What is RSS and what can it do for you?

RSS is a way for web sites to publish their content into a format that a computer can understand.

• Date published
• Title
• Description
• Link to the original source

What Problem Does RSS Solve?

We all have different sites on the Internet that we like to visit again and again. Usually we save this sites in our bookmarks and click on the bookmark to return to the site. Then we start reading, stopping when we reach stuff that looks like we’ve read it before. It’s something we all do, and it works perfectly fine unless you’re trying to read a lot of information — then it can be slow because you don’t know when a site has updated, and you don’t know where you stopped reading before.

RSS solves this problem. Every website that supports RSS has a list of new information (with a title, description and link back to the source) and the time when it was published. We can use computer programs called RSS readers to keep track of the websites we want to follow and what we have and haven’t read on those sites.

Your RSS reader program gives you a one-stop place to visit all of the sites that you think are important on the Internet. You follow a site by subscribing to its RSS feed (like subscribing to a newspaper, but with less clutter). Then instead of using your bookmarks to visit the site you use your RSS reader to keep track of what’s new.

This video explains RSS better than I ever could. You can view a better quality version of the video here.

RSS Readers

The first thing you need to use RSS is a program that can read RSS feeds. I recommend:

• Google Reader (web-based)
• Bloglines (web-based)
• Feed Demon (windows)
• Net News Wire (mac)

How Do I Know If a Site Supports RSS?

Look for the RSS icon. If you’re using Firefox, you’ll be able to see the RSS icon in the address bar for RSS enabled websites.

When you see the icon click on it and you’ll be prompted to subscribe to the site. Try it:

• Subscribe with RSS

Advanced Users

So you’ve got a way to keep up to date on your favorite websites. Instead of visiting the websites or getting them email to you, you can read them in your RSS reader. Here’s a few other things you can do with RSS.

Activity Streaming or Lifestreaming

As you use different websites on the Internet, it’s really easy to take all that information you’re creating (uploading photos, commenting on sites, sharing links) and put it all in one place. If you’ve ever used Facebook, it’s like the Facebook mini-feed but for the entire Internet. I recommend Friend Feed for lifestreaming.

Filtering Information

RSS is a way to manage more information. Yahoo has released a really nifty tool called Pipes that lets you create filters on any RSS feed. Unfortunately, it’s a bit hard to create a pipe unless you’re already a geek. But it’s easy to search for a pipe that already does what you want.

Aggregating Information

This is where you start to really see the power of RSS: people can take all those RSS feeds and build interesting services on top of them.

• http://popurls.com/ – what’s most popular on the web
• http://alltop.com/ – the latest headlines from the most popular sites based on genre
• http://techmeme.com/ – the latest technology related stories
• http://www.rssmeme.com/ – the most popular stories people are sharing (tech heavy)
• http://linkriver.com/popular/week/ – what people are sharing (tech heavy)
• http://readburner.com/ – what people are sharing (tech heavy)

Photo by kk

www.staticphotography.com

My geek want of the day is getting an RSS feed of my Xbox 360 game activity so that I can use it with lifestreaming services. For once I’m not the only person who feels this need. There’s at least two of us! :)

I’m not sure why Microsoft doesn’t make an RSS feed of your Xbox Live activity available. The information is all there, they publish it as a gamercard. But they don’t give you access to the raw data to do with as you please unless you’re a member of the Xbox Community Developers Program. Here are the various ways you can access your Xbox 360 Gamercard to use with other websites.

Method 1: Embed Gamercard as an Image

By far the easiest way to display your Xbox 360 info is by using a Gamercard image. You can embed the image or flash in your web site and it’ll display in real time. There’s also a WordPress plugin that uses a slightly hacky method of using regular expressions on the official Xbox gamercard.

Method 2: Facebook App

Xbox 360 Live Gamercard is a Facebook app that will give you all the info right on your page.

…will show you what games you play along with your Gamerscore and achievements for each game. A few times a day, your Gamercard will be updated and your new achievements published to the news feed for all of your friends to marvel at through our use of exclusive Xbox Live APIs. See who your friends are on Xbox Live and there is also a leaderboard. Enjoy.

It works for Xbox 360, Games for Windows and Live Anywhere. Your profile will show your latest games, how many achievements you have got in each, and you can compare games with your friends.

Here’s an example of Modern Life Is Rubbish’s gamertag:

There are other FB apps that do the same thing like Xbox Live Express.

Method 3: Broadcast your Xbox 360 Status to Twitter

Duncan MacKenzie has written a Windows app for broadcasting your Xbox activity to Twitter. You install it on your computer, put in your Xbox gamertag and Twitter username/password and it’ll update Twitter with your Xbox activity.

Method 4: SOAP/REST APIs!

Duncan earns huge geek points in my book for putting up SOAP/REST APIs to the Xbox gamertag info. This is what Microsoft should have made available and in my books it underlines everything that’s wrong the M$.

He explains where he gets the information from:

It is not from scraping and it is not from any publicly available source. I joined the Xbox Community Developer Program (XCDP), which is an official program designed to support folks who are building community sites (forums, reviews, blogs, etc…) around Xbox related topics.

Many folks who want Xbox info, are not working on a large site like the people in the XCDP, which is exactly why I created my service. This way, people who are building a small tool or script, most likely to be used by a small number of folks, can have access to some well formed and easy to use data.

What if you would qualify for the XCDP? Well, at the moment I don’t have any direct link for you, but I’ll ask around to see if I can find a link or a contact for anyone may qualify and would like to sign up….

Method 5: Yahoo Pipe RSS Feed

Because Duncan was awesome enough to provide a REST API for the Xbox 360, I was able to create some pipes for converting that information to an RSS feed. You can use it with lifestreaming apps like Friend Feed until they get access to the developer program and are able to officially support the Xbox 360.

The RSS feed includes your gamerscore and achivements in the description, as well as a thumbnail of the game. The links point to your Xbox.com Live profile so people can compare games with you.

I’ve put together two different pipes

1. Displays your Gamertag in the feed title, and links to your Xbox.com Live profile
2. Does not display your Gamertag and does not link to your Xbox.com Live profile (more private)

Click on the link you want, enter your gamertag and run the pipe. Then click on More options and Get as RSS.

The blog posts might have been slow lately, but that’s only because there’s been an accumulation of interesting projects piling up on my hard drive. Here’s a few things that are in the pipe (which I’m talking about to stop my procrastination and force me to release them):

• Sandbox Theme for Tumblr so that you can use Sandbox CSS themes on tumblr.com
• Tumblr Theme Templates to make it easier to develop themes for tumblr.com without having to upload your theme to tumblr.com
• Tumblr automatic backup + restore
• WordPress.com automatic backup
• Twitter There Will Be Followers – program to automatically follow back anyone who is following you on Twitter
• PostMaster html2blog – automatically post formatted HTML to Tumblr, Blogger or WordPress
• rss2html – powerful templating system for converting an RSS feed into HTML

It’s the last one I want to talk about. I’ve gotten tired of using Yahoo Pipes + Pipe Cleaner to build digest posts. It’s kind of a pain in the butt. So I want something that can take an rss feed, convert it to html so that I can use another program for automatically posting it to the blog. I’m not going the plugin route because of WordPress.com’s inability to support javascript or PHP plugins.

