Ask MetaFilter posts tagged with feed

need a library for text classification

chexov — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 16:17:29 -0800

I need to be able to automatically identify language (English, Japaneese, Russian, etc ... ) in which a particular blog-post has been written. (lang attribute might or might not be available). Few years ago I came across a library for RSS feeds that was doing roughly what I need - can not find it anymore though.

Cows with new calves kept out of pasture: Why?

maxwelton — Tue, 27 May 2008 01:37:27 -0800

Moo: Our local farmer, who raises beef cattle organically (no antibiotics, no fertilizers on their home-grown feed, etc., etc.), keeps all of his cows with new calves in a plowed (dirt) field for about two months after the little ones are born. Why? I haven't seen him on the fenceline and he always looks awfully busy in any case. I'd guess he runs about 200 head of cattle and I think there were probably about 20 new calves this year.

The current theories of Mrs. Maxwelton and I:

1) He wants to strictly control the diet of the cows and calves during some critical time period in the calves development.

2) He wants to use up excess fodder from the winter storage, which would be cut hay and some maize he grows for fall harvest.

3) Perhaps that particular plot is convenient for keeping track of the critters, and having to feed them is a small price to pay to avoid having the keep track of them.

4) His main grazing field is too dangerous for calves. It's flooded during winter; if he allowed grazing in any of his other fields, he would be sacrificing the first cut of grass hay.

I expect it's either #1 or #4. We don't have too much tansy ragwort out here, so I don't think it's to keep the youngsters from ingesting a toxic plant, but that could also be a reason, obviously. Other farmers locally seem to let their cows drop calves and raise them in their regular grazing fields, for what it's worth.

Maybe I'll see him around, though I welcome any insight from y'all.

Dry out moist fertilizer for drop spreader?

wrnealis — Tue, 13 May 2008 17:27:12 -0800

How do I dry out an old bag of weed and feed for use with a drop spreader? I have a big bag of Scott's Weed and Feed I bought last year. I used about 1/4. I did not seal the bag, it has been soaking up moisture all year. According to everything I could find it should still be effective, but it clogs up my drop spreader.

Is there a safe way to dry this out so it will function? It's moist enough to stick to my gloves, and I can form it into a loose ball. Sure I can get a new bag, but I'd rather use it up.

Create my own RSS feed?

I_Love_Bananas — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 12:30:18 -0800

Customizable newswire-type site with RSS feeds? I like the Open Press site but need to get RSS feeds targeted to more specific keywords. Does such a thing exist?

For example, if I want to be able to get a feed that sends me every available story about, say, the Boston Marathon, or the Muppes, or whatever- there should be a site that lets me first configure the search to pull in the right content, then an RSS link that will allow only that content to show up where I need it.

I've searched but can't find anything. If it's right in front of me, I apologize. Thanks!

Industry specific news service feed

curiousleo — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 05:12:08 -0800

I need to create a company website. Are there custom news bulletin that can be updated automatically so only industry relevant info are displayed? I am total newbie on web building. I noticed some other company websites have industry specific news bulletins shown on there homepages. Where do i need to go for such service? how much does it usully cost?

I figured since the company site is not planning on updating homepages too often, that such news serivce may add some freshness to the homepage i am trying to build.

What is RSS feed? is that what i am look for?

Astronomy events iCal feed?

Mwongozi — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 18:22:21 -0800

An iCal feed containing events of astronomical interest? I found this one, but it only contains events in the past, which seems to miss the point. I want to know about Astronomy events, before they happen.

Recommendations?

Facebook applications are perplexing

the_arbiter — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 00:04:16 -0800

[Facebook-filter] Are there any Facebook applications that allow me to display an XML file on my Facebook Page? Just a quick question, really:
I've set up a Facebook Page (not a Facebook Profile, by the way) for a non-profit I help out with, and I'm trying to get the Last.fm charts for that same group to be displayed on the page. I've just got this simple XML file that I want to show, without much pizzazz, on my Facebook Page.

