Random rants and wandering words
What? You didn’t know today was OPML Thursday? Neither did I, until I threw that up there in the title of this post.
I figured that the especially RSS-geeky among you might care to peruse my current Google Reader OMPL file. I think I removed all personal/private/incriminating feeds. Hopefully.
How about you? What’s in your reader?
[tags]opmlthursday, opml[/tags]
I just got done reading through a post today over at Web Worker Daily called Needing a Gentle Intro to RSS Feeds. The author talks about some frustration/confusion she has with “getting” Google Reader and figuring out how to go through her feeds.
After reading the article, it seems to me that her problem is mostly self-imposed. She subscribes to a total of 36 feeds and seems completely stressed-out over categorization/tagging. Here’s the deal: at 36 feeds, you probably don’t need categorization/tagging. If anything maybe break out the 12 Second Life feeds into their own category, but when you’re creating categories for one or two feeds, you’re wasting time.
A big key to RSS with Google Reader is to stop organizing and start reading.
A river of news is a beautiful thing. At 36 feeds, just hit the “All Items” link in Google Reader and scroll your way through life.
[tags]rss, googlereader, riverofnews[/tags]
I love using RSS Feeds and my feed aggregator as my primary portal for incoming information, and I love sharing my photography on Flickr. Let’s take a look at making the most of Flickr’s RSS feeds. The site provides a variety of feeds that can be used to bring relevant photos and photo information into your aggregator.
When we’re talking photography, visual display matters. For a lot of text-based RSS feeds, the formatting of the aggregator isn’t a big deal since the information is all in text. As we look at retrieving photos via RSS, some aggregators are going to stand above the rest for photography.
Here’s a screenshot of how FeedDemon displays a folder of photo feeds:
This is a great view of a photo feed, allowing easy click-through to the individual items as desired. Other aggregators, such as Google Reader, will display the photo as an item in the feed without special formatting.
Flickr offers a couple RSS feeds which provide you with a glimpse at photos as they relate to you and your use of the social features of the site. The first is the Recent Comments feed, which lets you know who left comments on your photos. This is similar to clicking the “New Comments” link that you’ll find on Flickr’s homepage. The easiest way to get the URL for your recent comments feed is to go to your recent comments page (while logged into Flickr) and finding the Feed link near the lower left corner (look for the feed symbol 
).
The second personalized feed is a feed of your contacts’ photos. As I’ve mentioned before, the power in Flickr lies in the community features, and I often visit my contacts page to see the latest work posted by the folks I follow. Those photos can also be seen via a feed. Log into Flickr, go to your friends page, then grab the Feed link near the lower left corner (again, look for the feed symbol ).
Flickr also makes it easy to grab feeds for groups. You can get a feed for either the group photo pool, or the discussion topics. You might be noticing a pattern on how to find the feeds. For the discussion feed, just hit the group homepage (for example, Engineering as Art) and you’ll find the feed near the lower left. The photo pool feed can be found by going to a group’s pool page, then grabbing the feed link from the lower left… marked by the feed icon ()as usual.
Flickr doesn’t yet offer an easy way to grab a search feed, with the exception of tags. You can get an RSS feed of photos with a given tag by using the following feed:
http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?tags=TAGNAMEHERE&lang=en-us&format=rss_200
…and replacing TAGNAMEHERE with the tag you want.
What’s better than a bunch of Flickr feeds? Mixing and combining, of course! With the variety of feeds from Flickr, it’s fairly simple to use Yahoo Pipes to mix things up. In about 15 minutes I created a Flickr Portland Megafeed which mixes a half dozen Portland-related sources on Flickr, does some combining and filtering, and spits out a big feed of things related to Portland. You should be able to grab the feed, or check out the source.
RSS is a powerful way to consume information and Flickr is the most popular photo community on the ‘net. Combining the two provides a lot of value for information and photo junkies such as myself.
I’ve got a blog post queued up, ready to go, talking about the results of my feed categorization. But as I’ve started to plunk a few feeds and widgets onto my dashboard, I’m realizing something that might just be a show stopper, or at least will require a major shift in the way I view things.
Having my screen filled with things I’ve already read seems like a big waste of space. Sure, the built-in Netvibes RSS module lets me configure how many items to show, and you can “mark as read” so that they’re not bold, but I still have a screen full of widgets with grayed-out headlines that are no longer relevant. This is annoying on the big screen, but when I’m mobile this is a huge usability issue… I have to sit on scroll though tons of old data to pick out the new stuff. Tonight was the first time I seriously tried to use the Netvibes mobile interface, and having to scroll though screen after screen of already-read data was a huge time-wasting pain in the ass.
Is there a better RSS module? I found a Greasemonkey script that claims it’ll do what I’m asking on the full screen version. I haven’t tried it out, but my biggest usability beef is with the mobile interface. Unless there’s a module which can hide read items from the server side, this may be the end of my Netvibes adventure…
[tags]netvibes, rss, mobile, dashboards, information[/tags]
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