Overview

Now, it is with some chagrin that I admit I didn’t cotton to rss/atom/other feeds until earlier this year. When Google released its Google Reader, I played around with it, since I tend to check out most of their toys anyway.

Well.

Whether you’re a geek like me or not, it’s worth learning how to use feeds. And yet, since I brushed them off and didn’t even consider their utility for some time, I’m writing up about them here to clarify why they’re so handy and how they can be used.

There’s two concepts to cover here. First is the feed itself. Although I see them called “RSS” or “Atom” or “subscriptions” and so on, technically they’re just “feeds” — rss, atom, xml, etc are different formats for the feed. Think of a feed as a broadcast of a web page. Instead of a user going TO a webpage, a user looks at a broadcast FROM the webpage. What’s the distinction? I can tell all the particular feeds I’m interested to come to a single place (i.e., aggregate) and I can then read them in that place, all together. Since any kind of webpage can broadcast a feed, there are feeds available for blogs, online news sites, photo sites, podcasts, and even video blogs (known by the awful “vlogs” contraction). Since most blogging software comes bundled with setups for feed broadcasts, chances are a blog I find interesting I can add to my collection of feeds.

Which brings me to the second part, the feed reader (or feed aggregator). A feed reader will take my list of feeds (or my subscription list) and fetch their latest broadcasts and then present them to me. The resulting presentation will not look like the original website pages but are instead a simplified layout. I can even opt for synopsis rather than full articles. I actually find this simplification to be a blessing in many cases; not only to avoid some horrible layouts or clashing colours or lots of adbling, but also with a standardized reader layout I can concentrate more on the content of what I’m reading. Depending on the particlar feed reader, I can browse through lists of the subscriptions, lists of their currently unread articles (by title or by title and synopsys), or at the unread contents. The exact options and layout varies by reader, of course. In some cases, only a synopsis is actually broadcast. In other cases, everything is sent, down to images used for the particular article, and I can choose whether to display these as a synopsis or in their entirety. Which I can choose to do therefore also depends on the sort of information the feed contains.

To give a scenario: I have a collection of subscriptions to daily comic strip publications. So I group these subscriptions into a single folder or group (also called outlines or tags or categories, etc). I also mark them for full display. Now when I choose to see my comics subscriptions, I get a single page with all of the latest comic strip publications laid out one after the other. I can just browse this single page, reading nothing but the exact comic strips I want. It’s better than the newspaper comic page!

There’s a fairly dry summary here and a bit more of an interesting summary here, especially in the Usage and History sections.

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In general, the programs and tools I use revolve around a couple of considerations:

1. I need to use them at home/at work (or more precisely, from different computers)
2. I want to use the same tool regardless of the operating system I’m using (I have linux at home, but must use Windows elsewhere)

Ideally I’d like my data accessible from anywhere, and I don’t want to have to learn new applications just because I’m on a different operating system. Obviously there are no hard and fast rules because some programs are just too useful not to have around even though they only run on Linux. (Don’t let the mentions of Linux scare anyone off here. Everything I discuss is either a web application or works on Windows as well as it does on Linux.)

In practice, this means I gravitate toward browser based utilities and open source cross platform utilities. In the former category are many of the Google tools: Gmail, Calendar, Notebook, plus others such as Bloglines, Meebo. In the latter category are Firefox, Thunderbird, Open Office, Gimp. Sometimes there are programs near and dear to my heart that I take the trouble to locate off platform versions of them, such as vi (yes I know I’m depraved) but this last category I’m not addressing here.

I’ve actually known about Meebo for some time, but I’ve started experimenting with it only in the last few days. I have no complaints whatsoever with Gaim which is what I normally use. However, when I was travelling for a few weeks last year, it was very cumbersome to download it, unpack it, use it, and then delete it. I should have made use of Meebo then although I’m not sure how usable it was at this point. Right now, it’s pretty sleek, works very well. Could use some more bells and whistles (I do not mean this literally in the sounds sections) — I have a hard time telling when I’ve got a new message in, for example. But it’s got a good interface, looks very smooth, and is worth checking out. It also offers a one stop place to log all your conversations, which could be a good thing or a scary thing, depending (completely configurable, never fear).

