RSS

Mark Paschal's Kit Radio Tool really rocks! It replaces the standard Radio News Aggregator with one that has filters (text, time, span), grouping, date stamping, and color coding. Using the Kit Aggregator it is now possible to subscribe to dozens of feeds, group them by interest category, filter the category by time or key words, and get only a small subset of the thousands of possible articles. This is very nice.

I believe such filtering is critical to effective use of RSS and Aggregators in K-Log environments, where you may need to filter down to key articles that pertain to project- or time-specific topics. Oddly, a search for Paschal's name on the K-Logs Yahoo! Group yields zero results. I would think the other K-Loggers would have discussed this improvement.

Installation is a snap, directions are clear, and after a little experimentation use seems pretty intuitive. Oh yeah, Kit does all sorts of other things like run scripts, search weblogs, change time/date stamps on posts, edit outlines, and probably other things I don't understand. But if it didn't do anything more than give me control over the aggregator it would be a winner.

Paschal also makes Stapler, an RSS generator you can use to create feeds for sites that do't have them. Once you create the feeds Stapler will store them locally, update them, and even aggregate them into combined feeds. Pretty cool.

Another gem found courtesy of [Russ Lipton Documents Radio].

Automatic RSS Titles and Links

5:54:02 PM

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Andy Fragen got tired of having blank lines above his posts when he forgot to add a Title. He wrote a callback. Andy Fragen doesn't have blank lines anymore. Andy's cool.

I can't make it work (I'm a Frontier idiot) but I will get it figured out. This will be a great way to have my Mail-to-Weblog posts formatted to match my active posts.

Untitled post callback.. OK, I fiddled with the untitled post macro to make it use the first sentence as the title of the post. If anyone wants the callback let me know. Actually here it is.

on untitledPost (adrpost) {
if not defined (adrpost^.title) {
adrpost^.title = string(string.firstSentence (adrpost^.text))}}
Simple changes. Callbacks are great!

[Surgical Diversions]

See also: kottke.org :: Automatic discovery of RSS feeds | COMP249: Assignment Part 5 | Blunt Force Trauma | Blunt Force Trauma | Blunt Force Trauma | Juri Pakaste - The Blog | Radio UserLand : Radio 8.0 Directory | Radio UserLand : Radio 8.0 Directory | Frontier 9.0 | oreilly.com -- Online Catalog: Essential Blogging

Shortening RSS Descriptions

4:05:21 PM

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This thread in the Userland DG is about creating a callback to truncate the default RSS descritpions in Radio. By default, Radio puts an entire post into the RSS. I wanted to send out only the first sentence. This helped. Thanks to Rick Klau for guidance.

See also: Jon Udell: Paul Holbrook improves RSS truncation | Ken Rawlings | Jon's Radio | Blunt Force Trauma | Paul Holbrook's Radio Weblog | Radio UserLand : Re: Shortening RSS descriptions | Radio UserLand : Shortening RSS descriptions | Radio UserLand : Shortening RSS descriptions | Radio UserLand : Archive for 6/24/02 | Jon Udell: Paul Holbrook improves RSS truncation

Aggregator Redux

7:18:53 AM

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I've been using AmphetaDesk while on the road. I think it has some configuration options I haven't quite grasped yet. I know Morbus Iff is going to add grouping in the next release. Some aging and auto-delete control would be nice, too.
Nothing beats being able to post directly to the weblog, though. I miss that. It's a pain to have to do the cut-and-paste routine 2-3 times to get the URL, the title, the copy, etc. How do other weblogs do that? Do blogger and such have aggregator facilities or some interface element that lets users post from third-party aggregators?

See also: Blunt Force Trauma | Blunt Force Trauma | Blunt Force Trauma | Blunt Force Trauma | Blunt Force Trauma | Blunt Force Trauma | snowdeal.org | conflux | Blogging Roller | Blogging Roller | same as it ever was: July 2002 Archives