This is what I’ve come up with.

The idea is simple: give it an RSS feed and a template file and it will fill in parts of that template with data from RSS feed. The syntax looks like HTML with some Ruby code plugged in. I think it’ll be too hard to use for novices, but people who are comfortable with HTML and RSS should be able to use it without having to know how to program.

What can you use it for? Well, my weekly digest can be created using it. Any kind of ‘daily tweets’ type of post could be built using it. But those are just the easy stuff. It’s flexible enough that the sky is the limit. If you can do something with Yahoo Pipes, then you can do it with this program, except you’ll have fine grained control over the output.

Here’s an example.

Template

<% @rss.remove_items_tagged(['Best of Feeds', 'Monthly Digest']) %>
<ul>
  <% @rss.items.each do |item| %>
  <li>
    <%= item.title_link %><br />
    <%= item.description.no_html %><br />
  </li>
  <% end %>
  <li><%= credit_link %></li>
</ul>

HTML Output

• Searching for the Perfect Inline Code Documentation Tool
  I have an intense love automatic documentation generation. Nothing makes me more tickled pink than seeing code and documentation living side by side in perfect harmony. I hate seeing documentation put on the company intranet only to diverge from the code it’s supposed to explain as the days go past. I hate hitting my head against a brick wall as I’m pouring through the source code trying to understand an API because at no point does it mention that it’s documented in a Word doc in another directory. This is my rule of programming: documentation should live beside the code it documents, in the comments, especially if it’s API documentation.
• Mashing Your MP3 Music Collection with Last.FM
  One geek itch I’ve been wanting to scratch is to be able to listen to my MP3 collection using the recommendations from Last.FM. I’ve you’ve never heard of Last.FM, it is a music service that lets you listen music as a radio station over the internet. I’ve been using it for a year and a half and I love it; it’s helped me discover so much good music. I’ve found two ways to automatically build MP3 playlists using online recommendations. The first way uses iTunes replacement Media Monkey and some extensions to connect to Last.FM (thanks TJOHO!) and the second way uses software by a new startup called The Filter (backed by Peter Gabriel).
• How to Explain RSS to Normal People – 2008 Edition
  As a geek who enjoys spending too much time on the internet, I like RSS almost as much as delicious toast. As a blogger, RSS is the shiznitz because it lets you consume a lot more information and it makes it easier for other people to read your blog without having to drop by every few days to see if you’ve written something new. For something so useful, it’s pretty hard to explain why people should use RSS. Lots of people try to do it. This is my take on it. It’s 2008 and explaining RSS should be much simpler because if you’ve used Facebook, then you’ve used RSS.
• I Can Has Ruby?
  I have a new tumblelog for ruby stuff.
• How to delete your Tumblr tumblelog with TumblrCleanr
  There’s one feature missing on Tumblr: how do you delete your Tumblr? At some point you might want to destroy all traces of your tumblr (privacy concerns, or you want to use it for something else) and there isn’t an option to do that — other than click the delete button on every individual post. I wanted to repurpose a tumblr I had been using for feed aggregation and it had over 18,000 posts. That’s a lot of clicks. Enter the TumblrCleanr. Provide it with your tumblr domain name as well as your username and password and it will delete up to the latest 3000 posts at a time. You can keep running it until your entire tumblr is clean as a whistle.
• Book Review: Halting State by Charles Stross
  If you’re a programmer/gamer geek and looking for a gripping book that you won’t be able to put down then look no further than Halting State.
• Created with rss2html

But Wait, There’s More

Like I said, that was the trivial example. Here’s a list of all the operators I have so far:

Action on All RSS Items

• Remove Items
  • @rss.remove_items_older_than(7.days.ago): remove items older than 7 days from the list
  • @rss.remove_items_older_than(1.month.ago): remove items older than 1 month from the list
  • @rss.remove_items_tagged(‘toread’): remove any items with the tag ‘toread’
• Ignore Tags
  • @rss.ignore_tags(‘linkblog’): don’t display the tag ‘linkblog’
  • @rss.ignore_tags(['linkblog','toread']): don’t display the tags ‘linkblog’ or ‘toread’
• Display Tags for All Items
  • @rss.tags.to_s: Programming Tools, Ruby, Technology, Writing Better Documentation, automatic document generation tools, code, development, doxygen, perldoc, plain old documentation, pod, RDoc, Geeking Out, Music, MP3s and Internet Radio, last.fm, ipod, itunes, media monkey, media monkey and last.fm, mp3, mp3 software, music, the filter, Building a Community, Facebook, Humor, RSS Syndication, rss, ruby, simple help, Asides, IDT Labs Software Development, Software, Tumblr, Web 2.0 Blogging, delete tumblr account, free software, microblogging
  • @rss.tags.to_sentence: Programming Tools, Ruby, Technology, Writing Better Documentation, automatic document generation tools, code, development, doxygen, perldoc, plain old documentation, pod, RDoc, Geeking Out, Music, MP3s and Internet Radio, last.fm, ipod, itunes, media monkey, media monkey and last.fm, mp3, mp3 software, music, the filter, Building a Community, Facebook, Humor, RSS Syndication, rss, ruby, simple help, Asides, IDT Labs Software Development, Software, Tumblr, Web 2.0 Blogging, delete tumblr account, free software, and microblogging
  • @rss.tags.sort_by_least_frequent.to_sentence: Asides, Building a Community, Facebook, Geeking Out, Humor, IDT Labs Software Development, Music, MP3s and Internet Radio, Programming Tools, RDoc, RSS Syndication, Software, Tumblr, Web 2.0 Blogging, Writing Better Documentation, automatic document generation tools, code, delete tumblr account, development, doxygen, free software, ipod, itunes, last.fm, media monkey, media monkey and last.fm, microblogging, mp3, mp3 software, music, perldoc, plain old documentation, pod, rss, simple help, the filter, ruby, Ruby, and Technology
  • @rss.tags.sort_by_most_frequent.to_sentence: Technology, Ruby, ruby, the filter, simple help, rss, pod, plain old documentation, perldoc, music, mp3 software, mp3, microblogging, media monkey and last.fm, media monkey, last.fm, itunes, ipod, free software, doxygen, development, delete tumblr account, code, automatic document generation tools, Writing Better Documentation, Web 2.0 Blogging, Tumblr, Software, RSS Syndication, RDoc, Programming Tools, Music, MP3s and Internet Radio, IDT Labs Software Development, Humor, Geeking Out, Facebook, Building a Community, and Asides
  • @rss.tags.top(10): Technology, Ruby, ruby, the filter, simple help, rss, pod, plain old documentation, perldoc, music
  • @rss.tags.bottom(10): Asides, Building a Community, Facebook, Geeking Out, Humor, IDT Labs Software Development, Music, MP3s and Internet Radio, Programming Tools, RDoc, RSS Syndication
  • @rss.tags.top(10).to_technorati: Technology, Ruby, ruby, the filter, simple help, rss, pod, plain old documentation, perldoc, music
  • @rss.tags[0..9].sort.to_technorati: Programming Tools, Ruby, Technology, Writing Better Documentation, automatic document generation tools, code, development, doxygen, perldoc, plain old documentation
  • @rss.tags[0..9].sort.reverse.to_technorati: plain old documentation, perldoc, doxygen, development, code, automatic document generation tools, Writing Better Documentation, Technology, Ruby, Programming Tools
  • @rss.tags[0..9].upcase.sort.to_technorati: AUTOMATIC DOCUMENT GENERATION TOOLS, CODE, DEVELOPMENT, DOXYGEN, PERLDOC, PLAIN OLD DOCUMENTATION, PROGRAMMING TOOLS, RUBY, TECHNOLOGY, WRITING BETTER DOCUMENTATION
  • @rss.tags[0..9].downcase.to_technorati: automatic document generation tools, code, development, doxygen, perldoc, plain old documentation, programming tools, ruby, technology, writing better documentation
  • @rss.tags[0..9].capitalize.sort.to_technorati: Automatic document generation tools, Code, Development, Doxygen, Perldoc, Plain old documentation, Programming tools, Ruby, Technology, Writing better documentation

