Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with feed

I need email updates on my blackberry from a private authenticated rss feed.

Chamunks — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 00:57:46 -0800

I need to be notified on my blackberry of RSS events on a secure authenticated RSS feed. These notifications can be sms texts or preferably plain text emails. They could and should filter for keywords as the site doesn't as far as I can tell. I was thinking of using yahoo pipes but I have no idea how to start but I've heard its a good way to start. I'm looking for ways to be notified immediately of events on member sites I go to. One in particular is https://ssl.what.cd and a keyword would be something like "freeleech". Its the only example that I can think of right now but I have many other uses for something like this any insight related to fulfilling my need here is fully appreciated.

Also if this (assuming but not limited to the use of yahoo pipes) pipe could also benefit from being able to push this feed to google reader as it would be nice to find a way to get authenticated feeds in google reader.

Please if you must troll over invites and morality issues please restrict them to direct messages to my user via mefimail I would prefer to keep this questions answers related to solving my problem and not a possible piracy flame war when that is not the focus of this question it was only an example.

Can any RSS reader read private Blogger blogs?

freddymungo — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 22:21:07 -0800

How can I view private Blogger blogs in any RSS reader? Is there any way? I think it's silly that I can't in Google Reader, since I use the same account to read those blogs as in Google Reader. Bonus points if there's a good downloadable (not online) service that can finagle it.

How to trim a Feedburner feed?

Solomon — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 08:41:50 -0800

Within the past couple of weeks, I've noticed that a lot of extra info is being displayed in the Firefox address bar when clicking through from my feed reader. How do I stop this from happening? I'm using Firefox 3.5.5 and Sage-Too 2.0.0. Up until a couple of weeks ago, when clicking through from Icanhascheezeburger's feed, it would show

http://icanhascheezburger.com/2009/12/05/funny-pictures-smarter-than-the-terrier/

in the address bar, but now it shows

http://icanhascheezburger.com/2009/12/05/funny-pictures-smarter-than-the-terrier/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ICanHasCheezburger+%28I+CAN+HAS+CHEEZBURGER%3F%29

I think I may have upgraded Firefox in the past couple of weeks, but Sage-Too has been installed since August. I'm also pretty sure that this is only happening on Feedburner feeds.

How do I get it to stop adding the extra bit on the end and make it display like it did previously? I don't want to change my feed reader if at all possible.

How do I create a RSS feed for my Amazon Web Store?

Aegean — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 04:44:56 -0800

I'm trying to figure out how to create a XML / RSS feed of my Amazon web store products so I can update to Google Merchant. There doesn't seem to be many functions / plug-ins offered by AWS and their help isn't very helpful. I've done a fair amount of searching and have come up empty handed. Would anyone have an idea how I might go about creating this feed?

I'd like to cause newspapers to lose revenuve faster...

cgomez — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 14:45:17 -0800

Which quality newspapers and other news services provide full-text RSS feeds? I'm looking for a world, national, and also sources specific to California news and politics. Alternatively, what are some MacGyver-style ways to make a full-text RSS feed for my current favorites? Some exemplary source I've seen are the Sacramento Bee, NY Times, and of course - Metafilter. I've found a site called Feedcry which does offer some full-text feeds for Bloomberg and the WSJ which is great. But, I'm looking for more. Thanks much.

What's a good alternative for Google Reader?

scottso17 — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 15:23:54 -0800

What's a good alternative for Google Reader? My employer just started blocking Google Reader (via Websense), saying that it's using up too much bandwidth. (Yeah, sounds funny to me, too.) I suspect there's some alternatives that aren't blocked, but I really love Google Reader and miss being able to jump into it at work. I appreciate any suggestions. Oh, I can't use software like Tor or HTTP Tunnel. That already got me in trouble. Oops.

Adios AvantGo, now what?

omnidrew — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 10:39:03 -0800

Adios AvantGo... miss ya. Anything similar out there for a Palm OS smartphone without data service? AG now references Snacs as a solution... but that requires wireless (and they don't have a Palm client anyway).

I already pay too much each month for my phone as a phone, so I'm not willing to add wireless data service.

Suggestions?

