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Tag Archives: RSS

Duke Gregarius Forever

I was poking around Gregarius' Trac installation when I ran across the funny screenshot that you can see to your left.
In retrospect, I am not sure what I was worried about in my earlier post about Gregarius development. I have all the time in the world…
Gregarius 0.6.0 - coming out when it is ready.

My Road to 0.6.0

I wanted to write something about how Gaim's communication problems might be solved by Sean Egan's new blog (which, at the time of writing, only has one post), but then I remembered that I have not written anything about Gregarius lately. Since the last post written about features in the next version of Gregarius is [...]

To the Designers of Iranian President Ahmadinejad's New Blog

I do not know who designed President Ahmadinejad's blog, but they did not do a good job.
The Good Stuff

Easy to remember URL.
Nice use of AJAX.

The Bad Stuff
Using Visual Studio .NET 7.1 and a table-based design to create the page. Speaking of which, the site should degrade gratefully if JavaScript is disabled.
Spelling errors. While I can [...]

Official Pitchfork RSS Feeds … Again

The official Pitchfork RSS feeds that I previously reported on are back. I assume that they are a permanent feature of the website, so I am yet again removing my feeds. Unlike the previous iteration of the Pitchfork "redesign," the website now has permalinks (which work!) and categories (which do not).

Finally: Official Pitchfork RSS Feeds

Pitchfork Media introduces official RSS feeds. Martey rejoices.

Now Valid Atom 1.0

Using Ben de Groot's drop-in replacement for wp-atom.php, I quickly and simply updated this blog's Atom 0.3 feed to Atom 1.0. If this negatively affects you, let me know. Otherwise, rejoice!

Updated Pitchfork News RSS

Tony Gambone's post about adapting my Pitchfork RSS feeds to work with their Best New Music section inspired me to redo some of the feeds. Since I previously changed the reviews feed to include an actual description of the review with its rating (thanks to Chris Thacker for suggesting this), it made sense to change [...]

Calvin & Hobbes RSS Redux

Previously, I wrote about the Calvin & Hobbes RSS feed I was scraping from UComics. Unfortunately, UComics replaced the image that was placed in the RSS feed with a Flash file. While I have updated the RSS feed, I am still a bit angry, since the Flash utilized on UComics is Flash 8. Since Flash [...]

Summary ➝ Full Text RSS

Annoyed at the fact that Technorati tags do not work when my posts are excerpted in RSS, I have switched back to full text in RSS.

Full Text ➝ Summary

In what is definitely the strangest way I have ever celebrated New Year's, I am changing the site's RSS feeds from full text to summary. If this causes a problem for anyone, let me know, and I will consider changing them back.

Deprecation!

Official RSS feeds from the Harvard Crimson and Haaretz means an end to screen-scraping.

Calvin and Hobbes RSS Feed

From Reasoner:
calvinandhobbes.com, the home of everyone�s favorite child-and-tiger duo, publishes a daily reprint of a classic Calvin and Hobbes strip. This part is reasonable. But here�s the rub: there�s no RSS feed!
Well, there is now: Calvin & Hobbes RSS Feed

Duplicate Items in Gregarius. Duplicate Items in Gregarius.

The problem with duplicate items showing up in Gregarius, which was troubling me earlier last month has started again. As I mentioned on the Gregarius developers' mailing list, the problem is ridiculously hard to debug, since it occurs in a seemingly random fashion, and is only happening to me.
Part of me thinks that this is [...]

I Want My eGovernment

I found this Washington Post article about the American military's attempts to entice recruits by allowing them to get rid of part of their service obligation by serving in the Peace Corps (assuming, of course, their application is accepted by the organization) interesting, especially since while opposition to it is just beginning, the program was [...]

Gregarius 0.5.0 Release

As previously stated, Gregarius is the online RSS aggregator that I use. Read about the new version on the Gregarius development blog.