Anyone know of a relatively simple application that will do this?
Or do all Facebook apps have to be developed around a specific XML/RSS file?

Yes, I already know that Last.fm produces its own Facebook applications, but these are limited to users, not groups, and similarly cannot be used on Facebook Pages, but only people's Profiles.

(FYI, the file I'm working with looks like this, but for another group)

You'll have to forgive me for not knowing too much about how this whole FB app thing works.

Video podcasts are supposed to be easy for everyone

bryanjbusch — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 09:35:41 -0800

I'd like a Flash video player of my video podcast on the web site, and a high-quality (960x540 should work) video file in the podcast feed. I'm currently using WordPress and PodPress to manage the feed and video. But I can see why some people who don't want to install QuickTime might not be able to see the show. PodPress currently makes me very happy with its stats reporting, but if I have to dump it in favor of something else, I will.

I have tried placing the video in the Revver (site currently down) Flash player and including the video file as a "feed only" option with PodPress, but for reasons I can't diagnose, that doesn't work in iTunes.

Ideas?

My best idea so far is just to include an obvious link in each post that redirects the user to a different site (YouTube or Revver or something) to watch the video, but that's not exactly user-friendly. What would be easiest for both me and the viewer?

vacation compatible RSS: how can I cache one month of feed items?

nolnar — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 11:58:01 -0800

Say that I will go travelling for one month without internet access. For my email that poses no problem. All incoming mails wait for me in gmail when I get back. But how can I similarly avoid missing content in the many RSS feeds I regularly read? Can some online service cache all the feeds for me? Some of the RSS feeds contain only a few new items every month so for those feeds I will get all those items when I get back. But many other feeds have a much higher throughput of items. Some have 100 or more items every day and the feed itself only includes the latest 50 or so items. For those feeds I risk missing out on almost 3000 items!

How can I remedy that? Is there some neat web service that allows me to cache all items in some feeds for a period of time? Or at least one that continually and automatically lets me filter some feeds for certain items and cache all matches? Is there even a site similar to archive.org for RSS?

What I've looked into already:

I could set up a server at home, run some RSS reader in it and write a script or change some setting so that the reader checks the feeds for new items several times every day. But I have no home server at the moment so it seems both like much work and as overkill as far as solutions go. I hope there is some alternative online solution.

I've found several online services that combine or mashup several feeds into one. Yahoo pipes, http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/ for example. But I haven't found one that cache one month of RSS feed items, mashed up or not.

There are several RSS to email services (see http://ask.metafilter.com/70159/RSS2Email-Headaches ). But I haven't found one that allow conversion back to RSS later on. But maybe I just haven't searched enough? If there is some solution that reliably can do these steps then tell me about it: RSS >>(through some online service)>> email >>> gmail account >>(one month later, through some online service)>> RSS >>> locally installed RSS-reader. I definitely want the items back into my regular feed reader since I very often do searches on the locally downloaded feeds (I've set the reader to not remove old downloaded feed items) and I want to avoid having to do those searches at several places (feed reader and gmail) if possible.

I would most of all prefer some service that simply takes an OPML as input, cache all items in those feeds and then let me grab them easily later.

"Placeholder" for Google Reader?

illflux — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 08:53:46 -0800

Many of the feeds I follow have a lot of activity (such as the one for ask.mefi), so by the time I get a chance to look through them, there may be hundreds (thousands?) of items. If I'm not able to get through all of the items at a time, the next time I come back to the feed, I have to scroll through the items I did get to before I can reach the older items. Is there a way to "mark my place" in a feed and skip directly there, rather than having to scroll through all the already-read items? I have my "Feed Settings" set to "sort by newest" and have "In expanded view, mark items as read when you scroll past them" checked in my settings.

I've tried using "sort by oldest," but that only shows posts from within the last 30 days. Depending on how long it's been since I've had a chance to catch up with a feed, this may not be enough.

Perhaps as an alternative, is there a way to make "sort by oldest" show more than 30 days?

