firefox 4 Ditches the RSS Button, Here’s how to get it Back

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That dark spot no one clicks? Yes, that's the RSS button

Firefox 4 is nearly complete. The next version of the venerable web browser introduces dozens of new features — everything from built-in bookmark syncing to hardware acceleration — but it also removes a few noteworthy features as well.

The now-departed status bar — which has been replaced by the add-ons bar — isn’t the only thing that’s been relegated to dustbin in Firefox 4. The familiar RSS icon in the URL bar is gone as well.

RSS has a long, complicated history and, despite its usefulness to the web at large, it just never caught on with mainstream users. RSS may power much of the web behind the scenes, but from a user’s point of view it remains an awkward tool with a terrible user interface. As Firefox developer Leslie Orchard points out, clicking the old Firefox RSS button would give you “a plainly-styled version of what you were probably already looking at on a site.” Of course, if you knew what you were doing, you could quickly either create a live bookmark or add the RSS feed to a feed reader. But for the uninitiated, the UI was confusing enough that Orchard says “some people would think they broke the page when the button was clicked on accident.”

According to Mozilla’s user study the RSS icon was clicked by a scant 3 percent of users. The only thing more neglected is the scroll left button, which is only present on very wide websites. With no one using the button, Firefox designers decided to remove it from the increasingly cluttered URL bar.

Cue the outrage and pleading for its return.

But just because the RSS button has lost its former position in the toolbar doesn’t mean you can’t easily subscribe to RSS feeds in Firefox 4. There’s a new menu option under the Bookmarks menu that will offer to “Subscribe to this page” and you can also add a subscribe button to your toolbar if you like. Just head to the customize option under the View menu and you’ll see a new toolbar button for RSS feed. Drag that button to the toolbar and you’ve restored the RSS button.

Given that seemingly no one used to original button, removing it hardly seems a bad thing, especially when it’s easy to get it back.

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File Under: Software, Web Apps
May
28
2010

Google Reader Dumps Offline Access, Old Browsers

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Google Reader is losing some features. As of June 1, Reader will no longer offer offline access and users of older browsers will see a notice suggesting they upgrade to a newer browser with support for current web standards.

The browser support change isn’t all that surprising; Google Docs made a similar change earlier this year. The main target of the policy change is Internet Explorer 6. But lest you think Google Reader is picking on Microsoft, the announcement also targets the company’s own Chrome 3, which is barely six months old.

Other browsers no longer supported include Firefox 1 and 2.0, and Safari 2.0 and 3.0.

According Mihai Parparita, a technical lead for Google Reader, the new browser requirements will enable Google Reader to spend more time on new features. “Reader is a cutting-edge web application, and this will allow us to spend our time improving Reader instead of fixing issues with antiquated browsers,” he writes on the official Reader blog.

Older web browsers aren’t the only thing Reader is leaving behind. Also like Google Docs, Reader will be ditching the Gears-powered offline support (launched back in 2007). However, unlike Google Docs, Reader won’t be replacing Gears with HTML5-based offline tools. With Reader, Google is simply dropping offline support for the time being.

Instead, the Google Reader blog suggests downloading desktop software that syncs to Reader and downloads your items. While that’s certainly one way to sync feeds and read them offline, the main point of the orginal offline support was that it worked in the browser without the need for extra desktop apps.

The Reader team claims that only a small percentage of users ever took advantage of the offline support. But for those that did, there’s really no substitute.

The good news is that the Reader team claims this bit of “Spring cleaning” will pave the way for new features and improvements in Google Reader. Without the need to support older browsers, Reader will presumably be able to take advantage of things like HTML5 and CSS 3, though so far Google has given no hints as to what any new features might entail.

In the meantime, you’ll have to switch to a syncing app if you want to read Google Reader items without a web connection. Some of the more popular ones for the iPhone/iPod are Feeds, Byline and Reeder. For the desktop, there’s FeedDemon, NetNewsWire and RSS Bandit. For Android, we like NewsRob and Feedr. Let us know about your favorite in the comments.