Who Snarks on the Adverts?

crazyray — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 22:59:11 -0800

I have become addicted to a certain website (RSS feed actually) that makes snarky criticism about major advertising campaigns. Can you recommend other similar blogs? Everytime I google for keywords based on their domain I get (nonsurpirsingly) very spammy results. I won't want to actually directly link to the blog I am talking about, because I have hyper-anti-pepsi-blue-especially-on-the-green' ism, but the blog I am talking about is Ad Freak dot com. Are there other similar, or even better, blogs which snark all over major ad campaigns?

Before anyone thinks I might be astroturfing AF dot com, please note my posting history on the green and also realize I am not trying to drive traffic to the website in question- I actually want to find their competitors!

Feed me bites

gensubuser — Wed, 06 May 2009 19:03:08 -0800

How do I share images securely through an RSS feed? I have a series of images I would like to syndicate to myself, wherever I may be accessing Google Reader. I'd rather restrict "plaintext" access to only my computer, by some simple client-side encryption, if necessary. What's the easiest way of doing this?

There's an old encrypted RSS article that is exactly what I want, only for text. I'm not worried about local attacks.

Is there eg, a Greasemonkey script that would work? Am I neglecting that I would still have to host the images securely somehow? Right now I "host" from 127.0.0.1, solving several of the problems temporarily.

Faith and Fear in FeedDemon?

phaded — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 11:58:04 -0800

Why won't this RSS feed update in FeedDemon? I used Google Reader up until pretty recently, when I switched to FeedDemon. One thing that didn't make the transition is the RSS feed for Faith and Fear in Flushing, a Mets blog I read and enjoy a lot. The feed still updates just fine in Google Reader; in FeedDemon, though, it won't. The feed validates and everything, so I'm not sure what's wrong. Anyone have any idea?

Facebook Overwhelm

goalyeehah — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 07:17:37 -0800

How do I block certain feeds on Facebook! I'd like to manage feeds from certain friends who have the need to post something every 5 minutes. How would I go about doing this?

Too much of a good Instapundit

Jaltcoh — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 06:45:46 -0800

Is there any way to make GoogleReader (or another RSS/feed reader) limit the concentration of posts I see from any given website? I use GoogleReader to keep up with a slew of blogs and some other websites. There are a lot of them -- I have over 100 subscriptions, mainly blogs. Though I basically like the huge convenience of this system, there is one thing that bothers me: some blogs have lots of posts every day -- say, 20 or more. Other blogs update about once a day or even less. I wish I were seeing posts from those sparser blogs as often the ones from the more profilic blogs. As it is now, there are some blogs I'm only mildly interested in that I end up reading all the time, while some of the most interesting blogs that happen to have fewer posts get lost in the shuffle.

Ideally, I'd like to have a filter akin to the way Flickr displays photos from your contacts: they give you a stream of the latest 5 posts from every contact. I suppose the solution wouldn't need to be that draconian, but I would like some way of taming the overly prolific sites.

Admittedly, this is not a problem of earth-shattering proportions: I can get around it by manually clicking on one blog after another in GoogleReader. I'm just wondering if there's a way to automate this. (I realize another workaround would be to manually create one list for blogs with very frequent posts and another list for blogs with lighter posting schedules, but that would be too cumbersome.)

I use GoogleReader and would prefer to stay with that, but I'm open to switching to something else if this is impossible in GoogleReader.

I want a YouTube RSS filter

scottreynen — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 09:43:46 -0800

I would like to take a given RSS feed (e.g. MetaFilter's feed), and create a derivative feed containing only the items with YouTube links in the content, with the destination URLs changed to the YouTube links (rather than the source of those links). Does something like this already exist? If not, what's the simplest way to create it? I can write code if necessary, but would rather not if there's an alternative. To give some context, I have a bunch of feeds (Hulu, video blogs, etc.) on a computer attached to my TV, and all of them allow me to click through to the destination URL and load a video immediately. I'd like to be able to do the same with various feeds that only sometimes point to YouTube videos.

Is there an easy way to combine multiple blogs posts into a single, daily RSS item?

viewofdelft — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 10:45:52 -0800

Is there an easy way to combine multiple blogs posts into a single, daily RSS item? I wrestled in vain this morning with Yahoo Pipes—my arch-nemesis and occasional collaborator—and we've both given up. Is there an automated, dummy-proof method for bundling a set of posts from my blog into a single RSS item?

Ideally, that means I'd post three separate entries on Monday and they'd show up in my feedreader early the next morning.

