As recently as just a couple years ago, I didn't "get" RSS feeds. I understood the general concept, but I didn't understand WHY. What's the point? Why all the hubub? Then one day, it just clicked. RSS feeds allow me to be notified that a particular website I'm interested in has been updated with new content, without having to remember to browse to the site everyday to check for myself, and without (this is the kicker) having to give them my email address. When I don't want to get updates anymore, I just cancel the feed on my end. No need to figure out what hoops I'm supposed to jump through on their site to try to unsubscribe, no worries about them selling my address to a spammer, nothing. I have complete control... as long as the site provides an RSS feed (which a couple years ago, not that many did).

Now, two years later, I can't believe that some sites STILL don't provide RSS feeds. Case in point... the Missoulian. This is a website for a newspaper! They have updates every day, but I really don't want to have to remember to go check their website every day (which I don't and that's why I rarely go there) and I don't want to have to wade through a bunch of garbage on the site to see what's new. I just want a simple list of headlines to automatically show up on my computer as they become available, and I want to be able to click any that interest me to go right to the full story at the Missoulian. This is the 21st Century. This is how news gets distributed now. Everybody from The New York Times to I Can Has Cheezburger? have RSS feeds now, but the Missoulian? Noooooo... well, until now. But not becuase they did anything about it.

I finally got fed up with not being able to keep up on the local news as easily as I could on the national and international news. So, I wrote a little Ruby script to figure out what the latest stories and breaking news was at the Missoulians website, and format it into a couple RSS feeds. And, because (as I've said before), "you're all that, and more," I'm giving it to you, too.

One word of warning, though. The underlying HTML at the Missoulian has the consistency and structure of potato salad, making it very difficult to programatically figure out where the news stories are inside the mess, and therefore any little change they make to their site could easily break the feed. Considering they should be seriously thinking about redesigning their site anyway, it's only a matter of time before this happens. Or, maybe not... who knows. Anyway, if the feed breaks, I'll see about fixing it as soon as I damn well feel like it... until they start paying me for the service.

So, without further ado, here's the links for the feeds. Copy and paste the URLs into your favorite feed reader. And post a comment here to let me know how you like them.

Another thing that I didn't really "get" until recently were Podcasts. Podcasts are like RSS feeds (in fact, they are RSS feeds), but instead of delivering text and a link off to some news site or blog, they provide a link to an mp3 file that your computer automatically downloads for you. When people hear mp3 they often think "music" but podcasts are usually just people talking, and the first ones I ever tried to listen to were people who really, really liked to hear themselves talk and who didn't say anything I was particularly interested in listening to. Which is why I didn't "get" it. "Why the hell do people want to listen to this crap?" I asked myself. A great many (maybe even most) are still like that. But I've come to realize that hidden among all the garbage are a few really, really good gems. Podcasts get their name from iPods, but you do NOT need an iPod to subscribe or listen to them. Any podcast client (google for it) that you can install on your computer will do, although having a convienent way to move them onto an mp3 player to so you can listen to them, for instance, while driving to work, mowing the lawn, and so on is extra nice. It's kinda like TIVO for internet talk radio.

So, anyway. While working on the above RSS feeds, I had an idea. KUFM, the local Public Radio station posts the evening news as an mp3 file on their site, but it's not a podcast. While I'm doing these RSS feeds for the Missoulian, why don't I turn that news into a podcast for KUFM? Then I can listen to the previous nights news while on my bike on my way to work the next morning! So... I did that too, and again, since you're all that, and more.... (note: they seem to be having some audio issues with the last couple episodes, but my tests for last weeks shows worked fine, so as soon as they solve that, this should work great.)

And to close things off, Here's a short list of some of my absolute favorite podcasts. Load your mp3 player up with these, and like me, you may never want to turn your TV on again.

Tags: RSS, Missoula, Podcasts.
Comments: 0 [add comment]

Anyone subscribed to an RSS feed for this blog should update their feed URLs. The old ones should still be working for now, but it won't be long until I remove support for them and only support the new ones. So, consider yourselves warned.