With Individual RSS Items

• Title and Link
  • item.title: Mashing Your MP3 Music Collection with Last.FM
  • item.link: http://internetducttape.com/2008/03/05/mashing-your-mp3-music-collection-with-lastfm/
  • item.link.to_link: http://internetducttape.com/2008/03/05/mashing-your-mp3-music-collection-with-lastfm/
  • item.title_link: Mashing Your MP3 Music Collection with Last.FM
  • item.domain: internetducttape.com
  • item.domain.to_link(‘http://’): internetducttape.com
  • item.via_link:
• Tags
  • item.tags.to_sentence: Geeking Out, Music, MP3s and Internet Radio, Technology, last.fm, ipod, itunes, media monkey, media monkey and last.fm, mp3, mp3 software, music, and the filter
  • item.tags.to_links(‘http://del.icio.us/engtech/tag/’): Geeking Out, Music, MP3s and Internet Radio, Technology, last.fm, ipod, itunes, media monkey, media monkey and last.fm, mp3, mp3 software, music, the filter
  • item.tags.to_blog_tag(‘http://internetducttape.com/’): Geeking Out, Music, MP3s and Internet Radio, Technology, last.fm, ipod, itunes, media monkey, media monkey and last.fm, mp3, mp3 software, music, the filter
  • item.tags.to_blog_category(‘http://internetducttape.com/’): Geeking Out, Music, MP3s and Internet Radio, Technology, last.fm, ipod, itunes, media monkey, media monkey and last.fm, mp3, mp3 software, music, the filter
  • item.tags.to_blog_search(‘http://internetducttape.com/’): Geeking Out, Music, MP3s and Internet Radio, Technology, last.fm, ipod, itunes, media monkey, media monkey and last.fm, mp3, mp3 software, music, the filter
  • item.tags.to_delicious: Geeking Out, Music, MP3s and Internet Radio, Technology, last.fm, ipod, itunes, media monkey, media monkey and last.fm, mp3, mp3 software, music, the filter
  • item.tags.to_technorati: Geeking Out, Music, MP3s and Internet Radio, Technology, last.fm, ipod, itunes, media monkey, media monkey and last.fm, mp3, mp3 software, music, the filter
• Dates:
  • item.date: Wed, 05 Mar 2008 18:38:25 -0500
  • item.datetime_long: March 05, 2008 18:38
  • item.datetime_short: 05 Mar 18:38
  • item.datetime_rfc822: Wed, 05 Mar 2008 18:38:25 -0500
  • item.datetime_to_s: 2008-03-05 18:38:25
  • item.date_long: March 5, 2008
  • item.date_short: 5 Mar
  • item.date_rfc822: 5 Mar 2008
  • item.date_fmt(“%x”): 03/05/08
  • item.date_fmt(“%Y/%M/%d”): 2008/38/05
  • item.date_fmt(“%A, %B %d, %Y”): Wednesday, March 05, 2008
• Descriptions:
  • item.description.no_html: One geek itch I’ve been wanting to scratch is to be able to listen to my MP3 collection using the recommendations from Last.FM. I’ve you’ve never heard of Last.FM, it is a music service that lets you listen music as a radio station over the internet. I’ve been using it for a year and a half and I love it; it’s helped me discover so much good music. I’ve found two ways to automatically build MP3 playlists using online recommendations. The first way uses iTunes replacement Media Monkey and some extensions to connect to Last.FM (thanks TJOHO!) and the second way uses software by a new startup called The Filter (backed by Peter Gabriel).
  • item.description.simple_html: <p class=”idt-header” style=”text-align:center;”></p> <p>One geek itch I’ve been wanting to scratch is to be able to listen to my MP3 collection using the recommendations from Last.FM. I’ve you’ve never heard of Last.FM, it is a music service that lets you listen music as a radio station over the internet. I’ve been using it for a year and a half and I love it; it’s helped me discover so much good music. </p><p> I’ve found two ways to automatically build MP3 playlists using online recommendations. The first way uses iTunes replacement Media Monkey and some extensions to connect to Last.FM (thanks TJOHO!) and the second way uses software by a new startup called The Filter (backed by Peter Gabriel).</p>
  • item.description: <p class=”idt-header” style=”text-align:center;”><img src=”http://engtech.files.wordpress.com/2008/03/music-mp3-itunes.jpg” alt=”MP3 Music” height=”125″ width=”500″ /></p> <p>One geek itch I’ve been wanting to scratch is to be able to listen to my MP3 collection using the recommendations from Last.FM. I’ve you’ve never heard of Last.FM, it is a music service that lets you listen music as a radio station over the internet. I’ve been using it for a year and a half and I love it; it’s helped me discover so much good music. </p><p> I’ve found two ways to automatically build MP3 playlists using online recommendations. The first way uses iTunes replacement Media Monkey and some extensions to connect to Last.FM (thanks TJOHO!) and the second way uses software by a new startup called The Filter (backed by Peter Gabriel).</p>

Advanced Users

Most people won’t need these, but they can be helpful for the advanced users.