Haaretz RSS is Broken (Again)

The Haaretz RSS feeds give me the most trouble out of all of my RSS feeds. They have not been working for the last few weeks, since Haaretz implemented site registration. While it occurs to me that I suggested such a move (oops), it makes generating RSS feeds much more difficult (the Perl script would [...]

WP Category Feeds Don't Play Nice with RSS Category

A cool thing about WordPress is that each category (you can see a list of them on the main page, in the sidebar at the right) has its own RSS feed, accessible by adding "/rss/" to its URL (For RSS 2.0 feeds, add "/rss2/". For Atom feeds, add "/atom/".). So if you were only interested [...]

Caught Up on News

I feel having no unread items a great accomplishment, especially considering that a number of days ago, there were about 4500 items. Almost 900 of them were unread. That means in about 48 hours, I have read, skimmed, or otherwise parsed almost 4000 different news articles.
Using Gregarius is a lot different than using Sage. Gregarius [...]

Official Harvard Crimson RSS Feeds

In response to a query about whether RSS feeds would be coming to The Crimson's website sometime before the Second Coming of Christ, I was informed that the Crimson already has two RSS feeds of its News and Sports sections, located at http://www.thecrimson.com/rss/news.xml and http://www.thecrimson.com/rss/sports.xml. Their feeds do not have more metadata than the scraped [...]

Choosing a Server-based News Aggregator

As I have previously mentioned, the Firefox extension Sage was my choice for reading RSS feeds. After reading Chris Gonyea's post on Feedlounge, a new web-based RSS feedreader (like Bloglines), I became intrigued about using an online aggregator. Since Feedlounge is still in private alpha testing and I was not really enthused about using Bloglines, [...]

Greasemonkey User Script for Washington Post RSS Query Strings

Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension that allows changing the behavior of websites through the addition of "user scripts." User scripts are also supported in the latest version of Opera, and in Internet Explorer through Trixie and the not-yet-released Turnabout. The user scripts I have installed include Jesse Ruderman's AutoLink (which creates hyperlinks in useful places), [...]

Upgraded to Wordpress 1.5.1

The RSS feeds are not working, but hopefully this post will fix it. I will probably have to make a comment to fix the comment feed. This is annoying, but life could be worse, I guess.
UPDATE: Uploaded a patch from the bug page previously linked to which should provide a more permanent solution.

Thinking Old Thoughts: Live Bookmarks and Sage, Again

Last night, I decided to switch all of my RSS feed bookmarks over to Live Bookmarks. I was then dismayed to find that clicking the "Check Feeds" button in Sage did not update my Live Bookmarks.
So dismayed that I began to look for another RSS reader. I had a few simple requirements:

open source
works on Windows [...]

Oh, Perl

I made a mistake with serious ramifications when I edited RSS.pm. Who knew a > could cause so much trouble?
1614c1614
< open(OUT,">$file") || croak "Cannot open file $file for write: $!";

> open(OUT,">:utf8",">$file") || croak "Cannot open file $file for write: $!";
The above code added a > to the beginning of each filename, [...]

Wide character in print at ./RSS.pm line 1606.

I receive six email messages each day with the above Perl error message. For some reason, the script that generates the Pitchfork Reviews RSS feed would generate that error. None of the other RSS scripts would generate the error, despite having highly similar code. The Mozilla Live Bookmarks Converter script on a Spanish technology site [...]

KCNA RSS Feeds

Renzomatic's comment reminded me that I had not read KCNA in a while. Recalling that creating a RSS feed for Haaretz increased the frequency with which I read the publication, I decided to do the same with KCNA. A quick search found a Bloglines feed that has not been updated in almost a month, and [...]

Harvard Intersession

Intersession is a weird time at Harvard. Unlike the normal amount of activity that characterizes student life here, there is nothing important (at least, nothing important in the academic sense) that needs to be done. As a result, I am trying to get various other stuff done.
The modified CSS for this blog's theme is still [...]

