USA08

Sun 8 Jul 07 19:36 | Tags: Blogging, Internet

I followed up today's release of Conflagration Beta 4 with an update to SiteBus's page for the United States 2008 presidential election. If you're interested in American politics, check it out; this page aggregates posts from the blogs or news sites of the candidates for the Democrats, Republicans, Greens and Libertarians - around thirty in all.

The changes in the update are:

Democrat Bill Richardson now has a web feed for his blog, so he has been added. Right now, the top article expresses outrage about the recent commuting by Bush of federal convict Scooter Libby's prison sentence.
Republican Mitt Romney was not included in earlier updates because the feed for his news page on his site is invalid and couldn't be properly parsed to get the articles out of it. This is still the case; however, his site now features a blog apparently written by his family entitled Five Brothers which does have a valid feed. This blog is probably the most "blog-like" of all the candidates' blogs; campaigning plans and platform diatribes are eschewed for lots of family pictures and such. I think the news feed would be more relevant, but until it is fixed, I've added the Five Brothers blog to the page.
New Republican candidate and former actor Fred Thompson has been added.
Republican candidate Mike Huckabee's blog has been removed from the page, as its feed seems to be experiencing sporadic errors. Huckabee's feed has worked fine in the past, so I suspect it's just a temporary thing; later tonight I'll try re-adding his feed and see if it works again. Currently his blog features photos of an electric guitar-wielding Huckabee on stage with his band, punningly named "Capitol Offense;" there's also a YouTube video of the band playing Skynyrd's immortal Free Bird. The guitar playing is fine, but whoever the singer is… well, he gets an A for effort.

Get more great Ray Gun Robot content sent directly to your feed reader or email inbox! Subscribe today!
Articles & Links — Via Email
Articles Only — Via Email

0 Comments | 0 Trackbacks | |

Conflagration Beta 4

Sun 8 Jul 07 17:29 | Tags: Blogging, Software

Yesterday, I released the latest version of my Conflagration script. If you're a blogger who "burns" feeds with FeedBurner, check out Conflagration; it lets you do some cool things with your feed counts that FeedBurner's standard non-programmer tools won't let you, like combine the feed counts of more than one feed and create a custom image to display your feed count.

New in this version is the ability to also output your feed count as plain text, if you don't need no stinkin' images to show off your count. Doing this required some major changes to some parts of the code, so it's possible that a few new bugs snuck in there somewhere; mad props will go to you if you can find one.

Conflagration is totally free and fairly easy to set up, so why not give it a try?

Get more great Ray Gun Robot content sent directly to your feed reader or email inbox! Subscribe today!
Articles & Links — Via Email
Articles Only — Via Email

0 Comments | 0 Trackbacks | |

You can't take it back

Sun 3 Jun 07 20:28 | Tags: Blogging, Internet

As I was catching up on my web feed reading today, I came across an article from a tech site provocatively named Geeks Are Sexy. (I'm going to single out that site in the point I'm about to make, but it's certainly applicable to any form of internet publication, including my own sites; I hope GAS's staff can forgive me.) The article was entitled "Gettin' Political - an opinion column" by Brian Boyko, and it explained the reasons why Mr Boyko felt that former vice president Al Gore would be a good choice for the upcoming 2008 presidential election for those interested in technology. Gore has not yet announced his intention to run for the candidacy of the Democratic party; he has, however, left himself open to the possibility.

Mr Boyko was correct in that Gore likely "gets" technology much more than most (if not all) of the candidates on both sides of the aisle. As Boyko mentioned, Gore, as a senator, backed the "Gore Bill," which publicly funded some of the computer science experiments that would help develop the foundation of the internet - this is where the whole "Al Gore invented the internet" silliness stems from. Also relevant is the fact that Gore is an Apple board member, a fact that Boyko neglects to mention - though one has to wonder how much time Mr Gore has to dedicate to Apple with all the other things he has going on.

All in all, it was an interesting article, and I wanted to read the comments that others had left on it as well as possibly leave my own. (I agree that Gore is probably more tech-aware than most other current presidential candidates, but his enthusiastic environmentalism, including his gross misinterpretation of climate change, would not be in the interest of the country as a whole.) The comments were not visible in my feed reader, so I clicked on the article's title to open it up in my browser - only to find that the article is no longer there. Apparently, some time after my feed reader downloaded the article and saved it for my later perusal, it was deleted from Geeks Are Sexy's site without explanation.

