Tag Archives ⇒ RSS

Hey y’all, let’s start a blog!

January 2, 2019
· Martin Kelley

Okay, it’s not specif­i­cal­ly Quak­er – it’s not actu­al­ly at all Quak­er – but I like the think­ing behind Why You Should Start a Blog in 2019 by Ernie Smith in Tedi­um. Long-time read­ers will know I usu­al­ly have at least a post a year in which I blog about blog­ging. This time I’ll let Ernie talk about the ratio­nales and needs for a blog­ging culture:

We could use a lit­tle momen­tum. A decade ago, as I was get­ting start­ed with this, plat­forms like Face­book took advan­tage of our desire for a sim­pler option and used it to silo up our data, lock and key. We lost an excit­ing blo­gos­phere in the midst of all of this — and the first step towards get­ting it back is by real­iz­ing that own­er­ship should be a first class cit­i­zen, whether or not we even­tu­al­ly give away those words, sell them, or keep them close to our chest. A blog that you own, that you pay the host­ing bill for? That’s the first step — a form of expres­sion that should be the future (because after all, how awe­some is it that any­one can own a print­ing press?!?) but some­how became the past.

I haven’t been updat­ing this Quak­er Dai­ly Read as much as I’d like over the last month or so. That’s part­ly the result of an ear­ly Decem­ber vaca­tion and then the chaos of late Decem­ber hol­i­days with the fam­i­ly. I’m sure I’ve missed some great posts that I should have shared but there’s also days when I run through my RSS col­lec­tion (I use Feed­ly to fol­low about a hun­dred or so blogs) and find noth­ing par­tic­u­lar­ly fresh or inter­est­ing. I’d love to see more of us trad­ing the Face­book dopamine-rush imme­di­a­cy for some more thought­ful writ­ing and conversation.

https://​tedi​um​.co/​2​0​1​9​/​0​1​/​0​1​/​2​0​1​9​-​i​n​d​e​p​e​n​d​e​n​t​-​b​l​o​g​g​i​n​g​-​t​r​e​n​ds/

Retooling after Google Reader

July 16, 2013
· Martin Kelley

I must admit I’ve been thrown off my blog read­ing by the demise of Google Read­er, closed July 1 with only a few months warn­ing. I remem­ber when Google’s was the newest mem­ber of the RSS read­ing options. Its sim­ple inter­face and relatively-solid per­for­mance even­tu­al­ly won me over and its com­peti­tors grad­u­al­ly stopped inno­vat­ing and final­ly closed. 

In the last few months oth­er ser­vices have tak­en up the chal­lenge of replac­ing Read­er, but it’s been a chaot­ic process and a gam­ble which would be rolled out in time. One of my go-to pro­grams, Reed­er, now works for the phone but not the Mac app. It runs off of the Feed­ly ser­vice, which I now use in the brows­er to access my feeds. 

I rely on these blog read­ing ser­vices to keep track of over 100 blogs. RSS may not be sexy enough to be a mass-market ser­vice but for those of us whose tem­per­me­nts or hob­bies run toward cura­tion, it’s an essen­tial tool. As the new sys­tems mature, I hope to keep up with my Quak­erquak­er read­ing more thoroughly. 

Pen​n​char​ter​.com Media Pages

May 18, 2008
· Martin Kelley

William Penn Charter School Media PagesOne ele­ment of a gen­er­al social media con­sul­tan­cy project I’ve under­tak­en with Philadel­phi­a’s William Penn Char­ter school is a dynam­ic media page. They had col­lect­ed a large num­ber of pho­tos, movies and pod­cast inter­views, but the media page on their site was sta­t­ic and with­out pic­tures. I worked with them to come up with media poli­cies and then built a media site that auto­mat­i­cal­ly dis­plays the lat­est Flickr sets and Youtube videos, all laid out attrac­tive­ly with CSS. The Flickr part was com­pli­cat­ed by the fact that Flickr does­n’t pro­duce feeds of sets and this required access to it’s API and fair­ly exten­sive Yahoo Pipes manip­u­la­tion. The orig­i­nal pod­casts were just uploaded MP3 files and I worked to col­lect them togeth­er via Odeo (host­ing) and Feed­burn­er (feed pub­lish­ing), which then pro­vides RSS and iTunes sup­port. The actu­al con­tent for the page is col­lect­ed togeth­er on the Mar​tinkel​ley​.com serv­er and embed­ded into the Penn Char­ter media pages via javascript. Oth­er work with Penn Char­ter includes Google Ana­lyt­ics and Dreamweaver support. 

