The RSS Blog

Reblinks Features

randy@kbcafe.com (Randy Charles Morin) — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 17:35:18 GMT

Some new features were added to Reblinks this month thanks to Seth Robbins. Seth use to be an RMail user and has joined us at Reblinks.

We already added his from field suggestion. Now Reblink mails ae from "Blog Name <noreply@reblinks.com>". This will help you sort Reblink mails by subscription.

Seth also found some improvements we can make for Atom feeds, like providing more than just summary content. We also intend on adding a tip jar at his suggestion.

In the future, we might also add paid subscriptions. The paid subscriptions may or may not have features otherwise available for free. That decision has not been made. All existing features will most likely remain free.

www.reblinks.com

Rebooting the RSS cloud

randy@kbcafe.com (Randy Charles Morin) — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 01:14:44 GMT

Dave Winer has started a new project. He's implementing the RSS cloud. This is a ping server that echos the pings to subscribed clients. His ping server will be lifeliner.org. Unfortunately, this is no better than push. It's great for geeks and Web based aggregators, but it won't work for native RSS clients residing behind corporate firewalls or NATs. That's why push notification failed numerous times over the last decade.

http://rsscloud.org/
http://lifeliner.org
http://www.scripting.com/stories/2009/07/14/rebootingTheRssCloud.html

Requirements from a User

randy@kbcafe.com (Randy Charles Morin) — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 18:53:04 GMT

The best requirements are those from a real hardcore user like Chris. I got this email from him a few weeks ago.

Hi Randy,
I did a quick google search, and found your website to be a plethora of good information. I was hoping you might point me in a good direction (or let me know of a workaround).
I'm looking for an online RSS reader (not one I have to download or install - I want the portability).
I'd like it to have the following characteristics:

Nested folders
Support authenticated feeds
Allow for unlimited unread items
The three I'm looking at -- the "big three" are Google Reader, Bloglines and Newsgator; but each is missing something....
GR and Bloglines have #3, but not #1 or #2. I can live without #2 - since I can use freemyfeed to handle that; but #1 is pretty high on my list.
Newsgator has #1 and #2 but not #3 -- for example, I send my twitter feed through the reader. NG maxes out at 20 unread posts, while Bloglines & GR can accumulate many, many more.
Any suggestions on either how to resolve either of the problems with these; or - is there a product that actually does everything I'm looking for? :)
Thanks for any help you can provide!
Chris

Online Casino Lobby

randy@kbcafe.com (Randy Charles Morin) — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 01:37:27 GMT

Online Casino Lobby (www.onlinecasinolobby.com) is a great guide to online casinos. You don't need to fly to Las Vegas to enjoy a bit of gambling when you can do it online from your couch. Even better, online casinos can have better payout percentages and can offer a greater variety of casino games than traditional land base casinos. The reviewed casinos have payout ratios in the 96 to 98.6% ranges. The website features the best online casinos; Rushmore Casino, Golden Casino, Gambing Club, River Belle, Lucky Nugget and Roxy Palace. Each casino has it's own review, payout percentage and bonus. Bonuses range from as low as $100 to as high as $888. That's another great advantage of online casinos. The bonuses give you free money, so that you can enjoy yourself a lot longer. I went to Vegas this last winter and didn't gamble $1. Why would I? I know it'll be gone in minutes with little chance of me hitting any jackpots.

Beyond reviews, the website also offers instructional webpages to help you enjoy your online play. They have sections to help you Play slots online, blackjack, video poker, roulette, craps, baccarat and keno. They also have informational pages for choosing a casino, tips for beginners and payment options.

This is a paid review.

Pubsubhubbub

randy@kbcafe.com (Randy Charles Morin) — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 14:49:48 GMT

Today, Dave Winer brought up Pubsubhubbub, an attempt by Google and SixApart to add push to RSS and Atom. After reviewing the spec, I'm unsure how this push mechanism is gonna be any different from all the previous failed ones. The problem has always been that pushing to clients behind a Web proxy or firewall is implausible. Geeks can easily poke a hole thru, but mundanes have no clue what we are talking about. How do we get push to a mundane sitting behind his corporate firewall?