How do I create a page full of feeds?

joshnunn — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 14:22:19 -0800

Are there any simple sites that will help me combine a bunch of (RSS) feeds into a new page? I'm gonna be teaching my mother (and eventually other teachers) how they can blog and use wikis etc. I'll also be teaching her how quickly share links with others using del.icio.us or Google Notebook, and share interesting items from Google Reader/Bloglines. The problem is that all these things produce different feeds, and it'd be nice if she could have a page that she can set up that combines all the feeds into a single dynamic page that's constantly updating as she tags new stuff. All the different tools are useful in their own way - a blog for her own thoughts/opinions, Notebook for sharing pages and snippets, Reader for sharing other blog posts, but none have a simple way to combine together to form a 'super-feed'.

I realise there are many many ways to do this:
yahoo pipes
feeddigest
simplepie

But I need something with the simplicity of all the other tools I've mentioned. There has to be no setup, it's got to be free, and hosted. I thought I might be able to use Google Pages, or blogger, but neither let you pull in a feed and combine it with other feeds as new content.

I look forward to hearing if anyone has found something like this - I don't even know what phrases to Google with.

How can I get an RSS feed to play nice with all the other feeds in the aggregator?

perpetualstroll — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 13:37:25 -0800

Is there a free service online that will allow me to aggregate RSS feeds, but will only show the last entry from each blog? (more details below) I am currently using a feed aggregator (feeddigest.com) to combine 15 feeds into a single one for integration into a website. However, one of the blogs has a tendency to update once an hour and is drowning out the rest of the blogs that only update once a day.

Is there a free service out there like feeddigest.com that has a function which will allow me to "throttle" the hyper-active blog and will only show the latest entry so that all the others have a chance to be seen?

Creating a Popurls-like site

elmwood — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 17:48:54 -0800

How can I create a singlegator site like Popurls? Popurls is one of the few sites on my Firefox bookmarks toolbar. It's a "singlegator" that displays the headlines of RSS feeds from many popular sites, including Metafilter, on one page.

I'd like to create a site with a similar format as Popurls, but with feeds for those sharing my profession. Are there programs or scripts readily available to create a Popurls-like singlegator page for my Web site? (FWIW, the site has a Drupal CMS front end that is integrated with a vBulletin message board.)

Sorry, Slashdot types, but "learn PHP and roll your own" isn't an option. I can make very minor modifications to existing scripts, but forget about creating something from scratch.

Stop the repetition!

serazin — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 09:42:01 -0800

My blog seems to be 'reposting' its feed regularly. Why, and how do I stop it? I read a number of blogs through Live Journal's syndication mechanism and periodically, they seem to 'resyndicate' a million posts from a particular blog. That is, I see a dozen old posts all at once as if they were brand new. I've always assumed that this happens if the blog owner somehow edits old posts, and although I know that can happen (I check my own blog through the LJ syndication, and have seen specific individual old posts reappear if I edit them), yesterday my entire blog 'reposted', and I hadn't changed anything at all. My blog is hosted by blogger.

I use LJ as a feed reader because it gives me access to some real-life friend's 'locked' private entries.

There is nothing on the help pages of either Blogger or LiveJournal that explains this issue.

My questions:
1) Why is this happening?
2) Does this problem happen with other feed-readers?
3) How can I stop this from happening?
4) Or, at the least, is the problem located with my blog (on blogger) or with the LJ's syndication function?

Thanks!

Best way to promote my rss xml feed?

JaySunSee — Sat, 08 Sep 2007 16:22:11 -0800

Promoting my xml rss feed. For free. Online. What's the best way to about doing this?

How to get full RSS instead of partial RSS

eebs — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 15:57:15 -0800

Help me get full RSS instead of partial RSS. As many of you might know, the Freakonomics blog has moved to NY Times. They used to give full RSS feeds; now all we get is partial RSS. While this generated quite a buzz on the internets, no solution was provided. I get the feeling that a significant portion of the AskMeFi community has programming and internet development expertise. I do not belong to that portion, however I can follow directions. Looking at the whole Web 2.0 development, I cannot help but think that this problem should be a trivial one for programmers. So, questions:

1) Is there a straight forward way of automatically extracting the contents of a blog and generate a full feed for it ? (Isn't Yahoo! Pipes supposed to do this sort of tasks?)