I'm due to give a presentation on OpenID at the upcoming Missoula Web Discussion Group meeting and figured before I do a presentation on it, maybe I should actually implement it somewhere first. I've been meaning to implement OpenID on the blog for a while and figured that volunteering to do the presentation would light the proverbial fire under my you-know-what.

However, even longer than I've been wanting to implement OpenID on the blog, I've been meaning to convert it all over to a RESTful routing architecture. So, I sat down this morning with the intent to do that first, then work on the OpenID stuff. There was one unexpected hurdle though.

Writing the blog software myself was, in part, a practice Rails project that I started a long time ago, and I haven't really done much to update or improve the code since the original writing. It seems my coding practices have improved considerably since then. As soon as I opened up the first model I knew I had more to do. It was f'ugly, to put it nicely, and I wasn't about to start trying to build new functionality on top of that garbage. So, some major refactoring took place this morning before I could even start on the RESTful refactoring.

So, now it's late afternoon, I haven't refactored as much as I'd like but it's much better and the routes are now RESTful. However, I haven't even started on the OpenID stuff yet. Ugh.

But anyway, the RESTful upgrade meant that the RSS URLs needed change too. I managed to keep the old feed URLs working, but I'm not going to leave that in long. So, update your RSS client with the new addresses if you want to keep getting updates.

Tags: Rails, REST, RSS.
Comments: 0 [add comment]

Somehow I just recently managed to stumble on OpenCongress.org. It seems to have more info and better organized than VoteSmart.org (which is still a good site, don't get me wrong).

OC appears to have tons of RSS/Atom feeds available (which is how it should be), and I mean TONS!!!

For instance, there are 4178 'issue areas' defined by the 'Congressional Research Service' that get assigned to bills. Basically, they're 'tags'. Yes, that's right, the US Government is using tags. Who says politicians aren't hip? You can subscribe to the feed for any one of the tags, errr, issue areas. So, if "Gerrymandering" is a particularly important political issue to you, then it's absurdly easy to keep track of what congress is doing about it.

There are even feeds to alert you when a particular bill or congress person you're interested in gets mentioned in the news, or somebody's blog.

And there's a lot more, but the coolest thing about OpenCongress.org, is that it's powered by Rails.

So, keep track of your representativs, and don't forget to let them know how they're doing.

Tags: Politics, Rails, RSS.
Comments: 0 [add comment]
  • RSS Working
  • Posted By: Jon Garvin
  • on 21 Mar 2007 00:15

I got RSS working for the blog software last week sometime, and just got around to deploying the update to the server. Seems to work well.

It's only been in the last year that I really started to understand the power of RSS feeds... and maybe I still don't understand, but now that I think I 'get it', it seems that a lot of sites are doing it wrong.

For instance, when I subscribe to the RSS feed on this page, I expect to get notified of new stories that have to do with the "Environment and Energy". However, the stories currently showing on the feed tied to that page have headlines like "Microsoft probes possible Xbox Live fraud", and "Google will buy TV ad company, Blodget predicts". WTF? If I can get to a single page that narrows down the list of news articles to a specific subject or category, then the RSS feed linked on that page should only notify me about new stories on THAT page... not the entire damn site.

So, the RSS feeds on MY podunk site work the way I think they should. For instance, if you're only interested in articles about my pet peeves, and not remotely interested in articles on RSS (unless such articles also happen to be about one of my pet peeves, too), then you simply need to go to the page listing all my posts with the 'PetPeeves' tag, and subscribe to it's RSS feed. Then your feed reader will only be alerted to new articles that appear on THAT page, and you won't hear anything about new articles with me rambling on about Energy Conservation, or Hiking, or Flying Spaghetti Monsters, unless any of those posts also happen to be about a pet peeve of mine in that subject area. Of course, if you really do want to be notified of every new post, regardless of subject matter, then subscribe to the feed on the main page and that's what you'll get. What a concept!!! I ought to patent this! And the code to make that work took me a whole evening to do... having never coded an RSS feed before in my life. Shame on you CNET.

Tags: RSS.
Comments: 0 [add comment]