Wednesday, March 25, 2009

sofobomo rss feeds

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After a few days of tweaking and testing, I'm reasonably convinced this year's blog feed aggregator is working. The feed is here and you can subscribe/ consume it any way you like. As an example, I'm using it for the sidebar on this blog, on the top left. I also have it in an RSS news reader (Google reader). It is currently getting the feeds from all of the blogs that have been entered into the SoFoBoMo website by people who have registered to participate. Currently the list of blogs is not automatically updated, so if you've registered in the last couple of days you may not see any of your content appearing in the feed. The plan is to automate the inclusion of new blogs, soon. For now, if you have a blog with SoFoBoMo-related content that you want added to the pipe, let me know in the comments and I'll add your blog. If you do this, be sure to also add it to your book/ profile on sofobomo.org, or it may well disappear when we automate things.

Entries are filtered on a variety of criteria for inclusion in the feed. Basically if you have SoFoBoMo, in any variety of case ( SOFOBOMO, sofobomo and other permutations), anywhere in the post, title, body, categories or tags, it should get picked up. If you have examples of this not happening, again please let me know in the comments and I'll find out what's wrong. The feed should update approximately once every hour with new content.

This time around I decided to forgo using Yahoo pipes to manage the feed. While the Yahoo pipe worked well and didn't require any hosting, it was a royal pain to update via the graphical coding interface. In particular, adding new blogs took far too long. I've also automated the discovery of the RSS feeds, so we just need to know the blog address, not the RSS feed URL. Let me know if there are any problems.

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

Again, thanks for this! Works as a charm, great work!

Karen said...

This is great - I like being able to see everyone's musing on the SoFoBoMo process all in one place. I won't feel so alone when I start to panic over this. :)
I just started my own SoFo-oriented blog, Gordon, so please feel free to add it when you get a chance. http://krnodil.blogspot.com

Unknown said...

Karen - your feed is in now.

Anita Jesse said...

Another thank you for doing this again this year. I found it extremely handy last year. Soon, I will be posting some SoFoBoMo related posts and will remember to add tags.

Mark Belliveau said...

Yes this is cool. Please add mine if you'd like:

http://thelensmount.com

I just signed up and added it to my book info.

julie said...

very handy indeed, managing to keep track of what everyone's up to, and also found a few new blogs to add to my feed reader.

Are we doing a twitter tag thing, too? I just did #sofobomo when i mentioned it recently...

Unknown said...

Hey Julie - glad to hear it has been useful for you. I've been using the twitter hash tag #sofobomo but just mentioning sofobomo is also probably fine.

Hashtags (the # thing) make some sense for common words - e.g., there is a conference called TED, so #ted tends to mean posts relating to that conference, while if you searched on 'ted' you would get a load of unrelated hits about people's uncle ted and the like.

sofobomo isn't likely to have that sort of confusion, so the hashtag is probably more optional, but it does help other tools that track, search and index twitter to keep up. I might even knock together a tag reader for the site, too.

Anil said...

Gordon, I remember a lot of us bloggers got the code for the SoFoBoMo Yahoo Pipe and put a sidebar/widget to show the Pipe on our blogs.... how can we add a sidebar like yours this time? It would be cool to have everyone's SoFoBoMo posts displaying in a sidebar on our blogs!

Unknown said...

A good question Anil.

Feedburner does provide code you can drop onto a site (that's what I'm using here) I'll see if I can work out how to make it available or post it.

Anil said...

Gordon
I figured a quick-fix way to do this, look at page http://newber.com/anil/journal/sofobomo-2/

the code pased there is:

Oops! This comment page does not allow me to paste htlm code. So you can look at this page:


http://newber.com/anil/journal/myfiles/sofobomo-code.htm