People do expect instant feedback. The users of my Reblinks constantly complain that they didn't immediately get an update when they posted their blog entry. When I ask them 1 hour later, if they still didn't get it, they almost always confirm they did. These users want that update in minutes and seconds, not hours. Hmmm. Is it time for push RSS?

http://pubsubhubbub.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/pubsubhubbub-core-0.1.html

Follow-up: Dave has also blogged today about cloud and weblogs.com, two mechanism that for years served as a disguised push mechanism for RSS.

Intellectually Violent Blogging

randy@kbcafe.com (Randy Charles Morin) — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 17:59:53 GMT

I hate bloggers that try to impress by using unobvious acronyms. This can make an article and author look more impressing than they really are, but results in the reader either ignoring the blog post because he doesn't understand the material or spending time looking up definitions that even Google doesn't have an immediate answer for.

Quite often, the authors intent was too look smart. This is a form of intellectual violence and an indication that the blogger doesn't know how to communicate.

On Twitter, this problem is inevitable, as we try to communicate in 140 characters. When blogging, it's simply a knock on the author.

YouTube on my Phone

randy@kbcafe.com (Randy Charles Morin) — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 20:06:26 GMT

Getting sick of YouTube not working on my HTC cell phone from Bell Mobility. WTF is up?! Do I ned to install something or is Google's Youtube just crap on mobile Windows? Does it work on iPhones and Crackberries?

Newspaper Communities

randy@kbcafe.com (Randy Charles Morin) — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 13:47:21 GMT

I'm amazed how many large offline publications (like newspapers) don't allow user feedback, in the style of blog user comments, on every article of their website. Now, I'm sure they have blog-like sections to their websites that allow user comments. But why not everywhere? Here's some examples I came across while reading about the NHL's Phoenix Coyotes.

Now, here's pretty much the same article topic on CBC.

http://www.cbc.ca/money/story/2009/06/15/sp-coyotes-balsillie.html?ref=rss

300+ user comments. I'm not sure what their average is, but it's pretty apparent that readers want to engage in the conversation. From there, it's easy for a website to create a small user community for their readers. Acquire email addresses. Increase pageviews. Increase email subscriptions. Increase ad impressions. Increase profits.

It's no wonder that many of these newspapers are going bankrupt. They're so fixated on their print, that they can't see the goldmine of the Internet. You can't just put your offline article on a website. You have to go the entire nine yards. You need to make the Internet your focus, not just a side business. Print is in decline. Any newspaper that can't make the move will disappear and new online-focused media companies will emerge to take their place. And they'll print newspapers to compliment their offerings and make lots of money doing it.

Update: My dad just left two comments on my blogs today. My own little community.

Facebook Sucks

randy@kbcafe.com (Randy Charles Morin) — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 03:15:49 GMT

I'm so tired of Facebook restrictions. Today, I sent too many messages to my friends (about 20-30 at most). They issued me a warning, so I stopped. Then later, I found out they blocked me from sending further messages. Wait, I stopped when they warned me. And now they say I'm banned from the feature for continued misuse. WTF!? I stopped when I was warned and I wasn't doing anything wrong in the first place. I highly doubt anybody reported me. The restrictions are stupidly in the ballpark of normal usage now. This isn't even the first time this has happened. This is the 2nd time this happens to me. It's also happened to quite a few of my Facebook friends. Wake up Facebook!

Update: WOW! I've even been blocked from writing comments on my own wall posts. Facebook is going right down the suck road.

The Typo Police

randy@kbcafe.com (Randy Charles Morin) — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 01:39:33 GMT

Some of the worst people to have as Twitter friends are the tipo poleasse, or rather as they say, the typo police. These are people who sit there on Twitter and only respond when you make a typo. Give me a break! You gotta know that most of us are typing our statuses on devices with keyboards no bigger than three inches wide. You spell any word incorrectly and they jump you. Whatever! It's about the ideas, not the ability to type on a three inch keyboard.

