Category: RSS Tools

I’m not entirely sure what to make of this myself, but I’m intrigued by Microsoft’s recent proposal for a new XML format called “Simple Sharing Extensions” (SSE). What SSE does is:

So what does this enable, at least in theory? I can see services such as del.icio.us and Furl being enabled among smaller groups, where folks could post their bookmarks and share them via SSE in more distributed way. RSS feed collections — through OPML files — could also be collectively managed and published. What one person posts or edits would be visible to others, and so on. Does this create a Wiki-like service out of the more-or-less single-author blogiverse?
Lots more information is on Microsoft’s Frequently Asked Questions for Simple Sharing Extensions (SSE) page. The format, currently at version 0.9, is available under a Creative Commons license to enable experimentation and alteration. Very “Web 2.0” of them, if you ask me.

Google Base, Google’s public-access database for whatever you’ve got, has at least one feature that’s interesting from this blog’s perspective: it accepts input in the most common RSS formats (RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0 and Atom 0.3 ). This according to the Google Base frequently asked questions.
Some blog tools — I’m thinking of WordPress in particular — use MySQL as a back end so already have the database aspect covered. But if you’re using an RSS format as a way to get your data, whatever it is, from application 1 to application 2, and there’s a need to have that data searchable, letting Google Base import the data seems like a viable solution.
For run-of-the-mill blog content, of course, this isn’t really an advantage; plenty of search engines, Google’s included, handle weblog content admirably. But for other stuff that’s publicized by RSS — bibliographic records of recently acquired books, new journal articles in a given subject area, and the like — there might be some interesting uses.
Anyone doing anything with this who wants to share? Drop me a line…

Tired of checking all your favorite search engines and aggregators for the latest news on a given topic? MonitorThis, a beta service, has a solution. Enter your search and it will provide you an OPML file (which you can then import into your aggregator or feedreader of choice). For aggregators that let you put a bunch of feeds into a single folder, I’d recommend doing so — MonitorThis gives you one feed for each service. One obvious way to improve the service would be to have MonitorThis perform the aggregation and provide a single feed for a user to subscribe to.

If a site provides an RSS feed, it’s easy to grab it for whatever purpose. (Perhaps too easy — as the blogger at RSS Specifications points out, echoing Tim Bray’s serious concerns.) But I digress.
What if the site you visit hasn’t created its own RSS feed yet?
Several tools exist to meet this purpose. One I’ve just been clued in to (thanks Nick) is called FeedTier. Give it a web page and it will do its best to parse the page into content and fluff and create an RSS feed of the content. In a few trials, it did pretty well, though it erred on the side of omitting good content rather than providing unwanted fluff.

Google has entered the RSS aggregator fray with a new beta product called Google Lens. I suppose the only surprise is that Google waited this long to release a product, even in beta. Weblogsinc offers a thorough review of the service.
Importing an OPML file is slow — I exported my roughly 90-feed subscription list from Bloglines and had Google Lens import it. Ten minutes later, 7 feeds show up in my subscribed list in Google Lens. A new one appears ever minute or two. My groupings were lost, but it seems Google doesn’t have the concept of “folders.”
I wonder when this and Google Mail will be integrated?

Kebberfegg is “a tool to help you generate large sets of keyword-based RSS feeds at one time.” What it does is quite simple, and in that lies its utility and cleverness. You enter a list of tags — user-supplied keywords to describe an RSS feed — and select one or more subject areas (Medical, News and News Search Engines, Technology, Web Search Engines, etc.). Kebberfegg translates those tags into URLs that work at all the various sites that employ tags (i.e., Technorati, Del.icio.us, Google Blog Search, Daypop, etc.).
The list is either displayed either as HTML or as an OPML file. The HTML is OK for a quick review of RSS feeds that you can select from and add to your favorite aggregator — an “Add to Yahoo!” link is provided for each feed. The OPML file is in many ways better, once you have honed your search, since you can import it directly into your aggregator of choice.
The list of sites that use some form of tagaloging is impressive in itself — over 15!

First, some background. The Open Archives Initiative is a project to share the resources held in digital libraries. It defines a format for describing information about digital resources — articles, images, sounds, recordings, or virtually anything else — so that the holdings of various repositories can be easily shared among institutions. There are dozens of repositories, and hundreds of thousands of resources, in OAI-compliant digital collections.
The Ockham Initiative builds tools based on the vast (and growing) universe of resources described by OAI. One of these resources, just released, is a search tool that provides an RSS feed of the search results in addition to the static view within the web interface.
As an example, here’s an RSS feed for an OAI search for RSS. Now this is a straight keyword search, so it pulls down some false positives (it turns out that “RSS” is a common acronym in other subject fields), but several clearly useful items are returned.
This is a great way to highlight otherwise hard-to-find resources on almost any topic.

Wally Grotophorst, Associate University Librarian at George Mason University’s library, posts a small Perl application that searches his Voyager online catalog for a specific Library of Congress call number and returns the results as an RSS feed. He has an example of this feed embedded on GMU’s Library Systems Office home page (appropriately, new books on programming).
Wally embeds the code in a page using Feed2JS — but it would also be accessible to anyone who wants to track new books available in GMU’s libraries by subscribing to the RSS feed. The feed has a simple URL structure — in the example he posts, it is http://breeze.gmu.edu/cgi-bin/newrss.pl?QA76.
The Perl code is pretty straightforward though, Wally says, not particularly well optimized as yet.

I’ve talked about lots of way libraries are making it possible to learn about new materials via RSS — but what if you’re an eager beaver and want to get on the waiting list the second the book is in the catalog, not when it’s ready for circulation?
The Paranoid Agnostic writes about Using RSS and Z39.50 to Find Books Your Library Doesn’t Have — Yet. in a recent post. He offers a Perl script that will query his library’s catalog (using Z39.50), find the most recently added items, and republish them via RSS. So he can then jump into the holds queue a bit ahead of the rest of the crowd.
He’s not offering the code to the public yet — but tells you to watch his RSS feed for details. The author promises it before the Access 2005 conference in mid-October.