• debug(@rss): will display all of the attributes for the @rss object
• h(string): will escape HTML code in the string.
• rss2html(‘http://internetducttape.com/feed’, ‘idt.rhtml’): will include another feed/template combo

But Would You Use It?

I’m trying to gage how interesting this is (or even if it’s too hard to use for the normal person).  What would you like to use a program like this for? What other things would you like for it to be able to do?

As a geek who enjoys spending too much time on the internet, I like RSS almost as much as delicious toast. As a blogger, RSS is the shiznitz because it lets you consume a lot more information and it makes it easier for other people to read your blog without having to drop by every few days to see if you’ve written something new.

For something so useful, it’s pretty hard to explain why people should use RSS. Lots of people try to do it. This is my take on it. It’s 2008 and explaining RSS should be much simpler because if you’ve used Facebook, then you’ve used RSS.

RSS for Normal People (who use Facebook)

engtech: You should use RSS while web surfing. It makes things easier to keep track of what’s going on around the web.

the_dude: This doesn’t have anything to do with Ruby, does it?

engtech: No, they aren’t related.

the_dude: That’s good. That Ruby stuff is making you weird man. You get this weird look in your eyes when you talk about it.

engtech: …

the_dude: And it’s like you can’t stop talking about it. You bring it up at the weirdest times. And there’s the shirt. Your shirt is kinda creeping me out, man.

the_dude: So what’s RSS?

engtech: Ever used Facebook?

the_dude: Only every day for the past few months. I love me some Scrabilicious.

*the_dude bites engtech*

the_dude: Now you’re a zombie!

engtech: …

engtech: You know that screen that shows up after you login? The one that shows you what your friends have been up to?

the_dude: The update page?

engtech: It’s called the news feed.

the_dude: Yeah! That’s how I found out Amy broke up with her boyfriend and I was able to swoop in for da kill.

*the_dude does the victory dance*

engtech: How’s that going?

the_dude: 10 months bro.

engtech: Sweet. You could have had a baby by now.

the_dude: Not for lack of trying!

*the_dude nudge nudge wink winks*

engtech: So that news feed thing is RSS in a nutshell.

the_dude: Eh?

engtech: That’s all RSS is. It collects pieces of information from different websites and brings them all together in one spot. Check this out.

the_dude: Kitteh! What Facebook app is that? It looks like the “news feed”.

engtech: That’s not part of Facebook. That’s another site called Friend Feed. It does the same thing as the Facebook news feed, but with any site on the internet. RSS is like glue that lets any website send news that other websites can read.

the_dude: I haven’t heard of those Facebook apps. Tumblr? Reddit? Digg?

engtech: Those aren’t Facebook apps. They’re different websites. You don’t have to login to Facebook to read them. They’re out there in the great wilds of the Internet. They’re outside of Facebook.

the_dude: Man, internet people are horrible spellers. What’s up with those website names?

engtech: Web2.0 means spell check is optional.

the_dude: You spend a lot of time surfing the web.

engtech: As much time as you spend playing Scrabilicious?

the_dude: Point taken. So I can see why you like it, cuz you visit tons of sites a day. Why should I care?

engtech: RSS is a way for websites to send out updates, which means you can subscribe to websites.

the_dude: Can’t I do that with an email newsletters? I hate those. I never read them. Why do they always send them to people? !@#$ing junk mail.

engtech: RSS is exactly like those email newsletters. Except instead of clogging up your email you can use a special program called an RSS reader to read them. Google makes a good one. It lets you keep track of all the sites you read with one application.

engtech: And it isn’t junk mail, since it only tracks the sites YOU want to track. You can unsubscribe at any time without having to sacrifice a chicken like with email newsletters.

the_dude: I hear ya on that one. I don’t even remember signing up for the newsletter. It’s so much easier to hit “report spam” than to find out how to unsubscribe.

the_dude: So I can use RSS to subscribe to sites. But I already keep track of all of my FaVoRiTe SiTeS using Internet Explorer. I bookmark them. What’s the big deal?

engtech: Unlike bookmarking, RSS will also remember what you’ve read so far. When you put that together with being able to read all your sites in one place, it makes it very fast to quickly check *everything* at once.

the_dude: Well… I see how that could be useful. But why would I want to read all of those little status updates?

engtech: Ok, you might not want to subscribe to all of those updates. Or at least, only for people you want to keep close tabs on (*cough*AMY*cough*). But RSS also lets you subscribe to longer posts. It’s like having Facebook notes, but for the entire Internet.

the_dude: That’s kind of cool… I guess. And by cool, I mean…

engtech: Hey, didn’t those Facebook news updates help you meet Amy?

the_dude: Well, yeah.

the_dude: Wait… so RSS got me laid?

engtech: Yes, yes it did.

the_dude: Ok, that is pretty cool.

engtech: Yes, yes it is.

the_dude: …

the_dude: You’re just telling me about RSS because you want me to read your blog more often, aren’t you?

engtech: Maybe.

If you liked this post then please vote for it on Digg or StumbleUpon. Thanks!

Related Posts

• How I Use Google Reader
• 5 Tips to Building Your Readership

Popular social bookmarking site Reddit has announced a great new feature: users can create their own sub-reddit. What does this mean in English? Users and communities can create their own social bookmarking sites around specific topics: blogging, wordpress, specific programming languages, etc but still use their regular reddit account for submitting links and voting.

You can see a full list of all the new reddits here, sorted by popularity. Of particular interest to me is the new Reddit created for Ruby/Rails related posts.

Of course, it’d be nice to be able to subscribe to a filtered version of these links. I’ve created a modified version of Dave S’s “reddit popular on delicious” Yahoo Pipe that works with Sub-reddits.

http://pipes.yahoo.com/engtech/subredditpopularondelicious

1. Click on the link
2. Enter the name of the sub-reddit you’re interested in
   • ie: ruby, see full list of all the new reddits here
3. Enter the minimum number of saves on a delicious before a link is included in the feed
4. Enter keyword inclusion/exclusion filters if you want to limit what you get
   • ie: include only rails-related posts or exclude all rails-related posts
5. Click Run
6. Click on the subscribe to RSS button

I’m using the Ruby sub-reddit as an example, but this is a great way to track links based around any topic there is a sub-reddit for. Even lolcats.

I’m looking forward to when this Reddit feature comes out of beta and it’s possible to create a few new sub-reddits like blogging, wordpress and lifehacks.

Related Posts

• Greasemonkey Script: Yahoo Pipe Cleaner
• Blog Tip: Create a Link Post in 3 Seconds
• The Programmable Web – Yahoo Pipes

In August I was being the dutiful son and trying to get my father hooked on RSS feeds. (It’s like the Ring — if you get someone hooked on RSS you no longer have 700 unread items in Google Reader)

I hit a snag: his browser of choice is Internet Explorer and there wasn’t a simple way to “one-click subscribe” like there is in Firefox. I couldn’t come up with a quick solution while I was there, but I did bitch about it afterwards which lead to one of my readers coming up with a solution using Google Toolbar. Thanks!