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File Under: Blog Publishing, Web Standards
Feb
15
2010

RSS for Beginners

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Have you ever noticed those inviting orange buttons on some web pages, or spotted the odd link pitching an “RSS feed”? If you’ve ever clicked one out of curiosity, and then scratched your head at the unformatted gobbledygook in your web browser, you’ve seen an RSS file.

xml.gif

What is it really for, anyway? Two things: RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and Atom are two specialized formats that create what’s commonly called a news feed, or just feed. A feed is an easy way for sites to share headlines and stories so that you can read them without having to visit two dozen different web pages everyday.

In other words, web builders use feeds to dish out fresh news and content from their websites and web surfers can use feed applications to collect custom-tailored selections of their favorite websites to be read at their leisure.


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File Under: Blog Publishing, Multimedia, Web Standards
Feb
15
2010

Use Media RSS

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With the explosive growth of podcasting, publishers are including more multimedia in their RSS feeds than ever. While the method of including media content in an RSS feed with enclosures is fairly well known, there are other methods available for including media content in RSS feeds, one of which is Media RSS.

Media RSS is an RSS module that was created to expand the way that multimedia content could be included in an RSS feed.

Originally authored by Yahoo! to improve media enclosures in RSS and also allow the submission of media content to its search engine via RSS, the development of Media RSS has since been opened up to the RSS community through the rss-media mailing list. Full disclosure: I’m also one of the people at Yahoo! who worked on the creation of Media RSS.

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File Under: Software & Tools
Oct
9
2008

Quit Googling Yourself, Use RSS Instead

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Google is adding RSS to search result pages allows you to plug the feed into a newsreader and get notified of new listings automatically. The initial report came from a very brief mention in an October 1 Wall Street Journal article by Katherine Boehret and confirmed Wednesday by Search Engine Land. Google is bound to satisfy a bunch of eager marketing managers and even a few vain bloggers by adding RSS to their search results. Oh, OK, it will be useful to the rest of us simply concerned with tracking internet footprints too. Previously, if you wanted an RSS feed composed of Google search results all about your glorious self, you’d have to set up a feed on feedmysearch.com or resort to Microsoft’s okay Live.com coverage. The update to search results pages should happen “soon” according to a Google spokesperson’s e-mail to SearchEngineLand. It’s been a wanted feature for many, particularly search engine optimizers and those competing for Google’s top position on search terms. Being in the top position on Google Search typically translates to easy cash via free advertising and gross amounts of traffic. For the rest of us, the feature adds some utility to your most common search results. These would be the ones you used to have Google Alerts for. For example, your name, favorite band, company, etc… We have Google Alerts up now for e-mail alerts on the keyword “Webmonkey” and it gives us a chance to see who is linking to us and why. It’s also a good way to see what people are saying what about us behind our backs (we’re looking at you, Steven B. Smithely. That’s right, we’re watching you). If the RSS feeds were available now, we’d set up our newsreader to look out for “google search rss” and get the scoop as soon as the new feature was available. For now, we’ll be repeatedly pressing the reload button on search results in breathless anticipation. [via ReadWriteWeb> SearchEngineLand]
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File Under: Blog Publishing, Programming
Aug
27
2008

What’s SUP?: FriendFeed’s Modest RSS Proposal

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The RSS wizards at FriendFeed (a social news aggregation site) are proposing a new way to distribute and fetch RSS feeds faster. The proposal is a simple one: publishers provide a centralized RSS to inform readers which feeds have been been updated since their last visit. The benefit? Your news fast.

FriendFeed’s Gary Burd and Paul Buchheit (both former Googlers) want to download your RSS feeds as rapidly as they can without taking down your servers in the process. They’ve proposed a workaround which will spare your servers but still fetch your site’s RSS feed faster. The proposed platform: Simple Update Protocol (SUP).