Rick Sanchez is the Biggest Twitter Fake

randy@kbcafe.com (Randy Charles Morin) — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 19:59:54 GMT

Listening to people like CNN's Rick Sanchez, is like listening to Bible thumpers. He's a populist for the Twitterers. When you spend your entire show BOGUSisming (bending over and greasing up) for the Twitteres, you sound so fake it's ridiculous. How does CNN put up with such public a_s li_kers? This guys is the most fake reporter I've listened to in years. I love CNN and watch it all the time, but when this guy is on, I know he's just greasing up for the Internet geeks and I turn it off. It's so fake. Get a real opinion Rick instead of pandering to the Internet crowd.

http://twitter.com/ricksanchezcnn

RSS 0.9, 1.1 and Atom 0.3 No Longer

randy@kbcafe.com (Randy Charles Morin) — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 03:21:35 GMT

Today, working on a Reblinks support request, I realized that the blog in question was auto-discovering to an Atom 0.3 feed. I was stunned. I did add support for Atom 1.0, but there's no way I'm support Atom 0.3 or any version of RSS other than RSS 2.0. Further, I noticed their RSS 2.0 auto-discovery was incorrect. It works in Firefox, but doesn't work in IE or Reblinks. I'm simply amazed that a major news publisher like Canoe is using a deprecated version of Atom and misimplemented RSS auto-discovery. I'll be sending them an email, unfortunately a search of their website doesn't reveal any proper webmaster contact points. I sent an email to the authors.

Google Blog Search Sucks

randy@kbcafe.com (Randy Charles Morin) — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 17:25:51 GMT

With the recent crappiness of Google Blog Search, I've come to realize there no longer exist any blog search engines that work. First Google killed them all by being simply better. Then they've killed themselves by sucking big time. Is there anything new that tracks RSS and doesn't suck?

As per Google Blog Search Sucks, I just did a search for links to talk-sports.net just now and the results were empty. Yesterday, there were hundreds. I'm sure later today, there'll be dozens. It's totally unreliable. Worse, it picks up sidebar links, so I mostly get results that are not even in the RSS feed. Ridiculous!

3000 Emails per Day

randy@kbcafe.com (Randy Charles Morin) — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 00:33:36 GMT

Reblinks sent 3,000 emails in one day. WOOT!

TNT RaceBuddy

randy@kbcafe.com (Randy Charles Morin) — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 19:11:56 GMT

Watching the Pocono 500, I loaded up NASCAR.com and TNT RaceBuddy. You can attached your MySpace, Twitter and Facebook accounts and update your status in-race. I like what they did. Unfortunately, there's so many status updates (too many fans) that it looks like a bunch of noice and zero conversation.

http://www.tnt.tv/sports/nascar/racebuddy09_live/?o_cid=rbc18

Update: RaceBuddy hung up on my on my 2nd update :(

Bing.com and RSS

randy@kbcafe.com (Randy Charles Morin) — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 23:10:03 GMT

I'm very happy that Bing.com, like it's predecessor Live.com, supports RSS. Any Web search (rss) has a very predictable RSS feed (rss). Simply add the format=rss parameter to any URI. This appears to be exactly what live.com did, but I can't remember off hand.

I was surprised that all the Live.com RSS feeds got redirected to the equivalent Bing.com HTML webpages. An extremely smart RSS client might be able to rediscover the RSS feed, but it would have been better had they permanently redirected the old Live.com RSS feeds to the equivalent Bing.com RSS feeds. I'm sure they lost thousand, possibly millions of subscriptions because of this small failure. Something to remember, if you are into designing RSS search feeds.

http://www.bing.com/

Thanks Dave! for RSS and Blogs

randy@kbcafe.com (Randy Charles Morin) — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 18:44:26 GMT

I just wanted to thank Dave Winer for inventing blogging and RSS. I haven't worked a day in 32 months. I hated working for stupid co's. Thanks Dave!

Filter your Twitter RSS

randy@kbcafe.com (Randy Charles Morin) — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 03:11:31 GMT

Scott Kingery: RSS is not dead. It is the glue that holds the web together.

http://www.techlifeweb.com/2009/05/30/how-to-filter-your-twitter-feed/

This is a great article on filtering the RSS in Twitter using Yahoo! Pipes.