To Install

Step 1: Install Google Toolbar (if you don’t already have it)

Step 2: Install the Add to Google Reader button for the toolbar

To Use

Step 1: Click on an RSS feed link

Click to subscribe using RSS

Step 2: Click on the RSS icon in the Google Toolbar

Step 3: Choose the Subscribe with Google Reader option

The only gotcha is that you have to click on the feed URL before clicking on the Add to Google Reader button. This is because the Google Toolbar Button API doesn’t support RSS feed autodiscovery (something they’ll hopefully rectify). It’s still not as simple as subscribing to a feed with Firefox, but it’s a step in the right direction.

Thanks for helping me with this Eric, this is a great example of the lazyweb in action.

For the geeks in the audience, building a custom button is quite easy. I’m going to have to give it a try some time.

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<custombuttons xmlns="http://toolbar.google.com/custombuttons/">
  <button>
    <title>Add to Google Reader</title>
    <description>Add to Google Reader</description>
    <site>http://fusion.google.com/ig/add?feedurl={url.noescape}</site>
    <search>http://fusion.google.com/ig/add?feedurl={query}</search>
    <icon>...snip...</icon>
    <update>http://www.zouric.com/geek/addtogooglereader.xml</update>
  </button>
</custombuttons>

Last night I finished reading Accelerando by Charles Stross. Like many of the books I read these days, I heard about it from another blogger. It feels like a spiritual sequel to Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock, John Brunner’s the Shockwave Rider and Warren Ellis’ Transmetropolitan. It is about information overload to the nth degree and too much change in too short of a time.

Accelerando is broken into 9 fragmented stories with decades passing in between them. This is too bad because it was the initial segment, only a few years in the future, that I found most interesting. Our protagonist is hooked up to a portable computing network of software agents that he uses to continually data mine and plug-in to a “river of news”. As he communicates with other people he spawns off parts of his “distributed brain” to research more information and get back to him.

The greatest inventions usually come from seeing the possible connection between two separate things (eg: peanut butter and chocolate). Like in the Shockwave Rider, our protagonist is successful because of his ability to gather and process information is so far beyond an average person’s. Being immersed in the information stream he sees the connections and trends that other’s can’t see.

These connections lead to so many successful ideas, that he can’t possibly execute on them himself – because the time it takes to implement them would take away from the information processing that is his true talent. He makes a career of giving away his ideas and surviving off of the reputation gain and support of his sponsors he’s made so successful. Very much like Doctorow’s concept of whuffie – reputation as currency.

The book progresses to talking about the post-human experience after digitization has reached the point that we can successfully digitally encode human personalities. Post-death society, heads in jars and living bodiless on the internet. There’s a really good bit on how the next major species will be intelligent corporations and artificial spam intelligence. But what really interested me was the initial chapters so close to the beginning 21^st century: how do we use technology to deal with information overload?

(You can get a copy of Accelerando for free online – which is very useful because the copy I borrowed from the library was missing the last page – now that’s frustrating)

It’s Getting Harder to Find Information

We’re in the middle of a great revolution where anyone can become a self-publisher. But that’s the crux of the problem, isn’t it? Anyone can become a self-publisher. The low barrier to entry makes the competition for attention fierce. At some level we’re all on par with the lowliest spammers, trying to compete for other people’s attention. There is so much new content being created all the time at the only way old content stays in the public record is if the Great Google God returns it in a search result.

This is only going to get worse because Google has created a new caste of blogging serfdom. People create content and splash Google ads on it with the hope of that it will do well in Google search results so they can get paid.

There’s many a “business model” that relies completely on Google-Google Search for traffic and Google AdSense for revenue. And there’s an even larger amount of so-called business models that rely almost completely on Google for traffic, even if the money comes in via other means.

I think you know what happens to the money when the traffic stops.

I use the term “business model” above loosely, because a model that is entirely dependent on an outside company, for either traffic or revenue or both, is not really sound. You’re not in charge and you have very little control, because if Google decides to change the rules, you’re out of luck. Based on that, I would argue that relying on Google is not a business at all.

I’d say you work for Google.

From the Teaching Sells e-book

Where are the Smart Filtering Agents?

One of the things I remember clearly about the idea of intelligent agents in the early 90s was how it was going to revolutionize how we consume information. Instead of having to *gasp* pick up a newspaper, autonomous software agents would search the net finding tidbits of information what we were interested in and adapting and learning from how we interact with the results. Sci-fi books like John Varley’s Steel Beach dealt with the relationships between humans and these evolving artificial intelligences.

Take a moment to glance at the Wikipedia page on software agents; it’s quite good.

The 90s hope for intelligent agents has congealed. RSS has gotten us part of the way; now we can pick voices out of the chaos that we allow to push information to us. We can subscribe to alerts on search subjects that interest us. But aside from custom recommendation engines like Netflix and Last.FM there isn’t really a bot out there for finding information for us.

The Future: RSS Filtering

I see the fledgling baby steps of software agents delivering news. There are several sites competing for being able to filter through a list of RSS feeds and recommend the best news items to you.

• AideRSS
• Feeds 2.0
• Persai (by the guy who does UnCov)
• Particls

There’s also the “build your own” filtering agent approach.

• FeedRinse
• Feed Shake
• Yahoo Pipes
• BlastFeed
• Feed Sifter
• PubSub

And let’s not forget the ability to monitor search terms.

• Technorati Watchlist
• Google Alerts
• Yahoo Alerts

One of the more enlightened concepts I’ve come across is FaveBot that wants to bring you the custom information you want about your favorite actors, authors and musicians.

Is the Answer Better Gatekeepers?

Is having an intelligent software agent the right approach or is it better to let humans do the filtering? The past year has seen an incredible rising in using crowdsourcing to decide what is the best information available. This is how digg, reddit, stumbleupon and the delicious popular page find interesting information by using the wisdom of mobs. Unfortunately when the user-base grows too large it becomes watered down to only common denominators.

The other approach is to find human editors to act as your gatekeeper. I’m not talking about hiring your man in Mumbai, but rather niche news sites like Slashdot, BoingBoing and Fark, and to a greater extent using the network of blogs you enjoy to act as your information gate keepers.

The last.FM music service is an amazing tool for finding new music to listen to. What makes it even stronger is its ability to find your “neighbours” – people you don’t know who have similar musical tastes. Listening to your neighbourhood radio is like having a friend who’s a DJ and always pushing new and interesting songs at you.

I don’t know any of these people, but I like their musical tastes.

