Wednesday, April 18, 2007
All three of the televisions in my house are connected to either a TiVo box or a DirecTV box. Both of these systems give me the option of displaying a “guide” in a grid right on the screen. If I want to see what else I can watch, I click to the guide and browse until I find something I like. That way I can search all I want without changing channels and stopping whatever is currently being shown from being recorded. I love this feature.
My girlfriend fiancée hates it. When she is watching TV she never uses the guide. She just punches the code for E! or VH1 and goes right to the channel. This bothers me both because she sometimes stops recording something by changing channels and also because it just feels inefficient. Why not just use the guide?
I just can’t seem to get into RSS.
I can’t really get upset about it, though, because her method is the same one I use to read my blogs. I just can’t seem to get into feeds. RSS is certainly cool and I dig the ability to subscribe to the feeds of the sites I like. But I never do. I have a bookmark folder in FireFox called “Blogs” and that’s where I save the links of my favorite online reads. About once a day I scroll to the (incredibly cool) “Open All in Tabs” link in that bookmark folder and pop open all my blogs at once. This is definitely less efficient than using an RSS reader — or the system included with Firefox — and only checking the blogs which have been updated recently. Why in the world do I do it this way?
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Wednesday, February 21, 2007
Today I decided that my life would not be complete if I didn’t learn how to use Yahoo! Pipes. So I gave it a shot. I couldn’t really think of anything I wanted in a pipe, so I decided to try building one that would let me search eBay for items on my Amazon wishlist. Shouldn’t be too hard, right?
I learned that it is possible to pull your Amazon Wishlist items as an RSS feed, which is cool. I found an example on the Amazon Web Services Developer Connection. You need to have an Amazon Web Services Access Key (AWSAccessKeyId), but they’ll give those away to anyone nowadays. You don’t need to read the full article; I’ll summarize.
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Monday, December 11, 2006
According to the tag help page at Technorati, all you have to do to have their system “find” your tags is (1) add a rel=”tag” parameter to your links and (2) make sure those links end with the word you are tagging (e.g. something.com/tag). The first part is simple. The second part is easy, but not very practical. More importantly, though, is the fact that neither of these seem to actually work. As far as I can tell Technorati does not read your entire post and strip any tags it finds. In fact it seems that Technorati only reads your RSS and analyzes that to determine how to tag your posts. That’s okay, though, because I can tell you how to convert your WordPress tags into rss category nodes so that Technorati indexes them.
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Thursday, December 7, 2006
A little while ago I cobbled together a tagging system here on the site. The tags appear at the bottom of each post and you can use them to find related content. For some reason, though, they aren’t being caught by Technorati. I’m pretty sure I followed their specs exactly, but no dice. Every time I checked, the only tags that would display for a post in their summary were the categories associated with an entry.
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Wednesday, December 6, 2006
If you’re interested in displaying an RSS feed from an external source using PHP, you simply must grab RSS_Fetch by Drew Phillips. It is by far the easiest implementation that I have found. The readme file is very detailed and the code is well-documented. I highly recommend it.
Monday, June 16, 2003
MagpieRSS: an XML-based (expat) RSS parser in PHP!
Friday, June 1, 2001
AvantGo is a pretty cool site if you have a PDA (a Palm Pilot or a Handspring Visor). It’s been around for a long time and I’ve used it before to get updates on the Gators and Red Sox and such. They have a new page that allows you to connect your mobile phone to your PDA. There’s a wizard that makes it very easy to buy the right cable and / or tell you how to get wireless web service in your area. Cool.