RSS Feeds -> OPML -> List of websites...how?

divabat — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 14:19:03 -0800

How do I get a list of all the blogs I'm subscribed to, plus their URLs? I use FeedDemon/Newsgator. I'd like to generate a list of all my feeds, plus the site URL, into one document. Categorisation doesn't really matter at this moment.

How do I accomplish this? I figure I'll need the OPML file, but how do I turn it into something readable?

If possible I'd like the URL of the SITE, not of the RSS feed. Aside from a bunch of searching feeds, this shouldn't be a problem. However, I do know that a bunch of the sites I subscribe to use something like Feedburner to manage their feeds. How do I get the source URL?

I tried searching Google but I must be missing a keyword because I can't get anything useful.

My blog's been hijacked!

grrarrgh00 — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 07:49:58 -0800

Somehow, some spammer hijacked a feed of mine that posts to my Wordpress blog. Help me diagnose what happened. I have a shared folder on Foxmarks that I've set up to automatically post to my Wordpress blog, using the FeedWordpress plugin. This morning, a reader alerted me that my blog was full of Japanese spam posts. Looking at the posts, they were somehow injected into my blog via the same pathway that I use to post from the Foxmarks folder. (Each of the posts bears the custom fields that mark a post as coming from FeedWordpress - the syndication source, syndication feed ID, etc.)

Any clue what the source of this spam might be, or how I go about diagnosing this, and then inoculating my blog against it?

Profiting from the Feed Icon ?

querty — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 21:58:54 -0800

Profiting from the Feed Icon ? graphics.design.legal.filter.dot.dot.dot...

If I wanted to do a design that includes the Feed Icon as the main focus (but not as the main subject) and the icon is only seen in less than ~25% of the design as a small element or if the Feed Icon is broken up in half or in a few pieces, would that be "okay" with Mozilla's Feed Icon Guidelines? The design would then be sold for profit of course.

If you read the last 3 answers/paragraphs on their guidelines, it is really loosely written. So what is stopping people from making Feed Icon designs and selling them as t-shirts and mouse pads on CafePress?

If you check iStockphoto, there are people who sell the actual icon file with little to no accompanied designs/artwork: http://www.istockphoto.com/file_search.php?action=file&text=rss+feed+icon

Server-side script for combining RSS feeds?

Mo Nickels — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 10:43:18 -0800

Do you know of a server-side script for combining RSS feeds, removing duplicates, filtering out items that match keywords, and then generating a new RSS feed as a result? I'm looking for something that can be run on a standard web server with a typical LAMP configuration. I have 189 feeds, 3500+ feed items, and 500+ keyword filters I want to combine.

I'd settle for a combination of services that successfully can each do one of the tasks of combining feeds, filtering out duplicates, acting on keywords matches, and then generating a clean, unified feed.

This feed will be loaded into a shared Google Reader account, where various people will look at the combined feed items and star some for later attention, so I'm not looking for a client-side single-user feed reader.

Newsgator and Bloglines do not allow the marking and sorting of posts that I want, nor are they particularly efficient at going through hundreds of posts in a single sitting. Google Reader's single-letter keyboard commands are hard to beat.

Google Reader, however, does not do filtering (its biggest drawback out of the many drawbacks it has). There is a Greasemonkey script for doing filtering, but the people who will be viewing this combined feed either do not use Firefox or do not have the technical aptitude to use and update Greasemonkey. Further, I add and revise the keyword filters dozens of times a day, so a client-side filter doesn't really work. It needs to be server side so my changes are reflected wherever the work is being done.

Yahoo Pipes chokes and fails on the feeds. It only sporadically pushes out XML, it only pushes out a small bit of it, and it does it infrequently and after much delay.

FeedRinse keeps failing to add all of my feeds, inexplicably not saving them when I add them to a channel. The ones that are added to a channel are not pushing out any aggregated XML. The individually rinsed channels do load, but I don't want to individually add all those keyword filters to all those feeds, which is the point of channels. I would spend days just entering in the keyword filters.

MySyndicaat does not seem to be permitting new registrations (hitting the submit button throws up a very stupid pop-up that tells you to go to another site, where they lead you right back to the same registration that doesn't work). RSSMix, which I might be able to use to at least combine the feeds, does accept and read the feed but times out when I try to read the aggregated feed it produces.