Maybe instead of software agents we need software that connects us to other people who have similar interests? I read LifeHacker because I know the editors have very similar sensibilities to what I find interesting. Jon Udell shares my same love for information organization and manipulation. Jeff Atwood has perhaps one of the most engaging blogs for general geekery and love of programming, and his twitterstream is always full of interesting links.

The only downside to filtering information is that restricting your input to the people you already agree with creates a reinforcing feedback loop and destroys your patience and your ability to be around people with differing outlooks.

Related Posts

• Digital Obsolescence

This is the successor to my post on how to build a weekly digest in 3 seconds.

One question I’m frequently asked is “how do you build those Best of Feeds weekly links?” The way I do it is pretty complicated, but I’ve found a much simpler solution that I want to share with you all. Building a list of links is something every blogger does at one time or another, and it doesn’t have to be hard.

Why Create a Link Post?

Link posts are great ways to share and acknowledge interesting links. Linking to other blogs is what makes the blogosphere tick. If you don’t routinely read and link to other bloggers then your using your blog as a one-way soapbox instead of as a medium for sparking communication and building relationships.

Link posts can be used for a variety of reasons:

• Weekly Round-up
• List of resources about a subject
• List of group writing participants
• List of contest participants

Here are some more tips from the experts on why create a link post

• Make your link post matter
• The SEO reasons to link out
• Finding value with daily link posts
• the ProBlogger ultimate guide to link love
• (thanks to Jan for helping me find these)

Step #1: Use Delicious to Save Links

I’m a delicious power user and it’s my favourite site for bookmarking interesting links. It integrates nicely with whatever web browser you are using.

This video explains how to use Delicious to bookmark sites

Delicious already comes with a way of posting a daily link report, but I don’t like it because I feel like I’m spamming my regular readers if my blog is filled with “links for 2007-10-02″ instead of stuff I wrote myself. I much prefer posting once a week, or having full control over when I post my list of links.

But the delicious tagging system is so useful for building a list of links around a specific subject, and for attaching short descriptions around each link. For instance, I used the ‘project3′ tag when I was picking out my favorite posts from the Project 3 group writing project on Daily Blog Tips.

Delicious also integrates nicely into your web browser, no matter what it might be.

• *new* firefox bookmarks extension
• firefox extension *this is the one I use*
• internet explorer buttons
• bookmarklet buttons for any browser

Step #2: Use Delicious Link Builder

I’ve created a Yahoo Pipe that builds a list of your del.icio.us links that you can cut-and-paste into a blog post.

1. Put in your delicious username
2. Optional: Filter your links by a tag
3. Optional: Filter your links by date
4. Optional: Limit the number of links (maximum is 31, this is a limit from del.icio.us)
5. Click ‘Run Pipe‘
6. Cut-and-paste the results into a blog post using your WYSIWYG editor

The Results

This is an example of a list from my delicious saved bookmarks.

• [CODE] Software Is Hard
  • *Excellent* article about software estimation and Rosenberg’s Dreaming in Code
• [ESTIMATION] Web Worker 101: Estimating Basics
  • Nothing new, but good round-up for people who have trouble estimating.
• [LIFEHACKS] The Printable CEO
  • Collection of PDFs for task/hour tracking.
• [RAILS] Build Your Own Ruby on Rails Web Applications
  • Free e-book for next 60 days. Probably not as good as Agile Web Development.
• [WORKHACKS] Cover Your Butt At Work with Thorough Notes
  • If you have to CYA that much then you might want to say cya to that job. But there is a lot of be said for indoctrinating the people around you that you are coordinated and correct because everything is tracked.

That’s all there is to it. Bookmark web pages with delicious, then go into Delicious Link Builder when you want to make a list of them.

You can start by bookmarking this post. :)

Advanced Users – Pretty Cut-n-Paste

I use a Greasemonkey script in Firefox to make the output of Yahoo Pipes a little bit nicer.

1. How to Install Greasemonkey
2. How to Install a Greasemonkey Script
3. Install Yahoo Pipe Cleaner

Advanced Users – Clone Your Own Pipe

If you’re logged into Yahoo then you’ll have the option to ‘clone’ my Pipe (Delicious Links Builder). This means you have your own copy of it and you can change the default values for the fields to whatever you want, eg: always default to your username, and to 7 days worth of links.

Advanced Users – StumbleUpon

If you’re using delicious to save bookmarks, you can also use another handy Greasemonkey script I created that lets you save web pages to StumbleUpon at the same time you’re saving them to Delicious.

Related Links

• Blog Tip: Create a digest post in 3 seconds
• Blog Tip: Create a Blog Maintenance Start Page with Netvibes
• Yahoo Pipe Cleaner

There’s Plenty More

See the full list of free software I have created.

You can get frequent updates about all of my new software, tools or blog themes by subscribing to IDT Labs by RSS or by email. Or you could just subscribe to my main blog, Internet Duct Tape.

This post was written as part of the Geeks Are Sexy Ultimate “How-To” contest.

In Blogger GTD, Leo mentioned that it was a good idea to have one inbox for all your blogging related notifications. I hate cluttering in my inbox, but I do agree that it makes sense to have a single point of reference rather to spend 5 minutes checking some information in one place and then spend 5 minutes checking information in another place. As Skelliewag says, those 5 minutes add up over the course of a day and by the end of it you’ve wasted an hour.

Directing everything to my inbox would never work for me, but it is possible to have a single start page for all your blog maintenance activities using Netvibes. If you aren’t familiar with Netvibes it is a combination of an RSS feed aggregator and a widget platform. It is analogous to iGoogle (but works better). In simple terms Netvibes lets you put lots of information in one place and look at information from several web pages on a single page.

If you’ve never tried it out before then please visit http://netvibes.com — they let you play around with a default page even if you don’t have an account.

This is what I put on my blog maintenance start page. Replace internetducttape.com or engtech.wordpress.com with your blog URL.

Column 1: Comment Administration and Social Site Monitoring

The first column is for things that I want to respond quickly to — comments and checking to see if my site is submitted to Digg or Reddit.

Box #1: Comments RSS feed: http://internetducttape.com/comments/feed

Or you could use my WordPress Comment Extractor / WordPress Trackback Extractor to get only the comments or only the trackbacks.

Box #2: Shortcuts to WordPress administration activities using the Netvibes Bookmarks widget.

Bookmarks: http://www.netvibes.com/subscribe.php?module=Bookmarks

I add the following bookmarks:

• Moderate Comments: http://engtech.wordpress.com/wp-admin/edit-comments.php
  (also see WordPress Comment Ninja)
• Moderate Akismet Spam: http://engtech.wordpress.com/wp-admin/edit-comments.php?page=akismet-admin
  (also see Akismet Auntie Spam)
• Manage Posts: http://engtech.wordpress.com/wp-admin/edit.php
• Manage Pages: http://engtech.wordpress.com/wp-admin/edit-pages.php
• Layout Sidebar Widgets: http://engtech.wordpress.com/wp-admin/widgets.php
• Layout Edit CSS: http://engtech.wordpress.com/wp-admin/themes.php?page=editcss

Box #3: Social Site Submission Watchdog is a custom Yahoo Pipe I created.

