All posts tagged 'atom'

FeedGrowler update: Custom icons

Feb 05 2009

I’ve just updated the code for FeedGrowler so that it supports custom icons for each feed that you are monitoring. All you need to do is include the full path to an icon/image file as the second argument when you call feedgrowler.php (or in your crontab).

Custom icons for a WordPress feed, and a Twitter search.

This version also supports Atom feeds (in addition to previous RSS 2.0 support).

Check out the latest FeedGrowler.

What is Web 2.0?

Aug 27 2007

My brother recently emailed me with the relatively simple question, “what exactly is Web 2.0?” I know a lot of other people out there have taken a stab at defining the damn thing, but I thought I’d take a shot as well. Here’s what I replied with:

It’s kind of a “catch-all” expression for a lot of the things that are going on online now. It generally refers to things like blogs and wikis and sites where the user is actually doing all the work (thus the common term “User-Generated Content” or UCG).

Just to confuse things, a lot of people have started referring to a specific design style and set of technologies as being “Web 2.0″ as well. This tends to include:

anything mobile

anything including mapping/geo

AJAX (a JavaScript technique to avoid page-refreshes and make things more responsive)

widgets (which are a whole other confusing mess of their own)

anything that uses RSS/Atom feeds

So yeah… it’s not easy to give a simple one-line answer, because it’s kinda all of those things and more. Some people argue that it’s a “revolution” of the way the web works, because “Web 1.0″ was all about companies or bigger groups publishing information online, whereas 2.0 is more about “the little guy” out there (users) controlling and publishing their own content (think YouTube, Flickr, etc). To me, it’s actually just an evolution though, a logical progression that just took a while because we had to figure out and refine the technologies to allow things to be easy enough for everyone to be involved.

That’s my take on it anyway

FeedBlendr Rocking Along

Nov 27 2006

I haven’t posted actively here about it, but FeedBlendr is the first of a series of “feed power-tools” that I’m developing and will eventually tie together. There is a version live and actively being used already, and I’ve just put out a beta version for testing with some major upgrades to the core feed engine. People are really loving this sort of thing, and I’ve got some great plans for more additions to the family soon.

Keep an eye out for more here and also over at the Blendr Blog.

FeedBlendr – Custom, combined news feeds for the masses

Jan 22 2006

I’ve just released a project I’ve been working on, called FeedBlendr. Basically it allows you to create custom feeds by combining any number of existing RSS or Atom files into a single one. It’s got some funky AJAX-checking on URLs, and soon it will have some slick integration with FeedBurner which should allow me to do some very cool things with it.

Check it out and see if it’s useful – hopefully when combined with some other things I’m working on it’ll allow you to mash feeds up just the way you want them.

LiveJournal Atom API Support

Oct 23 2005

As soon as I posted details of my new Atom API library to the SixApart ProNet mailing list, I got an email from their Manager of Platform Technology, and then another one from Anil Dash, both with hopes that I could include LiveJournal support.

I’m now in touch with one of their people who’s handling the actual implementation of their APIs, so hopefully I’ll be able to work out what’s going on and add LJ support to the code library soon. At the moment, my WSSE authentication is failing on the second request to their API, even though it’s working on the first one… curious.

PHP Atom API Code Released

Oct 16 2005

I’ve finally packaged up and released the PHP Atom API code I wrote as part of webpad. You can download it now and go crazy.

Blogging APIs Discussed

Jul 07 2004

I’ve just gotten around to getting a copy of a lengthy post that I made to the blosxom mailing list about the different types of Blogging APIs and how they apply. It covers the Blogger API (1.0 and 2.0), metaWeblogAPI, Atom and a bunch of stuff relating to blosxom.

It’s been archived as a feature article for posterity

blosxxxom – it’s not porn

Dec 18 2003

In amongst all the talk of the Atom API (which might one day actually be released and usable) and RSS, and with me working on some XML/XSL things at work, I realised that there’s probably another option entirely with blosxom as far as templates/flavours/themes goes, and it goes a little something like this;

Three Xs, therefore blosxxxom, that’s one for blosxom (Apple’s OSX), one for XML and one for XSL, which are the three technologies we’re dealing with here.

Install the theme plugin for blosxom and get it working (this plugin makes life much easier!)
Now create a new theme, with a suitable name (mine’s called ‘blosxxxom’ for the sake of the experiment, and it looks like this; page.blosxxxom. This theme should create a valid XML document from your posts.
Your XML output should refer to an XSL stylesheet, which will actually take care of doing the formatting, entirely client-side (style.xsl in my example theme file)
In the XSL file, just use normal XSL processing instructions to handle the output and presentation of the XML document into XHTML!
Point your browser to blosxom and tell it to use the flavour name that you used to create this theme, and you should be able to see what the output looks like. View the source of the document and you should see the plain XML produced by blosxom

Now, for a couple notes;

I made my content_type value in the theme text/xml, but this forced blosxom to encode special characters to be nice for me. I found that it was better to comment this section of the main CGI out so that I could drop the values in, and wrap them in the CDATA tag seen in the XML theme.
Rather than worry about what’s in the body much, I just wrapped things in a <![CDATA[ tag ]]> to be safe.
Mozilla doesn’t currently display my output properly – it’s not doing links (or any tags) properly, and it’s just showing them rather than interpreting them as HTML. Anyone got any ideas on this one?
There’s more to be done, but it’s a fun point to start at, and there’s no reason why you can’t add things like a COMMENTS element to your STORY node, or a KARMA, a META node with a series of elements – it’s pretty free-form if you’re only doing the XML for your own presentation needs!

Hope that’s inspired some people to try some things out that they might not have otherwise tried, and if nothing else, it just demonstrates how flexible blosxom really is!