Reblinks Goes Beta

randy@kbcafe.com (Randy Charles Morin) — Wed, 20 May 2009 02:14:03 GMT

I just upgraded Reblinks to Beta. Still tones of work, but it's ready for people to start using and reporting bugs (to me randy@kbcafe.com). It needs some major ease-of-use work still. The email engine is working and sent 70 emails yesterday. This is the start of great things.

http://www.reblinks.com/

Reblinks Live May 20th

randy@kbcafe.com (Randy Charles Morin) — Thu, 07 May 2009 17:27:59 GMT

On my 40th birthday, May 20th, Reblinks will go live with an RMail 2.0 engine. And this time I won't sell it to some morons at NBC. Promise.

RSS is Dead? Give me a Break.

randy@kbcafe.com (Randy Charles Morin) — Thu, 07 May 2009 02:29:06 GMT

Steve Gilmour says RSS is dead. That's a prediction more than a thousand times proven false. What Steve doesn't realize is that all his arguments for RSS dying are actually arguments for why it has won the day. Why? Steve thinks RSS is a user application. What he doesn't realize is that the very site he claims is putting RSS to death relies on RSS itself. How many have created bots that use the Twitter API to automatically post content from RSS to their Twitter page? Go to your Twitter updates page and guess what? Your Twitter updates page has an RSS feed as well. RSS is not an application, it's a platform. It's here to stay. Even if those that don't understand the technology think otherwise.

Thanks Candem!

http://www.techcrunchit.com/2009/05/05/rest-in-peace-rss/
http://www.geeksaresexy.net/2009/05/06/rss-is-dead-long-live-rss/

Reblinks Email Service

randy@kbcafe.com (Randy Charles Morin) — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 07:49:42 GMT

Two years ago yesterday, I made the worst mistake of my life. I'm rewriting the Rmail engine for Reblinks and I'm getting closer and closer to an Alpha release. In the first version, I intend to support polling of RSS 2.0 or compatible feeds. I'm going to add SMTP support to begin, then MetaWeblogAPI and finally Twitter. Ya, I don't really like Twitter, but you geeks sure do. Polling can be set for either daily or hourly. The engine will be stateless, unlike Rmail. That is, I won't have to cache feeds. We'll see how this goes. I'm going to rely on pubDate to determine whether an item should be sent. I was hoping to have this ready at the end of March, but I've been really lazy this last month plus.

http://www.reblinks.com/

Is FeedBurner Dying?

randy@kbcafe.com (Randy Charles Morin) — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 14:56:19 GMT

Yesterday, I moved the blog and domain for The RSS Blog to a new server. Within an hour, a user reported a problem. I investigated and realized that FeedBurner was now picking up the wrong feed. It appears that it was not resolving the IP address with every pull, but rather using a cached IP address. I figured this was a temporary situation, but now it's 20 hours later and FeedBurner was still picking up the wrong feed. Worse, I noted that the feed itself had not been updated in those 20 hours. I pinged the FeedBurner server and that didn't resolve the problem. I ReSynced my feed and that did fix the problem. I have to ask myself how many people are RSS/FeedBurner savvy enough to have fixed this problem. FeedBurner really isn't for RSS savvy people like myself, but rather for the Joe-Blogger who doesn't want to manage his own RSS feed. More and more, I'm reading about user problems on FeedBurner. Just search for FeedBurner on Google Blog Search and most all you find is users struggling with the service. Somebody at Google should be doing this search daily and helping these guys. Is this service dying?

I think it's time for us all to call it quits with FeedBurner.

FriendFeed

randy@kbcafe.com (Randy Charles Morin) — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 13:40:23 GMT

Lot's of noise about FriendFeed these days. IMHO, FriendFeed+Twitter is like a really bad implementation of Facebook's implementation of Twitter. The ability to respond to status updates is built right into Facebook, whereas FriendFeed+Twitter are too separate applications. I use Twitter, but when people give me links to FriendFeed, I simply don't know what to do. I'm sure FriendFeed has its own advantages, unfortunately I don't know what they are and I'm pretty certain most of your readers don't either.