Click on this link then

• change your blog URL
• click on Run Pipe
• copy the RSS link to Netvibes

Column 2: Blog Stats

It’s a bad idea to check your blog stats multiple times a day, but is it so bad if you’re also checking blog comments, emails and instant messages at the same time?

Box #1: This will only work for WordPress.com bloggers, which is too bad because it’s a great way to check stats at a glance.

WordPress.com Mobile Widget: http://gamespotting.net/wordpressnetvibes.html

Box #2: Technorati Rank from RSS. Another custom Yahoo Pipe. This one is a little more complicated to install because you’ll need your Technorati API key.

Click on this link then

• change your blog URL
• find your Technorati API key and cut-and-paste it
• click on Run Pipe
• copy the RSS link to Netvibes

Box #3: Filtered Blog Reactions from Technorati. This is another custom Yahoo Pipe. It shows the blog URL as the title and links to the front page instead of directly to the post.

Click on this link then

• change your blog URL
• click on Run Pipe
• copy the RSS link to Netvibes

You could use this RSS feed instead: http://feeds.technorati.com/search/internetducttape.com

Column 3: Direct Communication

I use the second tab as a way to keep a quick check on how I stay in contact with other bloggers — through Gmail and Twitter.

Box #1: Gmail: http://www.netvibes.com/subscribe.php?module=Gmail

I use a dedicated Gmail account for blogging — I don’t receive any personal or work related email with that account.

Box #2: Twitter Replies RSS feed: http://twitter.com/statuses/replies.rss

This shows some of the power of Netvibes — you can view password protected RSS feeds.

Box #3: Twitter: http://www.netvibes.com/subscribe.php?module=Twitter

Create Your Own Blog Maintenance Start Page

This gives you a few ideas of how I use the service, but the possibilities are endless.

For instance there is a Facebook widget: http://www.netvibes.com/subscribe.php?module=Facebook

Not to mention several widgets that let you directly embed a web page. Using those generic modules you can embed Google Reader into Netvibes and other crazy stuff like that.

What are you going to put on your blog maintenance start page?

I’m a very big fan of Yahoo Pipes. It’s an amazing service that lets you take information from websites (using RSS, XML, JSON) and then do all kinds of filtering and manipulation with it. It is all done with a slick graphical user interface but it is not for the faint of heart — it is much easier to create new pipes if you have a programming background. But once a pipe is created it is simple for other people to use it. For example, this is how you can create a blog digest post using a Yahoo Pipe I’ve created for you.

Yahoo Pipes can create automated lists that you can cut-and-paste into blog posts. My only real complaint is with the HTML markup they create. It doesn’t look good when you cut-and-paste it into a WordPress blog. This is where Yahoo Pipe Cleaner comes in. It is a Greasemonkey script for Firefox that fixes the Yahoo Pipe output so that it looks nicer when you cut-and-paste it into a WordPress blog.

• removes any H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, H6 headers
• dofollows the links (removes rel=nofollow)
• replaces paragraphs with list elements
• removes all class/id CSS selectors

Without Yahoo Pipe Cleaner

• Facebook Tip: Broadcast your Facebook status as RSS

  RSS is one of the most useful tools out there for moving information around on the web. Recently the concept of “micro-blogging” status updates has become very popular with applications like Facebook, Twitter and Pownce. The only problem is that it is a pain to update many sites at the…

• How Do People Use Google Reader with Internet Explorer?

  Any computer geek worth his salt has been through the drill: you go to visit a family member for dinner and eventually they mention some arcane problem they’ve been having with software you long ago expunged from all of your computers. Common culprits are the Unholy Triad: Microsoft Outlook,…

With Yahoo Pipe Cleaner

• Facebook Tip: Broadcast your Facebook status as RSS
  • RSS is one of the most useful tools out there for moving information around on the web. Recently the concept of “micro-blogging” status updates has become very popular with applications like Facebook, Twitter and Pownce. The only problem is that it is a pain to update many sites at the…
• How Do People Use Google Reader with Internet Explorer?
  • Any computer geek worth his salt has been through the drill: you go to visit a family member for dinner and eventually they mention some arcane problem they’ve been having with software you long ago expunged from all of your computers. Common culprits are the Unholy Triad: Microsoft Outlook,…

Get Yahoo Pipe Cleaner

You can find installation instructions for Yahoo Pipe Cleaner here.

RSS is one of the most useful tools out there for moving information around on the web. Recently the concept of “micro-blogging” status updates has become very popular with applications like Facebook, Twitter and Pownce. The only problem is that it is a pain to update many sites at the same time. It is better to pick one and broadcast RSS to the others. I’m going to show you how to broadcast your Facebook status to Twitter.

IMPORTANT UPDATE: The Twitter Facebook App now lets you control your Facebook status from Twitter. This tip lets you posts your Facebook status in Twitter. Using them together is a very bad idea.

How to Find the RSS Feed for Your Facebook Status

This is actually the hardest part.

1. Login to Facebook
2. Click on Profile tab
3. Under the Mini-Feed heading click on See All
4. Click on Status Stories from the right hand column
5. Right click on My Status and copy the link

Filtering Your Status with Yahoo Pipes

I’ve put together a Yahoo Pipe that filters your status. This isn’t necessary, but it makes the status updates look a little bit better in other applications like Twitter. It removes your name, and changes the link to go to your profile instead of the individual status. Feel free to clone it and tweak it some more.

Eric is washing his cat.

becomes

is washing his cat (from Facebook status).

and the feed link is set to your Facebook profile.

1. Go to this Yahoo Pipe
2. Copy your Facebook status RSS feed
3. Click Run Pipe
4. Click on Subscribe
5. Right click on Get as RSS and copy link

You can now put this filter RSS into TwitterFeed, your blog sidebar, etc.

Special Thanks

• This Yahoo Pipe gave me the idea for filtering Facebook status
• Michael Pick for his instructions on how to find your Facebook RSS feed (he’s the source of the screenshot above)

Related Posts

• List of my Yahoo Pipes for bloggers
• Tweaking Facebook Privacy settings and Facebook privacy settings for applications
• Broadcasting RSS feeds with TwitterBot (pre TwitterFeed)

Any computer geek worth his salt has been through the drill: you go to visit a family member for dinner and eventually they mention some arcane problem they’ve been having with software you long ago expunged from all of your computers. Common culprits are the Unholy Triad: Microsoft Outlook, Internet Explorer and Norton Anti-Virus. But what’s much worse than when solving some niggling problem that is only caused by their choice apps is when you volunteer to enter the belly of the beast and perform some “improvements” of your own free will.