Which brings me around to my point. The internet permits the sharing of information on a level never seen before blah blah blah - you know the spiel - but as part of that, it also allows for the duplication of that information. Once a bit of information hits the internet, anyone can take that data and keep their own copy of it. It could be on the scale of the Wayback Machine, a project which has archived various web sites throughout time since 1996; or it could be on the much smaller level of me and my feed reader. Just as you can't un-send an email, Geeks Are Sexy cannot remove their article from my feed reader once it has been downloaded, nor take back the impression it had on me upon reading it. They probably had some good reasons for retracting the article, but thanks to the nature of the internet, their attempt to do so was only partly successful. From a simple blank "404 Not Found" page comes an important lesson about internet publishing.

Get more great Ray Gun Robot content sent directly to your feed reader or email inbox! Subscribe today!
Articles & Links — Via Email
Articles Only — Via Email

6 Comments | 0 Trackbacks | |

Conflagration: A better web feed subscriber widget

Sat 26 May 07 19:19 | Tags: Blogging, Meta, Software

Here's one for my fellow bloggers out there, specifically those who use the FeedBurner service to tweak and serve their web feeds. FeedBurner allows you display a little widget on your blog that shows you how many subscribers you have. Even if you don't use FeedBurner, you may have seen it around the web at big-name blogs like TechCrunch and John Chow, as well as smaller (though not as small as RGR…) blogs like Mac OS X Tips and Kumiko's Cash Quest. It looks like this.

I used to use this widget myself, for somewhat selfish reasons, but I was never too excited about it. Why? Because at every site it's displayed, it looks exactly the same, save for slight color variations. The same boxy design, the same ugly aliased font.

Now, if you look over to the sidebar on the right, you'll see a feed widget with a number that is quite different. How did I do that? I made my own widget which I call Conflagration. It gets the subscriber count from FeedBurner and creates a prettier and much more original image with it. I've even implemented a simple theme system which lets me create new designs apart from the code itself, so you don't have to know any programming to create new "themes." Along with the "RayGunRobot" theme which I'm using here, Conflagration also comes with these themes "out of the box:"

"BigTimeSkyBlue" theme (also comes in gray, pink and green).

"Tilted" theme. (It could use a little more work…)

Also, back when I began offering two versions of my feed, I wanted my widget to display the total subscriber count of both feeds. So I added a feature to display the total subscribers from as many feeds as you want.

Today I am making Conflagration available to the public at large for the grand price of zero, zip, zilch, free. It's still in "beta," so more features should be forthcoming, but it seems to work fairly well at present and there's no bugs that I know of. It's a little more difficult to set up than the standard FeedBurner widget, and you have to have a server which you can run PHP scripts off of (so Blogger/TypePad/LiveJournal/etc users are out of the loop for now), but if you're looking for features above and beyond what FeedBurner's widget can do, give it a try. And please don't hesitate to contact me or leave a comment if you have any questions, feature suggestions, or found bugs.

Also please contact me if you've created an aesthetically-pleasing theme which you'd like to share with others. I'm a programmer, not an artist, so I'd be glad to see more and better-looking themes made available for Conflagration than the ones that are currently included.

Oh, and have you checked out SigFeeder? That's another cool tool for bloggers which I've developed.

(By the way, if it looks like I'm linking to all those blogs in the first paragraph in the hopes that they'll notice the incoming link via Technorati, check this out, then start using Conflagration themselves and then link back to me, well, that's exactly what I'm doing. It's just one of those sneaky things bloggers do.)

Get more great Ray Gun Robot content sent directly to your feed reader or email inbox! Subscribe today!
Articles & Links — Via Email
Articles Only — Via Email

5 Comments | 0 Trackbacks | |

A video intro to web feeds

Sat 28 Apr 07 01:59 | Tags: Blogging, Guides, Internet

A site called Common Craft has created a short video on web feeds. The short, casual, quick-paced video helps to graphically explain the concept of web feeds in a simple way anyone can understand. If you have yet to become a feed addict like me, watch the video and give it a try.

I found this video via a post at Dosh Dosh. What I found interesting is that both this video and the post at Dosh Dosh recommend that you use one of the many web-based feed readers, like Google Reader, Bloglines, Pageflakes, Netvibes, or so on, instead of using an actual feed reader application. As I've mentioned before, my preferred feed reader is Vienna, which is an actual OS X application, not something I use through a web browser. But it's interesting that as new people are discovering this cool new tech of web feeds, so many people are first turning to web-based solutions instead of standard applications. This is perhaps a reflection of the coming-of-age of serious web-based applications, a concept which I myself am beginning to warm to.

Then again, as someone who's making my own sort of web-based feed reader/aggregator in the form of Siteb.us, I guess I shouldn't be so surprised…

Get more great Ray Gun Robot content sent directly to your feed reader or email inbox! Subscribe today!
Articles & Links — Via Email
Articles Only — Via Email

0 Comments | 0 Trackbacks | |