Think of it this way: When you go to the movies, you don’t go around to each theater to see which movies are playing and when; it would take all of your time and effort running around from theater to theater. Instead, you check the kiosk out front.

Your blog publishing system provides a RSS kiosk, or ping feed, to let FriendFeed (and potential RSS readers) know when and what has been updated since its last visit. Friendfeed doesn’t have to go theater to theater to see which movie is playing. It also checks all RSSs in a domain at once, eliminating the need to download each one separately. Polling is less frequent, but more accurate. By cutting out a lot of wasted data transfer, it reduces the load and gets the relevant information directly.

How do you implement such a thing? A modified link attribute in your RSS or Atom feed informs RSS readers, like Friendfeed, the ping feed is available. Under SUP, publishers would automatically generate ping feeds using the timestamps in their database.

The benefits, according to Buchheit, include:

* Simple to implement. Most sites can add support with only few lines of code if their database already stores timestamps.
* Works over HTTP, so it’s very easy to publish and consume.
* Cacheable. A SUP feed can be generated by a cron job and served from a static text file or from memcached.
* Compact. Updates can be about 21 bytes each. (8 bytes with gzip encoding)
* Does not expose usernames or secret feed urls (such as Google Reader Shared Items feeds)

FriendFeed is already test-casing; its SUP Feed is already online. An example of implementation is available using Buchheit’s FriendFeed RSS link. Sample code under the Apache license and project information is available via the SUP Google Code page.

Will it catch on? It’s intuitive and pretty simple in a “duh, why didn’t I think of it first” way. If other RSS readers and providers (such as WordPress, Twitter, Google Reader and FeedBurner) join FriendFeed and implement the idea, it means less used bandwidth for readers and publishers and faster RSS access all around. Sounds like a win-win to me.

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File Under: Web Basics
Apr
18
2008

Easily Bypass Password-Protection in RSS and Atom Feeds

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freemyfeed.jpgGoogle Reader is one of our favorite ways to consume news, it’s web-based, accessible on any computer and offers a variety of nice sharing, bookmarking and other features. However Reader is not without its drawbacks, including one very big one: it can’t handle password-protected news feeds.

Google Reader isn’t the only online feed reader that doesn’t support password protected RSS and Atom feeds, which is why a new web service, FreeMyFeed was born. FreeMyFeed offers to handle the authenticated as an intermediary step so you can view your password protected feeds in any reader.

FreeMyFeed takes your username and password for a protected feed and then parses it and generates a new feed sans protection. From there all you need to do is add the new feed to Google Reader or whatever you favorite news feed service happens to be. Reportedly FreeMyFeed doesn’t store any password info on the site, which means it probably encrypts your login and encodes it into the URL.

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File Under: Web Basics
Mar
19
2008

Netvibes Ginger Edition out of Beta

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Netvibes is doing its darnedest to be more than just a Web 2.0 portal, more than an online feed reader — although it does those things quite well, with Ajaxy drag-and-drop and a sleek usability. They name their versions after seasoning agents: this new one is called Ginger, an upgrade from Coriander. The transition isn’t too jarring when the end-user clicks the Upgrade Me To Ginger link, but behind the scenes there’s some cool stuff going on. With the new edition, Netvibes has introduced a Universal Widget API, a cross-platform specification for widgets that work on Netvibes, iGoogle, Mac’s Dashboard, Opera, and “soon” Facebook, Ning, and the OpenSocial constellation of social networking applications. In practice, there are not very many UWA widgets to choose from yet; you can’t just grab your favorite Dashboard thingy and put it on your Netvibes page. It will be lovely if the cross-platform API takes off, but that remains to be seen. CrutchfieldIn addition to their customized start pages, users are now encouraged to create “universes,” public collections of feeds and widgets. This is a move into Facebook/MySpace territory; public universes so far include ones from People Weekly and Crutchfield car audio. You can do things like add Crutchfield as a friend and follow its every move on Netvibes. Netvibes Universes have a ways to go.
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