Feed aggregators have been interesting. There’s plenty of computerside clients, of course, but for this one I definitely want a web based one! Google Reader and Bloglines seem to be the main contenders out there. I tried Reader first, but it has an inherent disorganization that makes me want to scream. You get fed a steady stream of all the new articles that have come out. And if non has, no problem, it will show them to you over again. You wind up completely uncertain of what you’ve seen, where you’ve seen it or even when you’ve seen it. You lose all context since a post from that political blog might be followed by a post from that comics blog and then your little sister’s journal entry. No thanks. Yes, there’s kind of an edit subscription mode at the top you can turn on that helps organize the information, but there’s no settings to turn that on or anything. Bloglines is much better organized, although their frames setup makes me want to scream. They could set the sidebar up without frames, I’m sure, and make a much nicer interface. Still, the organization of the subscriptions into orderly files is wonderful, and they have several API’s for accessing the feed list which you can turn to nefarious purposes on your own website and so on. My particular favorite has been to assemble a comics folder, in which I placed all my comics subscriptions — rigorously selected to actually display the comic (some will just give you links to go to your comics — no thanks!) — and in the morning i just flip that folder on, go to wide view and jump down each one almost like a regular newspaper. I love it! And of course all I need is a browser and I can go thru my feeds.

Different web utilities can be combined in sometimes unexpected ways. Here’s one that’s proved very useful (via LifeHacker) if you use Google Calendar and you want to track the daily weather: Go to Weather Underground and find your zipcode or area of interest. When you get to the page in question, you’ll find a green ICAL link in the upper right hand area of the screen. Copy the link location for this ical file (in FF, right click and choose copy link location) and then go over to your Calendar, click on Settings, then Import Calendar and paste the ical address in there. What’s cool is that the next seven days or so have weather information in them, which gets updated. It cleans up after itself: the weather information is always eight days including yesterday. Plus, as the weather info updates during the day, the info box also updates in the calendar.

I’ve been using Delicious for several months now to collect my bookmarks in a completely accessible fashion, although I use DR’s delicious account more for “reporting back” here, so with that account I take the trouble to copy or type up some notes with each link. Either way, Delicious offers a way to access your bookmarks from anywhere, and through the different utilities and API’s that it has, you can do all kinds of stuff with the bookmarks you make, besides go searching or browsing through them at Delicious itself. They finally took the smart step of adding private entries to this utility, which is good for people who want to keep certain work links or personal links private and yet keep everything together. I experimented with Magnolia as well, which could be another alternative, but I have enough links on Delicious that exporting/importing isn’t an attractive proposition. Oh, and you can save an xml export of the Delicious bookmarks, although at present I don’t know of any utilities that work off of it (even Delicious itself!). Still, you can download that to your personal computer for backup.

The final sort of online utility I’ve been considering but have not actually used yet, is an online password saver. I’ve looked at this one, but I have serious reservations about saving passwords online. At the same time, if they are saved on my personal computer, I’m really screwed if I can’t remember something while away from my computer. (As an aside, I should note that I’m very strict about setting FF and other browsers and utilities to never remember passwords. Even if someone should get on the computers I actually use, they will find that nothing has my passwords: not my ftp or ssh utilities, not my browsers, nor my mail clients. Nothing logs in automatically and so on. Perhaps the constant need to remember my passwords will keep Alzheimers at bay, who knows…)

I don’t think I need to extoll the virtues of Firefox here, but it sure does have good extensions, which would make a post in of themselves. I’ll confine myself to the latest one I’ve nabbed: the copy as html link firefox extension which is a boon to bloggers everywhere (along with Google Notebook) in cutting and pasting links (how often have you copied the address, come back here, pasted it, gone back, copied the title, back here, paste, and so on ad infinitum?). With this, you highlight the text you want, right click, choose the copy as html that is now present, and go back to paste in one step. This is one of those tiny little utilities that fix something which was truly headdesking and yet never addressed till now and you wonder why it wasn’t done this way to begin with. This is functionality that should be built into browsers.

Thunderbird is a very well thought out program, and I do like how it’s set up. However, while it meets my criteria for operating across different platforms it still renders my mail inaccessible if I download mail with it onto a particular computer. So although I prefer its interface to Gmail’s, I primarily use it to retrieve and archive my email, from Gmail and IMAP clients (had to leave the pop ones alone). Still, if you use something like Outlook (shudder), you should definitely be looking at something like this. Plus, Thunderbird also has cool extensions like Firefox does, to help you customize it exactly the way you want.

I was initially somewhat dubious of Open Office’s Write as I’d tried converting a few files a couple years back and had too much trouble with tables, but the OOo team seems to have been hard at work and I’ve been very pleased with the results this time around. No trouble with any of my files so far. Ditto Gimp — I coudln’t figure out how to do anything the first go around, and this time I transitioned right off Photoshop with nary a hiccup. I’m particularly pleased that the interfaces on the Windows version are the same as in Linux. Saves me a lot of bother. Plus which the applications are smaller, faster, and somewhat cheaper than the Windows counterparts Even if you’re not a Linux user, you’d probably be pleasantly surprised at the speed and ease of use of these programs. They keep getting cast in terms of substitutes for Windows programs, but in reality they’re full fledged programs with a good deal more functionality plus interoperability.