MyFeedz is shut down.

Google Reader's sharing will only show 20 items of a shared folder containing all the feeds; I need it to show ALL of those items in the shared folder. Otherwise, it might serve as a decent feed aggregator.

cat feed directly from can?

pharcide — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 13:43:21 -0800

can you feed your cat directly from the can?

Choosing more suitable feed reader after Netvibes

tseo — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 03:00:59 -0800

Feedreader that fits my needs? Shows read feeds, has good browser view... I was using Netvibes until now but it is developing in a direction that I don't like so I want to move to more usable feed reader. I tried Google Reader, Feed Demon and Newzie but there is some stuff that they lack or I don't know how to unlock.
One of the things that I need is to see as many as possible from my list ordered by categories and feeds and not by read and unread. I basically refer too much to already read feeds so I need them to be there too.
The other thing that I need is to see the post in the feed reader as I will be able to see it on the actual page. This was something Netvibes had and it helped with blogs that don't offer their full posts, cause when you switch to this mode you still browse the blog in your reader, you just get the actual page.
From all three that I tried Google Reader looked the most promising but it still lacks the second feature.

What's the simplest way for me to grab a daily digest of my twitter output?

cortex — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 11:10:05 -0800

What's the simplest way for me to grab a daily digest of my twitter output? I'm planning to do a bunch of writing via twitter next month, and I'd like to be able to easily grab my output on a regular output -- once a day, probably.

I'm aware of TweetDumpr but had no luck with a test run (other reservations aside). The idea -- export data as CSV -- is more or less exactly what I'd want, though. Being able to deal with the data in a parsed-out manner is definitely key.

Are there other existing solutions that would make this easy to do? Has anyone experimented with this?

I have heard that the twitter API is pretty approachable, but I've never dug into it; if the best way to get a clean dump is to go that route with some perl, I can do so and would love pointers on how to get going on that.

Display a custom rss feed in the same way that iGoogle does when you add a feed normally?

gregschoen — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 06:38:48 -0800

I am attempting to create a Google Gadget that displays RSS feeds on the iGoogle page. The problem that I'm having is that the gadget does not display the RSS in the same way as adding an XML to iGoogle does, there is a different display depending on theme and device. So, if you add the Metafilter Gadget, which is just the Metafilter RSS feed, it displays in one way. Switch to another theme and it changes to a different display.

Sorry if this doesn't come out clear, but the question that I'm wondering is whether anyone has experience with this, and whether or not anyone is aware of a way to interact with the API at this level and display an XML RSS feed the same way that Google does. Also, better documented API for the _IG_* namespace would be helpful as well.

How do I fool the rss feed into not updating?

answergrape — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 14:07:13 -0800

Is there a way to update information on a website that has an rss feed and have the feed not show the pages as "updated?" I have a collection of news releases that were inconsistently showing some information. I made them consistent, but the next time I update the rss feed, every news release I did this year will come up as new. Any way to prevent that?

Looking for good web- or desktop-based RSS reader that can handle older posts

fsmontenegro — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 21:26:50 -0800

What options do I have for a good web- (preferred) or desktop(Windows)-based RSS reader that has good options for managing older posts within feeds? I've been using Google Reader as my primary reader for as long as I can remember, but I'm getting fed up with its behaviour around auto-archiving posts after 1 month and not being able to mark older posts as unread.

I subscribe to approximately 100 feeds, some that are chatty (dozens of posts a day) and some that are pretty quiet (1 post every 1-2 weeks or less).

Every now and then I find a new blog to follow and when I subscribe to it I'd like to easily read previous posts as well. Google Reader retrieves older posts, but doesn't let me mark them as unread.

Also, it has the very annoying feature of marking as read anything older than 1 month. This is fine for a chatty feed, but I don't like this behaviour for quieter feeds.

I looked into FeedDemon/NewsGator but it seems to also be limited in handling older posts.

Are there any options for a decent solution that is more flexible for older posts?

Live Blogging the Next Cold War

theRussian — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 19:53:01 -0800

Is anyone Twittering or live-blogging the ongoing conflict between Russia and Georgia? Any one know of any first hand accounts, twitterers, or blogs set up to follow the conflict from the front lines? English or Russian is fine, just looking for something I can add to my RSS feed.

Not looking for one time articles, but rather a regularly updated source. Thanks!