Entries in aggregation (2)

Monday
Sep212009

What you are watching: honorable mentions

This humorous video tour uses Google Earth and captions. It’s getting a lot of attention, having been added just yesterday.

 

This “video” slide show of the PubSubHubbub overview is also quite popular.

 

Wednesday
Mar112009

Yahoo Pipes OPML FAIL (Google Reader)

Go to My Yahoo Pipes if you want to verify or play along: “BROKEN Fetch OPML -do aggregate …”

I went to add a simple feature on this site: a list of entries from blogs I like. Also known as a widget showing a magic RSS feed. Enter Yahoo Pipes. Should be simple enough, except I discovered that almost every OPML parser in use is broken with regard to google reader. I have many many subscriptions, so I create a number of folders for organization. Because I use google reader as my "master" feed subscription list, I think it's important to get these basic tools right. I'm going to solve this step by step,  starting with a better  method for parsing the xml, to handle "nested" OPML a la google reader. Folders are empty parent items with a no URL or "type=rss", just "text", "title", and children.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<opml version="1.0">
  ...
 <body>
  <outline title="arts" text="arts">
   <outline text="Civic Center" title="Civic Center" type="rss" xmlUrl= ... 

So, to summarize: FetchData & Yahoo Pipes Help are deficient, and all the OPML aggregation examples I’ve tested are broken. They use FetchData to make an item list out of body.outline, so you get a list of “folders”, instead of the actual feeds. yahoo-pipes-opml-fail1