Pitchfork Returns

The news feed needed no modifications, the size of the script grabbing album reviews actually decreased substantially, and the "We Are the World" feed (now pointing at the Track Reviews section) uses a hack, but they all work.
Update: Official Pitchfork Feeds

Pitchfork Redesign

On Pitchfork's home page, Ryan Schreiber notes that the Pitchfork website is undergoing a redesign, which will be completed next Monday.
I've been designing the site myself since starting it up in 1995, purely out of necessity. It's been functional, but otherwise not much to look at. This time, we've actually hired an honest-to-god design team: [...]

Haaretz RSS is Fixed…Sort Of

Since I was tired of trying to figure out why the screen-scraping code refuses to work properly on this server, I made a semi-elaborate workaround. A shell script on this server calls a number of perl scripts on the FAS server, which does the "hard" work of scraping the Haaretz site. After this is finished, [...]

Dazed & Confused … About RSS

Not willing to wait until Christmas, I decided to look at the Ha'aretz RSS problem. My diagnosis of the problem: something is wrong with the Ha'aretz feeds, but I am not sure what it is.

I'm Sick

And I have been since Sunday, although I was feeling better on Monday. I have missed a number of classes so far this week, so I have a boatload of homework to catch up on. So I may not post until Christmas. This also means I may not have time to fix the Ha'aretz RSS [...]

Live Bookmarks in Sage 1.3

When I read on Erik's blog that Sage 1.3 was released with Live Bookmark support, I was ecstatic. I immediately converted all of my RSS feeds from normal bookmarks to Live Bookmarks (it was as simple as editing bookmarks.html - the file where Firefox stores your bookmarks - and changing all incidences of HREF to [...]

Ha'aretz RSS

Back before I consumed my news by RSS, I used to read Haaretz regularly. Now, I am lucky if I get to it once a month. In an attempt to change this, I have created four Haaretz RSS feeds.

Haaretz News
Haaretz Editorial & Op-Ed
Haaretz Features
Haaretz Business

RSS for the People

Yesterday, http://del.icio.us/hublicious and the Waxy.org link blog linked to my RSS directory, which contains the "bootleg" (their words, not mine; I contacted Pitchfork earlier this year about adding RSS feeds and received no response) Pitchfork RSS feeds. While I wish they linked to an actual post (instead of an directory listing), I am still happy [...]

Pitchfork RSS is Go!

Just finished a RSS 2.0 feed for Pitchfork's music news, as I talked about doing yesterday. I also changed all of the Crimson feeds to RSS 2.0; the change should take place when the feeds next update. The URL has also changed, but I made symbolic links in order to make it transparent.
Update: Official Pitchfork [...]

Decemberists Blog!

I was reading today's music news over at Pitchfork (regrettably, they never answered my query about RSS; I might want to look into doing a screen-scrape, as the only other RSS feed I could find seems to be broken, despite being active not two months ago). The top story is about the Decemberists' heading back [...]

RSS Pet Peeve

One of my bigger annoyances about RSS feeds is that many large media outlets feel it necessary to add query strings to the URLs in their RSS feeds. Among the offenders are the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Slate.
Why is this annoying? I use Sage, a Mozilla Firefox extension, as my RSS reader. [...]

New in Safari: RSS

Even though I do not own a Mac (too expensive!), I have to admit that Apple is more forward-looking than many other technology companies. Take the release schedules of their operating systems. Not is there a new release every few months (a page straight out of the open-source playbook), but the codenames are easy to [...]

Updated Crimson RSS Feeds

As first reported here. Updated files are available at the project page. Just in time for the Commencement coverage, which starts tomorrow.

Crimson RSS

When I first read this article, it simply confirmed what I already knew about the Berkman Center; it was an important part of the Internet landscape. At the time, I was attempting to build a RSS aggregator in C#, inspired by this article. Although I never finished that project, when I became to read both [...]

Projecting into the Future

For those of you interested in the status of the main website, the Projects page now exists. There is one project that I am working on, but since it is still not ready, its purpose will have to remain secret, for the time being. Let's just say it involves screen-scraping and RSS.