Entries Tagged 'Feeds' ↓

The only real frustration I’ve had since switching to Wordpress has been with feedburner. The disadvantage of not actually writing static files to disk is that it’s very difficult to validate each and every address that will get you to a particular feed. And of course I want feedburner to access one particular spot to slurp my feed and to declare the feedburner location in my headers so that no one else does. The worst part is that although there are at least 3 plugins that are supposed to deal with this and at least 6 detailed pages full of instructions on the web, nothing seems to have worked… but nevertheless, it does in fact seem to work, at least for the moment (it didn’t over the weekend).

So - now that comments are working on this blog again (thanks, WP!), if you (dear reader) could let me know if my feeds seem to be working for you (and at what address) I would very much appreciate it.

from Adobe: myFeedz - the social newspaper. I haven’t yet seen what they’re really trying to do with this, but it’s pretty slick.

“Unfortunate RSS Accidents” is brought to you by Aaron Straup Cope, blogger extraordinaire and, recently, an unparalelled mover of house and home. Aaron’s made a recent post about “Things I like about San Francisco”, which is fine. Unfortunately, though, his RSS feed sends only headlines. So if you read his feed, you would have seen the following:

Not exactly what he meant, I don’t think!

a new search service that allows you to Roll Your Own Search Engine by specifying the sources in which you’d like a search to be performed. I’ve been hoping to see something like this for years. Very Web 2.0 as well.

the beta of Google Reader, their entry in the RSS/syndication feed reader sweepstakes. It looks fabulous, but it’s pretty blah overall. It offers no new features or innovations of any kind, that I can tell, and the usability is crap. Pretty much UNusable, overall. They break the browser and force you to use their crap navigation just so you can see their supposedly tasty Ajax goodness. Give me a nice interface, but don’t break my scroll wheel! What is it, 1996?

I got my invite to Odeo earlier this evening, and from my cursory look-see, the service looks pretty good. The site is easy to navigate and use, and is presented in a very straightforward manner. I downloaded the Odeo Syncr app and gave it a try, but I also was very happy to note later that you don’t have to use it - you can also subscribe to an RSS feed of your subscriptions and use your normal feedreader to download the podcasts, which is probably what I’ll do.

There is an important feature that will likely be the next tempest in the blog-teapot - but that I think is totally cool and web-like. The site is to a great extent simply organizing links to podcasts that already exist elsewhere, so the original show stays only on the site it came from. At least that is the case for content that has not been expressly put into Odeo by its creator. You can be sure that there’s going to be some sort of outcry over this, but that will be misplaced to say the least.

Beyond that, the little inline Flash player is pretty good, and for some reason your subscription list is hidden and only accessible via the Sync section. It really should be a site-wide sidebar item or something.

Anyhow… I can’t wait to see the content creation tools, and maybe soon I’m going to have to motivate myself to do something in this medium. Or maybe I’ll just convince Nadia to give it a try - after all, she’s the all-pro radio host in the family. I’m sure her skills would translate very well to podcasting!