New Feedster Feature: OPML Tracking

This is geeky and won't mean a lot to many Feedster users but for those who care, I suspect they'll find it a good thing.  A lot of Feedster users track not one or ten feeds but 50 or more.  And they're constantly adding new feeds to their OPML file.  Earlier tonight Crystal Flame asked me "Hey I have some new feeds in my OPML file, mind importing them into Feedster?".  "Nope" I replied.  And I have a good manual import routine so I asked for the url and he then gave me the kicker -- "Ah... I'm going to be adding more feeds to it later this week".  Oof!

That's when it struck me -- Feedster users want the feeds they read in Feedster to make sure that when they search Feedster anything they might have seen will be in the database.  So what we really have here is a specialized case of input tracking i.e. what I should be doing (for users that want it) is monitoring their OPML file which defines their RSS feeds no more than once a week.  These don't change that often so that should be good.  So now for any feeds that Crystal Flame adds to his OPML file and for any feeds that Keith adds to his, they'll be automatically reflected in Feedster.  I used Keith for another test case but I couldn't even tell you how I got the url.  Odd.

Right now there isn't any way for an end user to add their OPML file by themselves so just email it to sjohnson@fuzzygroup.com for now and I'll add it if you want.  If there is enough interest then it will get automated.  All I need is an opml url that defines your RSS feeds accessible via the public internet.  Here's an example of what I know works.

And man is there some **damn** good content on CrystalFlame.  Boy blogging really does keep you humble -- there are so many smart people out there.

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Some Random Bits to Round Out the Night

Like a lot of bloggers, I blog stuff often because I know that **I** want it again.  So here's a bunch of that for the night:

• Picture of the day: Duck Walk (go see, its cool)
• Good MacOSX freeware to install including a good ASCII editor (mi), an Outliner (MyMind) and more
• Pictures from PHP-Con: Day 1, Day 2.  My what a geeky bunch we are ...  (Tip on how to spot the vendors at a conference, they never look as geeky as the attendees). 
• John Coggeshall's php-con trip report. Interestingly he seems to be as favorable on Sams as I am.  Watch out O'Reilly ! 
• Marco's php-con trip report. 
• I think its time to register for OSCon.  *grumble*  Its in Portland this year!  Ack.
• Don Park has some cool thoughts on News Aggregators.  Don if you want to tie this into Feedster, let me know....
• Adam's pissed at Slashdot and I suspect I'm violating their TOS also.  Sigh. 
• New charges in the Mike Hawash case.  And even so his friends are sticking by him -- Good For Them !
• Details from news.com on the new Apple audio system.  It seems to be NOT MP3 files which means that I'll never bother with it -- who needs another crappy format ?
• Via Keith: Tim Bray on Unicode.  Nice !
• Adam on Google's RSS feeds.  Not so nice.
• Preview of Longhorn.  Picture. 
• Free MP3 audio books.
• Ranting about Corporate Stupidity from Derek.  All too true.

I've been blogging like this for a while but not always getting back to it.  Now that I have Feedster, I can just drill down on my own blog to find anything I've linked to.  Example.

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Feedster on SARS

I ran across a blog on SARS and figured I'd add it to Feedster.  Oops.  Its already there.  Very cool.  So I figured that I'd use it to take a peak at what exactly is going on in the SARS world.  Very interesting and more than a bit scary:

• Feedster SARS Search
• Feedster Drill Down into All of SARS Watch

Bias: I'm the guy who wrote Feedster, blah, blah, etc, etc.  You know the drill.

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Imajes / James on MySQL Replication

My buddy James / Imajes (real world name versus unique computer world name) has posted a good chapter on MySQL Replication that was supposed to be part of a WROX book that, well, died with WROX.  His blog posting on this (includes PDF version also).  Recommended. 

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More Buttons Take Two

GtMcknight has even more buttons for bloggers.  Very cool.  There's even a new Feedster button.  Tres Cool.

He really has done an awesome job putting these together.  The one suggestion that I'd give him is to add a unique prefix to each button like "btn_gtm_NAME".  I mean one of the buttons is named blank.gif -- what are the odds that you already have blank.gif in your images directory?  They're actually quite good.  Still just outstanding work.  Thanks man.

My two favorites:

 

(Feedster and "Font Bitch?  Not me!)

If anyone needs any of these, you can also download them from here one by one.

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A Senator on Sex

Via Gregory (who oddly enough turns out to be just a few miles away from me).  From Cory: Senator Santorum's Guide to Appropriate Sex. 

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Feedster Race Conditions Fixed

Saturday night I returned to a report that Feedster was hitting a site too aggressively for its RSS feed.  This "race condition" is fixed now (or should be).  I put in a global level check that before an RSS feed can be requested a time interval not less than 20 minutes must have passed.  If you are seeing any type of requests where we seem to be hitting your site more frequently then please let me know - sjohnson @ fuzzygroup.com and I'll see that it gets fixed.

Hm... Now that I write this, I am seeing one circumstance where it could occur -- when a site doesn't make its RSS feed clearly accessible i.e. they don't use the LINK syntax to specify it and we have to try different alternatives like rss.xml, index.xml, etc.  That could still lead to some repeated page hits.  I guess I'll have to look into that.  Still there haven't been any reports of that particular race condition just the more generalized case.

Oh and the Feedster "spider" (not really a spider since its not recursive) now discloses its user agent.  Sorry for not setting that for so long.  Just stupidity on my part.

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Serendipity: A PHP Based Weblog System

Serendipity is looking better and better.  The plugins actually look pretty damn good.  All the standard blogging type stuff is there and then more.  Oh and surprise, surprise: Sterling is part of the core team.  So is George.  Both of whom I talked with in real life last week.  Small damn world.

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