Update: Pen­n­Char­ter redesigned their web­site in August 2009 and the Media Page is unavailable.

Client Testimonial:

“Mar­tin has worked for our school to inte­grate Web 2.0 technologies
into our com­mu­ni­ca­tion mate­ri­als. Mar­tin is highly-personable and his
is an expert in cur­rent tech­no­log­i­cal approach­es. This is a hard match
to find in con­sul­tants.” April 30, 2009

Michael Moul­ton, Tech­nol­o­gy Direc­tor, William Penn Char­ter School.
Hired Mar­tin as a IT Con­sul­tant in 2007, and hired Mar­tin more than once.
Top qual­i­ties: Per­son­able, Expert, High Integrity.

Working with Pipes #2: A DIY personalized community with Del​.icio​.us, Flickr and Google Blog Search

March 17, 2007
· Martin Kelley

It’s
not nec­es­sary to devel­op your own Web 2.0 soft­ware infra­struc­ture to
cre­ate an inde­pen­dent Web 2.0‑powered com­mu­ni­ty online. It’s far
sim­pler to set a stan­dard for your com­mu­ni­ty to use on exisiting
net­works and then to use Yahoo Pipes to pull it together.

I decid­ed on about a dozen cat­e­gories to use with my DIY blog aggre­ga­tor (Quak­erQuak­er).
I only want to pull in posts that are being gen­er­at­ed for my site by
com­mu­ni­ty mem­bers so we use a com­mu­ni­ty iden­ti­fi­er, a unique prefix
that isn’t like­ly to be used by others. 

This post will show you how to pull in tagged feeds from three sources: the Del​.icio​.us social book­mark­ing sys­tem, the Flickr pho­to shar­ing site and Google Blog Search.

Step 1: Pick a community designator

I’ve been using the com­mu­ni­ty name fol­lowed by a dot. The prefix
goes in front of cat­e­go­ry descrip­tion to make a set of unique tags for
the aggre­ga­tor. When some­one wants to add some­thing for the site they
tag it with this “community.category” tag. In my exam­ple, when someone
wants to list a new Quak­er blog they use “quak​er​.blog”, “quak­er” being
the com­mu­ni­ty name, “blog” being the cat­e­go­ry name for the “New Blogs”
page.

Step 2: Collect the community prefix and category name in Pipes


You begin by going into Pipes and pulling over two text inputs: one for
the com­mu­ni­ty pre­fix, the oth­er for the spe­cif­ic category.

Step 3: Construct these into tags

blank
Now use the “String Con­cate­na­tion” mod­ule to turn this into the
“community.category” mod­el. The com­mu­ni­ty input goes into the top slot,
a dot is the sec­ond slot and the cat­e­go­ry input goes into the last slot.

blank Now, when you have a tag in Flickr with a dot in it, Flickr auto­mat­i­cal­ly removes it in the resul­tant RSS feed.
So with Flickr you want your tag to be “com­mu­ni­ty­cat­e­go­ry” with­out a
dot. Sim­ple enough: just pull anoth­er “String Con­cate­na­tion” module
onto your Pipes work space. It should look the same except that it
won’t have the mid­dle slot with the dot.

Step 4: Turn these tags into RSS URLs

blank
Pull three “URL­Builder” mod­ules into Pipes, one for each of the
ser­vices we’re going to query. For the Base, use the non-tag specific
part of the URL that each ser­vice uses for its RSS feeds. Here they are:

Del​.icio​.us http://​del​.icio​.us/​r​s​s​/​tag
Flickr http://​api​.flickr​.com/​s​e​r​v​i​c​e​s​/​f​e​eds
Google Blog Search http://​blogsearch​.google​.com

Under path ele­ments, put the cor­rect tag: for Del​.icio​.us and Google it should be the community.category tag, for Flickr the dot-less com­mu­ni­ty­cat­e­go­ry tag.