If you’re not off internet cafe hopping, Gaim’s a great application. It combines all the major IM interfaces into a single program. Yahoo IM, AIM, Jabber (which hooks up to Gtalk), and others are all represented here. You don’t have to have multiple programs running if you’re talking with people on different IM’s. It’s got a slick interface, tabbed conversations, and it can do group chats as well.

There. That should be plenty of toys to look over…

In bloglines, I notice some subscriptions have either their favicons appear on the subscription link (for example, any blog powered by Blogger), or have a small graphic that appears in the header (for example, wunderground.com’s weather channels). My DR subscription, though, doesn’t show any icons or graphics. This therefore has to be something that’s being sent by the feed.

Feeds come in three basic flavors these days — as I understand it, Atom is the newest kid on the block, the most widely used is probably RSS 2.0, and RSS 1 is still used by a few places but largely deprecated in favor of RSS 2. I found all the usual disagreements over which was the best, which would be most easily extensible in the future and so on and so forth. In the end, though it seems to me that much of the time a site will offer both Atom and RSS2.

Atom and RSS 2 provide a means to package up a site (an HTML page) into an XML representation which can then be used by a feed reader and/or aggregator, to put up the info about the site into the aggregator/feed reader. If you use Bloglines (or Google Reader, or any of a dozen other similar programs out there), that XML is what they’re using to snag info from your subscriptions. These programs will query your subscription sites regularly for any updates and download those into your reader.

To see your own WordPress atom and rss2 feeds, add feed/atom to your WordPress blog address, and just feed for rss2. So for example, DR’s RSS2 feed is at http://www.digitalramble.com/feed and it’s atom feed at http://www.digitalramble.com/feed/atom. Note that to see the atom feed, you’ll have to save it to a file and open it with a text editor (browsers do not “recognize” Atom pages yet.)

In tracking down the feeds for these examples, I found XML descriptors of the format channel->description->image->url and the url’s would be the locations of the images being used. Obviously, my own feed generators are not doing this, because even though I jumped through all the hoops to get favicons up for my site, they’re not showing up in a Bloglines subscription.

I, of course, must fix this.

So WordPress generates two feeds in a basic setup (at least, basic here at DreamHost?). I have three relevant files in my top wordpress directory: wp-atom.php, wp-rss.php, and wp-rss2.php. Because RSS 2’s so popular, let’s look at that one first. There’s a RSS 2 specification here. So as an experiment, I edit the wp-rss2.php file to contain

<image>
<link>http://digitalramble.com/</link>
<url>http://digitalramble/wordpress/favinit.gif</url>
<title>Digital Ramble</title>
</image>

Of course once I get into the php file and look around, I change this to use the same php bloginfo to genericize it:

        <image>
                <link><?php bloginfo_rss('url') ?></link>
                <url><?php echo get_option('siteurl'); ?>/favinit.gif</url>
                <title><?php bloginfo_rss('name'); ?></title>
        </image>

This isn’t perfectly ideal of course. Seems like there should be a favicon per theme, which loads in with the theme, and updates the icon in the browser tabs, bookmarks, and feeds. As it is, I’ve only got one favicon installed, and if I change things around I would have to change the current theme’s header.php, and the wp-content’s atom/rss generators.

Maybe I should make this a plugin, for the experience of creating an addition to the Dashboard, where you can enter your favicon, and then add the appropriate calls in your atom/rss2 feeds and your header…hmmm not a bad idea. Not today though This is just proof of concept.

OK, onto Atom. Googling around, I find its specification here. In scanning down this file, I find the relevant item: atom:icon about half way down the text. This looks like it. Here’s what it says:

The “atom:icon” element’s content is an IRI reference [RFC3987] that identifies an image that provides iconic visual identification for a feed.

atomIcon = element atom:icon {
   atomCommonAttributes,
   (atomUri)
}

The image SHOULD have an aspect ratio of one (horizontal) to one (vertical) and SHOULD be suitable for presentation at a small size.

There’s also atom:logo which is almost the same, except for a 2:1 horizontal:vertical aspect ratio. OK, so after some tinkering around, I decide on adding:

<icon><?php echo get_option('siteurl'); ?>/favinit.gif"</icon>

I’m not as certain of this one, because the atom feeds I was able to look at, on sites that have icons showing (such as DistroWatch), don’t seem to contain any icon information in their atom description! I did come across some comments that some aggregator sites will just pull the favicons from the feeding sites (but in that case the favicon.ico I have in my root directory should show up, unless that’s not really the root directory, which could well be the case…)

Now to publish this so I can see the results if any in Bloglines…!