To all the computer geeks reading this I offer you a humble warning: nothing good can come from volunteering to “improve” a family member’s computer. Don’t fix what ain’t broke.

I was at my father’s house this weekend. A relaxing day of pool, reading and sun followed by a delicious barbeque left me content and sated. My normal cynicism when it comes to technology was at an all time low. He isn’t as technically minded as me, and for a long time I’ve been wanting to get him set up using an RSS feed reader. He has never used them before but he understood the basic concept: RSS is like getting email newsletters of website updates, but without clogging your email. RSS is a blogger’s best friend. It lets us keep track of each other’s updates painlessly and effortlessly. He has a blog of his own and using Google Reader would make it very easy for him to share posts and links on his blog using the Shared Items feature and a widget in his blog’s sidebar.

Google Reader was an easy choice because it is the feed reader I use every day. It is the most widely adopted web-based RSS reader with 50-60% market share. The interface is similar to Gmail. It lets you quickly scroll through items, starring stuff you want to find again later and sharing items with other people. But the deciding factor for me is that it is the reader I use every day — always get your family members using the same software you do if you want to have any hope of troubleshooting problems later.

The initial steps were easy: create a new Gmail account for his blog identity that doesn’t use his real name (since that is displayed by your Google Shared Items), add that identity to his Blogger blog as admin, and add his Google Shared Items as a sidebar widget on his blog. It all went very smoothly until I started subscribing to feeds.

Internet Explorer 6 Sucks for RSS

He is still a die hard Internet Explorer 6 user, and it’s all my fault because of articles like this where I explain how to downgrade from IE7 to IE6. Internet Explorer 6 is really bad for reading RSS feeds because it doesn’t understand RSS at all. I so rarely use IE6 that I had forgotten that it doesn’t know how to automatically find the RSS feed for a page (“RSS autodiscovery”) and that when you click on an RSS link it displays crap like this:

What are you supposed to do with something like that? The answer is that you cut-and-paste the feed URL and add it to Google Reader manually. Is someone new to RSS ever going to do that? No.

There is an easier way of doing it using a bookmarklet — a piece of Javascript that you save as a bookmark (or “Add as Favorite” in IE lingo). You can find a bookmarklet for doing that in Google Reader under Settings and then Goodies. Unfortunately it didn’t work properly because of either his Internet Explorer security settings or because of a conflict with Norton Anti-Virus. He likes to save his bookmarks on the desktop to access them instead of using the Favorites menu, so the chances of getting him to use a bookmarklet were already slim to none. Back to the drawing board.

Instead of trying to figure out the conflict, I decided to add the Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer. Google Toolbar is a great little add-on for any web browser. You can edit the buttons to add all kinds of neat things like searching within the current website, notification of new Gmail messages, toggling highlighting of search terms on the current page and Google Reader notification of new posts in your RSS feeds. But what is missing is a way to one-click subscribe to the current site in Google Reader.

Screw this. One of the “advanced” features of Internet Explorer 7 is better RSS integration, so it’s time for an unplanned upgrade. 15 minutes and one reboot later we’re running the latest and greatest IE7 — and having the exact same problems!

How Do People Subscribe with Google Reader in IE7?

When you click on an RSS link in IE7 you at least get something you can read with an option to subscribe to it. But it only defaults to the built-in Internet Explorer 7 feed reader — it doesn’t give an option to subscribe to Google Reader. It’s much better than IE6 but it still doesn’t solve my problem: I want him to be able to add subscriptions to Google Reader with one click. The bookmarklet still isn’t working properly under Internet Explorer 7.

I’m tired, frustrated and desperate so I decide to pull out the big guns. Firefox has this amazingly little tool called Greasemonkey that makes it trivial to add additional functionality to your web browser. I know that there’s a Greasemonkey script to let you one click subscribe to RSS feeds in Google Reader. I know that it’s possible to manhandle IE to force it to be able to run Greasemonkey user scripts… Google tells me that a plugin called IE7Pro can do it, but after I install IE7Pro it doesn’t understand how to install Greasemonkey scripts.

WTF? THIS IS SO SIMPLE TO DO IN FIREFOX! Why in the world is everything so hard in Internet Explorer? How do people surf the Internet like this?

For any non-believers in the audience, let me show you how easy RSS works in Firefox land.

Firefox + Google Reader = Crazy Delicious

Firefox understands when a website has an RSS feed auto-discovery link. You don’t have to search through the entire page to find the stupid orange button, you can click on the button in your address bar.

Step #1: Click on the Orange Icon in the Address Bar

Step #Who Cares: You Only Do This Once

The first time you use it, it will display the feed in a nice, human readable way, with a yellow box asking you what you want to use to subscribe to this feed. Google Reader is one of the options and you can set it up to *ALWAYS* use Google Reader from now on.

Step #Skip This With Greasemonkey: Choose Between Google Homepage and Google Reader

Unfortunately, Google isn’t smart enough to remember your preference between Google Reader and Google Homepage — so you have to always chose the red pill or the blue pill. There is a handy Greasemonkey script to fix that though: always subscribe to Google Reader.

One click subscription to Google Reader thanks to Firefox and Greasemonkey. Quite a bit easier than:

1. Right Click on RSS feed URL
2. Copy shortcut
3. Log in to Google Reader
4. Click on Add Subscription
5. Paste short cut into form
6. Click Add

…which seems to be the only way to do it in Internet Explorer 6 that worked reliably for me.

Please Tell Me I’m Wrong

When I’m writing rants about frustrating moments of needless computer complication there is always the nagging voice in the back of my head that I’m missing something obvious and making things much harder than they have to be. I hope this is the case.

I was surprised that someone hasn’t built a one-click “add auto-discovery feed to Google Reader” button for the Google toolbar. A little digging shows that it isn’t be possible because the kind of things you can do with Google Toolbar is actually quite limited. This is too bad because it would get more Google Reader users using the Toolbar and more Toolbar users using Google Reader.

My experience with Google Reader + Internet Explorer wouldn’t have been so bad if the bookmarklet had worked for me. But given the fact that 58% of people surfing the web are using some form of Internet Explorer (compared to 35% for Firefox) and that Google Reader is the most popular web-based RSS reader… well, it’s no surprise that more people aren’t reading RSS feeds. It’s hard enough to explain to people why RSS is useful when you can’t show them how to subscribe to an RSS feed consistently in one or two clicks.

If the best feed reading software doesn’t integrate seamlessly with their web browser of choice then why should they jump through hoops getting it to work when they’ve never even used RSS before? And it really doesn’t help that most of the mainstream news portals on the net still don’t offer full feeds. If you don’t read blogs then it’s hard to explain the power of RSS — mainstream sites still don’t get how RSS without full feeds isn’t worth reading.