Step 5: Fetch and Dedupe

blank Fetch is the Pipes mod­ule that pulls in URLs and out­puts RSS feeds. It can also com­bine them. Send each URLBuilder out­put into the same Fetch routine.

Since it’s pos­si­ble that you’ll might have dupli­cate posts, use the “Unique” mod­ule to dedu­pli­cate entries by URL.
Through a lit­tle tri­al and error I’ve deter­mined that in cas­es of
dupli­cates, feeds low­er in the Fetch list trump those high­er. In the
actu­al Pipe pow­er­ing my aggre­ga­tor I pull a sec­ond Del​.icio​.us feed: my
own. I have that as the last entry in the Fetch list so that I can
per­son­al­ly over­ride every oth­er input.

Step 6: Sort by Date

blank
With exper­i­men­ta­tion it seems like Pipes orders the out­put entries by
descend­ing date, which is prob­a­bly what you want. But I want to show
how Pipes can work with “dc” data, the “Dublin Core” mod­el that allows
you to extend stan­dard RSS feeds (see yes­ter­day’s post for more on this).

Google Blog Search and Del​.icio​.us feeds use the “dc:date” field to
record the time when the post was made. Flickr uses “dc:date.Taken” to
pass on the pho­tograph’s meta­da­ta about when it was tak­en. Pipes’
“Rename” mod­ule lets you copy both fields into one you cre­ate (I’ve
sim­ply used “date”), which you can then run through its “Sort” module.
Again, it’s a moot point since Pipes seems to do this automatically.
But it’s good to know how to manip­u­late and rename “dc” data if only
because many PHP parsers have trou­ble lay­ing it out on a webpage.

Update: it’s all moot: accord­ing to a ZDNet blog, “Pipes now auto­mat­i­cal­ly appends a pub­Date tag to any RSS feed that has any of the oth­er allow­able date tags.” This is nice: no need to hack the date every time you want to make a Pipe!

Step 7: Output

blank The final step for any Pipe is the “Pipe Out­put” module.

In action

You can see this pub­lished Pipe here, and copy and play with it your­self. The result lets you build an RSS feed based on the two inputs. 

Creating an RSS feed from scratch

February 26, 2007
· Martin Kelley

RSS feeds
are the lin­gua fran­ca of the mod­ern inter­net, the glue that binds
togeth­er the hun­dreds of ser­vices that make up “Web 2.0.” The term
stands for “Real­ly Sim­ple Syn­di­ca­tion” and can be thought of as a
machine-code table of con­tents to a web­site. An RSS feed
for a blog will typ­i­cal­ly list the last dozen-or-so arti­cles, with the
title, date, sum­ma­ry and con­tent all laid out in spe­cial fields. Once
you have a web­site’s RSS feed you can syn­di­cate, or re-publish, its con­tents by email, RSS read­er
or as a side­bar on anoth­er web­site. This post will show you a
ridicu­lous­ly easy way to “roll your own” RSS feed with­out hav­ing to
wor­ry about your web­site’s con­tent platform.

Just about every native Web 2.0 appli­ca­tions comes built-in with mul­ti­ple RSS feeds.
But in the real world, web­sites are built using an almost-infinite
num­ber of con­tent man­age­ment sys­tems and web devel­op­ment software
pro­grams. Some­times a sin­gle web­site will use dif­fer­ent pro­grams for
putting its con­tents online and some­times a sin­gle orga­ni­za­tion spreads
its func­tions over mul­ti­ple domains.

Step 1: Make it Del​.icio​.us

To begin, sign up with Del​.icio​.us,
the pop­u­lar “social book­mark­ing” web ser­vice (sim­i­lar ser­vices can be
eas­i­ly adapt­ed to work). Then add a “post to Del​.icio​.us” but­ton to
your browser’s tool­bar fol­low­ing the instruc­tions here.
Now when­ev­er you put new con­tent up on your site, go that new page,
click on your “post to Del​.icio​.us” but­ton and fill out a good title
and descrip­tion. Choose a tag to use. A tag is sim­ply a cat­e­go­ry and
you can make it what­ev­er you want but “mysites” or your busi­ness name
will be the eas­i­est to remem­ber. Hit save and you’ve start­ed an RSS feed.

