Archive for the 'RSS' Category

Krantenkoppen op popnuuz.com

Published on May 11, 2009 in Belgium and RSS. 3 Comments

Een tijdje geleden merkte ik dat krantenkoppen.be verdwenen was. Ik gebruikte die site regelmatig om een overzicht te krijgen van wat er in de kranten beweegde bewoog die dag, “wat ik gelezen zou moeten hebben”. Na enkele weken dacht ik: nou dan maak ik hem gewoon zelf, maar beter. Dus ik begon te experimenteren met het importeren van RSS feeds en het opvangen van het klikken op artikels zodat ik “populaire artikels” kon tonen. De eerste versie was nogal traag dus ik stak er op verschillende niveaus ‘caching‘ in, en de uiteindelijk goed werkende versie staat nu online:

belgie.popnuuz.com – overzicht van Belgische krantenartikels

Krantenkoppen: belgie.popnuuz.com

Ik heb mijn inspiratie getrokken uit zowel krantenkoppen.be als popurls.com . Je ziet een korte inhoud van het artikel als je over de link gaat met je muis (‘mouse-over‘) zodat je beter kan beslissen of je het artikel wil lezen of niet. Er is een splitsing op topics: zowel inhoudelijk (binnenland/buitenland/economie/…) als geografisch (per provincie), en per categorie wordt er een top 50 bijgehouden, alsook een globale top 50. Hoe meer mensen de site gebruiken als nieuwsoverzicht en doorklikken naar artikles, hoe waardevoller de Populaire Artikels in Belgie – belgie.popnuuz.com/pop link wordt.

De bronnen zijn, naast de kranten, ook de tijdschriftten (Knack/Trends) en enkele websites (Clint, Brusselblogt/Gentblogt). De URL laat vermoeden dat er ook een franstalige versie kan komen, en dat is dan ook correct. Ik ben nu nog bezig met het verzamelen van  de juiste RSS feeds daarvoor.

Check het eens uit!

CalendarBurner: Feedburner for iCal calendars

Published on October 28, 2008 in Google, RSS and Web2.0. 3 Comments Tags: , , .

I am currently using my experience with milonga.be to build a similar site for Tango in Bulgaria. One of the major components of the site is the tango calendar. In this case I have chosen not to use a special iCal visualisation tool (more on that later in a series posts on Tango2.0), but just the standard Google Calendar IFRAME-based widget.

It’s not a bad widget, but it’s too limited. You can only display “Day/Week/Month/Agenda” style, the colors and fonts are fixed and it does funny stuff for events that continue after 12:00AM (which tango events regularly do, believe me).

I’ve already talked about the fact that iCal is a sissy format and that Gcal needs some more features. I was just thinking that it would be nice if some company would jump on that and provide the whistles and bells for iCal/vCal feeds (like those of Google Calendar), just like Feedburner did with RSS/podcast feeds (and they got bought by Google, so maybe their idea wasn’t half bad). So I introduce the following concept: CalendarBurner (since the Calburner/iCalburner domains are taken).

Continue reading ‘CalendarBurner: Feedburner for iCal calendars’

Grazr Widget for RSS feeds

Published on September 5, 2007 in RSS. Closed

I am always on the lookout for original ways to use RSS feeds, and the Grazr widget service is quite neat for text-based feeds. It consists of a Flash-based reader with a neat interface. Here an example for OverheardInNewYork:

And they pointed me to SimplePie, a simple replacement for MagPieRSS, the PHP-based RSS library I always used. Another thing to check out!

Reinventing the wheel: Twitter backchannel

Published on April 18, 2007 in barcamp and RSS. 10 Comments

I was chatting a bit with Bart about Barcamp, and I asked the inevitable question: “Should we do something with Twitter?” To which Bart’s answer was: “Maybe, but what?”. Let’s see:

  • create a “BarcampBrussels” Twitter account, which would serve 2 purposes: 1) be a source of Barcamp organisational info (“Speaker XYZ has to leave early, wants to do his speech before noon, anyone wanna swap?“) and 2) be the ‘glue’ between all Twitterers that are interested in Barcamp: the creation of a BarcampTwitterFriends group, of those who follow that channel.
  • But the Barcamp Twitter account also gets the updates of all its friends, so wouldn’t that be good info too? Well, you do get *all* updates, so not only the “Barcamp speech about XYZ rocks” but also the “feeding my cat” messages. What if you could create a filter on the aggregated messages? Hey: Yahoo! Pipes can do that! We take the RSS feed with all the Barcamp Twitter friends (twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline/[code].rss), pipe it through Yahoo and only use the updates with the word "Barcamp"!

    There are some issues with that: people have to remember to prefix each Barcamp-related comment with "Barcamp" (they choose a differente namespace, as it were). That's cumbersome and ugly. Also, the Twitter RSS only lists the 20 last updates, so the filter might easily remove all updates and leave an empty screen. Even worse, it seems the RSS feed is only updated every X minutes (easily 30, from my experience). So it seems we should have to use the Twitter API to create a live-updating feed. Imagine we do that:

    Then we refresh it every X seconds, project it on a screen and tada!! ... ladies and gentlemen: the backchannel! We're not the first to think of this, of course.

What's your take: should we do anything with Twitter? Set up a group chat in MSN Messenger or Skype? Or use an classic IRC backchannel? (Who still has an IRC client on his laptop these days?)