Tag: Syndication

And, in case anyone cares, this is how I do RSS feeds for my topical-oriented pages in Conversant. I should emphasize that there are a number of different ways to do multiple RSS feeds in Conversant, and this is probably the most complicated. But it offers a number of advantages, including the fact that the results can be cached.

First I set up an Advanced Query page for each topic. If I were doing page on PETA, for example, I’d create an AQP called peta.rss, and then I’d assign it a page title of “PETA” and a navigation title of “PETA – RSS Feed.”

Then I configure the Query Options to search for bound URLs and set the cache period to 180 minutes (since I rarely make updates more than once or twice a day).

In the Query Defaults, I set the AQP to search for messages labeled as “Articles” and then only those messages where I’ve set the “Organization” custom field to “PETA.”

Here are the templates I then use in the Results tab to output an RSS channel:

Page Content Template

[Link to Topical HTML Page] RSS Feed of Articles about
en-us
Copyright 2002, Brian Carnell
[email protected] (Brian Carnell)

[email protected] (Brian Carnell)

 

Query Result Template

 

Message Template>

” length=”125″ striphtml=”true”
adminLinks=”false”–>

So now, I’ve got an RSS feed. The next trick is to have the topical pages include both a link tag to that RSS channel in the header area, and also display an XML icon in the right hand-column.

To do this, I first created a Long Text custom field called “RSS.” When I’ve configured an RSS channel for a specific topical page, I just go back to that topical page, edit it, and then past the URL for the RSS channel into the text entry box for the “RSS” custom field.

Then I modified two templates. In the template I use to control the header information, I added this:

“>

This tests to see if the message in question has a value in the “RSS” custom field, and if so it grabs that and uses it in the link tag.

To get the XML graphic to display and link to the correct page I use this:

”
title=”RSS Feed for Stories about “>http://brian.carnell.com/wp-content/uploads/files/images/xml.gif“>

Again, this tests to see if the message in question has a value in the “RSS” custom field, and if so it inserts the icon and grabs the “RSS” value for the link.

Seth Dillingham sent me an e-mail the other day that reminded me I had started but never finished a project to create RSS feeds for pretty much every topical page on this site. Well, now I can cross that off of my to do list.

Almost all of the topical pages now have their own RSS feed. The little orange “XML” graphic on the right provides a link to the particular RSS feed and there is also a link tag embedded in the header information for all pages that have their own RSS feed.

For example, if you really want to read the next thing I write about Zimbabwe, simply visit the Zimbabwe page and copy and paste the XML channel location into whatever RSS newsreader you’re using.

Is it overkill to have 150 RSS feeds for a personal weblog? Probably, but Conversant makes it so easy to set up that there wasn’t much point in not doing it.

I have to do some work on the best way to format it, but my anti-animal rights site now has more than 200 topical RSS feeds.

So, someone interested primarily in animal rights terrorism could subscribe to the terrorism feed, etc.

I like RSS and tools like Radio, but frankly few of the people who I really want to target with this are aware of the format or the tools. So the next step will be replicating all of those feeds in a Javascript format that most of the people I’m targeting will know how to use.

Thankfully, Conversant makes it relatively easy to set all of this stuff up — it only took me a couple hours to set up those hundreds of RSS feeds, and it will take a similar amount of time to do Javascript versions.

Very cool.

Seth Dillingham posted URLS for some of his RSS feeds. I had sent a message to Jon Udell about the ease with which multipe RSS feeds can be created with Conversant. So, I spent about 15 minutes creating a few at my animal rights site:

AnimalRights.Net RSS Feeds

Seth Dillingham writes about a conversation he had with Jon Udell weblogs and RSS feeds about “the need for a new meta-layer above them to associate them together topically without worrying about their physical storage location. (This is the opposite of Radio Community Server, which associates blogs together by the server they’re stored on.)”

But what really caught my attention was Seth’s take on the need (my word, not his) for weblogs having multiple RSS feeds. Seth wrote,

Lots of weblogs now provide multiple RSS feeds (RSS is a syndication format.) Unless your entire weblog is devoted to a specific subject, and you never stray from that subject, you might want to belong to more than one community. TruerWords, for example, could provide RSS feeds for posts realted to Conversant, Birmans, or digital photography. Those feeds would be picked up by different communities, and it wouldn’t matter that my site isn’t actually hosted by any of them.

This is something I have been working at in my spare time. Frankly, Conversant makes it easy to set up RSS feeds for distinct categories, the real issue is that most of the people I talk to have never heard of RSS.

But as an example, I have a topical faq about animal rights that automatically categorizes the thousand or so articles I’ve written about animal rights into hundreds of categories. The obvious next step is to create topical RSS feeds. For example, a lot of people just want to track what PETA is doing. So I have a PETA RSS feed that shows the last 15 stories I’ve written that are about PETA.

It would take only a couple hours to create RSS feeds for the other 300 or so topics, so people who want to track animal rights terrorism or maybe the Humane Society of the United States could do that too.

Seth’s and Jon’s ideas about a meta-layer that brings together multiple such feeds is the obvious next step. For example, a lot of the warblogs include discussions and critiques of Noam Chomsky. A couple weeks ago there was discussion about starting a multi-editor blog just devoted to dissing Chomsky.

But that’s sort of hard to sustain on such a narrow topic. A much better solution would be for warbloggers who write about Chomsky occasionally to offer an RSS feed of just those stories and then use something like Seth is talking about to bring them together.

The major obstacle to this, of course, is that the number of bloggers who are attaching any sort of metadata to their posts is almost nil. I’ve seen more of it than in the past, since Radio and Movable Type support categorization systems (though neither seems to have the flexibility that Conversant does), but most of the blogs I read are done in Blogger and have no categorization at all (which is extremely frustrating as a user. Many times I visit a site and would like to see all the posts a person has written about Noam Chomsky, but that is very difficult without metadata).