How? Well, Del​.icio​.us turns each tag into a RSS feed.
You can see it in all its machine code glo­ry at
del​.icio​.us/​r​s​s​/​u​s​e​r​n​a​m​e​/​m​y​s​i​tes (replac­ing “user­name” with your
user­name and “mysites” with what­ev­er tag you chose).

Now you could just adver­tise that Del​.icio​.us RSS feed
to your audi­ence but there are a few prob­lems doing this. One is that
Del​.icio​.us accounts are usu­al­ly per­son­al. If your web­mas­ter leaves,
then your pub­lished RSS feed will need to
change. Not a good sce­nario, espe­cial­ly since you won’t even be able to
tell who’s still using that old feed. Before you adver­tise your feed
you should “future proof” it by run­ning it through Feedburner.

Cloak that Feed

Go to Feed​burn​er​.com. Right there on the home­page they invite you to type in a URL.
Enter your Del​.icio​.us feed’s address and sign up for a Feedburner
account. In the field next to feed address give it some sen­si­ble name
relat­ing to your com­pa­ny or site, let’s say “mycompa­ny” for our
exam­ple. You’ll now have a new RSS feed at
feeds​.feed​burn​er​.com/​m​y​c​o​m​p​any. Now you’re in busi­ness: this is the
feed you adver­tise to the world. If you ever need to change the source RSS feed you can do that from with­in Feed­burn­er and no one need know.

The default title of your Feed­burn­er feed will still show it’s
Del​.icio​.us roots (and the web­mas­ter’s user­name). To clear that out, go
into Feed­burn­er’s “Opti­mize” tab and turn on the “Title/Description
Burn­er,” fill­ing it out with a title and descrip­tion that better
match­es your feed’s pur­pose. For an exam­ple of all this in action, the
Del​.icio​.us feed that pow­ers my tech link blog and its Feed­burn­er “cloak” can be found here:

Get that Feed out there

Under Feed­burn­er’s “Pub­li­cize” tag there are lots of neat features
to repub­lish your feed your­self. First off is the “Chick­let chooser”
which will give you that ubiq­ui­tous RSS feed
icon to let vis­i­tors know you’ve entered the 21st Cen­tu­ry. Their “Buzz
Boost” fea­ture lets you cre­ate a snip­pet of code for your home­page that
will list the lat­est addi­tions. “Email sub­scrip­tions” lets your
audi­ence sign up for auto­mat­ic emails when­ev­er you add some­thing to
your site.

Final Thoughts

RSS feeds are great ways of communicating
excit­ing news to your audi­ences. If you’re lucky, impor­tant blog­gers in
your audi­ence will sub­scribe to your feed and spread your news to their
net­works. Cre­at­ing a feed through a book­mark­ing ser­vice allows you to
add any page on any site regard­less of its under­ly­ing structure.

SEO Myths I: Analyze This

January 22, 2007
· Martin Kelley

Every web design­er under the sun talks about search engine opti­miza­tion (SEO), but it amazes me to see how often basic prin­ci­ples are ignored. I’m in-between jobs right now, which means I’m spend­ing a lot of time look­ing at poten­tial employ­ers’ web­sites. I’ve decid­ed to start a series of posts on SEO myths and real­i­ties that will talk about design­ing for max­i­mum visibility.

I’m not going to focus on any of the under­hand­ed tricks to fool search engines into list­ing an inap­pro­pri­ate page. Google hates this kind of tac­tic and so do I. You get vis­its for hav­ing good con­tent. Good search rank­ings are based on good con­tent and the best way to boost your con­tent is to present your page in a way that lets both humans and search engines find the con­tent they want. Part one is on web­site analy­sis and tracking.

Don’t assume that your web­site is easy to nav­i­gate. One of the neat­est things about the web is that we have instant feed­back on use. With just a lit­tle track­ing we can see what pages peo­ple are look­ing at, how they’re find­ing our site and what they’re doing once they’re here.

Javascript Trackers:

My most advanced sites are cur­rent­ly using four dif­fer­ent track­ing meth­ods. Most uti­lize javascript “bugs,” tiny snip­pets of code that send indi­vid­ual results to an advanced soft­ware track­ing sys­tem. I put the code inside a Move­able Type “Mod­ules Tem­plate” which is auto­mat­i­cal­ly import­ed to all pages. Installing a new sys­tem is as easy as cutting-and-pasting the javascript into the Tem­plate and rebuild­ing the site.

  • AXS Vis­i­tors Track­ing System
    This soft­ware installs on your serv­er but don’t let that scare you: this is one of the eas­i­est instal­la­tions I’ve ever seen. AXS gives you great charts of usage: you can nar­row it spe­cif­ic pages on your site, or even par­tic­u­lar search engines or search phrases.
    There’s also a option to view the lastest traf­fic by vis­i­tor. I love watch­ing this! You can see how indi­vid­u­als are using the site and where they’re nav­i­gat­ing. I’ve been able to iden­ti­fy dif­fer­ent types of vis­i­tors this way and under­stand the com­plex­i­ty of the audience.
    It does­n’t seem like AXS is not being devel­oped any­more. The lat­est sta­ble ver­sion came out over two years go, which is a shame.

  • Hit­Tail
    This ser­vice watch­es search-engine links and makes rec­om­men­da­tions for new key­words. I wrote about this ser­vice yes­ter­day in Blog­ging for the Long Tail.

  • Reeferss​.com
    This is a sim­ple sim­ple bit of soft­ware. Like every oth­er track­ing sys­tem it keeps track of refer­rers: search engines and web­sites that bring traf­fic to your site. But unlike the oth­ers that’s all it does. Why care then? It pro­vides a real-time RSS feed of these vis­i­tors. I bring the feed into my “Netvibes” page (a cus­tomized start page, see below) and scan the results mul­ti­ple times a day.

  • Google Ana­lyt­ics
    The inter­net’s gate­keep­er bought the Urchin ana­lyt­ics com­pa­ny in April 2005 and relaunched the prod­uct as Google Ana­lyt­ics short­ly there­after. This is becom­ing an essen­tial track­er. It’s free and it’s pow­er­ful, though I haven’t been as impressed by it as oth­ers have. See its Wiki page for more.

Internet Trackers:

It’s easy to find out what peo­ple are say­ing about you online.

  • Tech­no­rati
    This ser­vice tracks blogs but you don’t need to have a blog to use it, for Tech­no­rati will tell you where blogs are link­ing. Give it your URLs (or those of your com­peti­tors!) and you’ll know when­ev­er a blog­ger puts in a link to you. You can also give it key­words and find out when a blog uses them.

  • Google Blog Search
    Google can also let you fol­low blog ref­er­ences or key­word men­tions on the blogs. Google will also track beyond blogs of course. Type “site:www.yourdomain.com” into the main Google search page and you’ll see who’s link­ing to your site (or to the com­pe­ti­tion). There are lots of oth­er ser­vices that track blogs and men­tions – Sphere, Blog­lines, etc. They all have dif­fer­ent strengths so try them and see what you think.

  • Feed­burn­er
    The best RSS mas­sager has always focused on ways to track your RSS feed. They’ve recent­ly intro­duced page track­ing soft­ware too. It looks great but I just installed it this week. I still have to see if it’s as good as Feed­burn­er’s oth­er offerings.

Keeping on top of this flow of data:

It’s easy to get over­whelmed by all of this infor­ma­tion. Most of the track­ing ser­vices pro­vide RSS feeds (See The Won­ders of RSS Feeds for an intro). I use Netvibes, a cus­tomized start page, to pull these all togeth­er into a sin­gle page that I can scan every morn­ing. Here’s a screen­shot of part of my Netvibes track­ing page – the full page cur­rent­ly shows four­teen track­ing feeds on one screen:

So why is tracking important to SEO?

With track­ing you find out what peo­ple are look­ing for on the inter­net. This helps you cre­ate pages and ser­vices that peo­ple will want to find. You might be sur­prised to see what they’re already find­ing on your site. Some examples:

  • Ana­lyz­ing one site, I noticed that few pages I thought were obscure were bring­ing in high Google traf­fic. I looked at these pages again and real­ized they did a good job of describ­ing the com­pa­ny’s mis­sion. I con­se­quent­ly redesigned the site home­page to fea­ture them and I made sure that those pages con­tained direct links to its most impor­tant services.

  • When I start­ed work for anoth­er client I looked at their site and sus­pect­ed that they’re most impor­tant arti­cles were not being seen – vis­i­tors had to click through about four times to get to them. Six months of track­ing con­firmed my hunch and gave me the hard data to con­vince the exec­u­tive direc­tor that we made some small mod­i­fi­ca­tions to the design. Hav­ing this strong con­tent linked right off the home­page helped bring in Google traffic.

The Wonders of RSS feeds

August 11, 2006
· Martin Kelley

RSS
Syn­di­ca­tion feeds are small web files that sum­ma­rize the lat­est posts
to a par­tic­u­lar blog or news site. They’re a cen­tral repos­i­to­ry of
basic infor­ma­tion: title, author, post date, a sum­ma­ry of the post and
some­times the whole post itself. You can open these files direct­ly (here’s the raw file for this blog) but you’ll see there’s a hier­ar­chy of cod­ing that makes it visu­al­ly uninteresting.

Syn­di­ca­tion
feeds are the lin­gua fran­ca pow­er­ing all the cool new web­sites. It
does­n’t mat­ter what blog­ging plat­form you use or what oper­at­ing system
you’re on: if your soft­ware pro­vides an RSS feed I can mix and match it and use it to pull in con­tent to my site.

Exam­ples 1: Pho­tographs: I email all of my adorable kid pic­tures to the pho­to shar­ing site Flickr,
which then pro­vides a syn­di­ca­tion feed (“here”). I use a lit­tle fancy
patch of cod­ing on my web­site to pull in the infor­ma­tion about the
lat­est pho­tos (loca­tion, cap­tion, etc) so that I can dis­play them on my
home­page. When­ev­er you go to my Theo age you’ll see the lat­est Flickr pho­tos of him. 

Exam­ple 2: Book­marks. I also use the “social book­mark­ing” sys­tem with the odd name of del​.icio​.us.
When I find a page I want to book­mark, I click a Deli­cious but­ton in my
brows­er, which opens a pop-up win­dow. I write a descrip­tion, pick a
cat­e­go­ry or two and hit save. Deli­ciouis then pro­vides an RSS syn­di­ca­tion
feed which I can use to pull togeth­er a list of my lat­est book­marks and
dis­play it on my web­site. Wave a few mag­ic wands of com­pli­ca­tion (pay
no atten­tion to the man behind the cur­tain!) and you have the main
trick behind Quak​erquak​er​.org.

I’ve sim­pli­fied both exam­ples a bit but you prob­a­bly get the point. Syn­di­ca­tion feeds are the secret behind blog read­ers like Blog­lines and email sub­scrip­tion ser­vices like the one’s I pro­vide for quak​erquak​er​.org.

New to me is the con­cepts around the Well-Formed Web. As described by Kevin Don­ahue
“The lay­man’s premise of the Well-Formed Web is that each site will
have drill-down feeds — a top lev­el feed, item spe­cif­ic feeds, and so
on.” What this means is that you don’t just have one sin­gle RSS feed on a site (your lat­est ten posts) but RSS feeds on every­thing.
Every cat­e­go­ry get its own unique feeds (e.g., the last ten posts about
web design) and every post gets its own unique feed track­ing its
com­ments (e.g., this feed of com­ments from my “Intro­duc­ing Mar​tinKel​ley​.com” post).
It cer­tain­ly seems a bit like overkill but com­put­ers are doing all the
work and the result gives us a multi-dimensionality that we can use to
pull all sorts of neat things together.