2) (If not) why not ?

Thanks.

I'm looking for a program that could serve as a perpetual, scrolling RSS feed that would cull news from various servers to be run on legacy OSes.

Lockeownzj00 — Sun, 19 Aug 2007 12:23:32 -0800

AsceticRSSFilter: I'm looking for a program I found by chance awhile ago that could serve as a perpetual, scrolling RSS feed that would cull news from various servers to be run on legacy OSes. I'm trying to turn my spare PC into something useful. I remember finding a program on the net awhile ago that serves what I'm looking for.

It was a command-line based client that would stream a sort of rss feed from this one website with miscellaneous news: local, weather, politics, etc. The program was meant to be installed and left on perpetually, and the feed would scroll as well. It could be run on old 386s and 486s, Palm Pilots, and pretty much any legacy OS without a graphical environment.

It was probably a one-word url/website/name, IIRC. Also, I found it through the comments of another website (which I can't remember) which I was looking at that gave tutorials on turning old laptop monitors into digital paintings/wall-pieces (ie 77 million paintings).

Thanks again.

Experiencing technical difficulties

clubfoote — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 05:50:51 -0800

Please Help, I'm having problems adding a feed to my google reader. I'm trying to add this blog's feed to my google reader: http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/clusterfuck_nation/.

The link, "subscribe to this blog's feed" just gives me a download of "index.rdf". What am I supposed to do with this? I'm used to just clickig the rss button, selecting my reader and presto, I've got the feed.

Slowing the RSS Tide

boombot — Sun, 24 Jun 2007 11:49:54 -0800

Is it possible, via a intermediary website or some other method, to delay an RSS feed, causing posts to hit Google Reader and/or iTunes a chosen amount of hours/days after being published?

Help my Netvibes get along with my Google Groups

blastrid — Fri, 11 May 2007 13:10:19 -0800

Netvibin': I want to add my Google Groups RSS feed as a Netvibes module. However upon adding a new feed, Netvibes throws its hands in the air and storms away... I paste the correct feed location (I've tried both Atom 1.0 and RSS 2.0 links from Google Groups) into the New Feed box in Netvibes. While verifying the feed, Netvibes spits out the choice between Atom and RSS, and neither option works after clicked.

Can I download an .opml file (the third option in the New Feed box) of Google Groups to import into Netvibes? Why doesn't Netvibes like Google Groups feeds?

Read only the User Friendly comics, inline?

bkudria — Sun, 08 Apr 2007 16:48:49 -0800

Can I get an RSS feed of the User Friendly comic that includes only cartoons, and has them inline in the feed? I like to read the User Friendly comic (http://www.userfriendly.org), but I'd like to read it without seeing the Daily Link, and more importantly, without having to click the link to see the cartoon (the feed just links to a cartoon which displays the comic). Is there any way to do this?

I've tried using Yahoo Pipes with their Regex filter, but the best I can do is filter out the daily link entries.

Creating an image tag fails, because the actual image is stored in a subdirectory that includes the short name of the month (i.e., aug, or sep), and there is no way to get this information in Pipes.

My second try was to put the whole linked page in an iframe, but that didn't work, because Pipes seems to completely strip out the tag. Bummer.

What else could I do? I guess this could be done manually using a PHP or Ruby script (I know both), but I don't look forward to coding all the infrastructure and scaffolding (which Pipes provides me), and I don't really have a place to host it.

What else can I try?

My YouTube Favorites feed

billtron — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 18:53:36 -0800

I would like to display my favorite videos on youtube through some sort of feed contraption on my Bloggy McWebloggerson, but I don't use wordpress. Any suggestions? I mean, it seems like there should just exist some sort of feed that people could subscribe to. Does Yahoo Pipes offer a solution?

How do I stop my RSS feed from being abused?

stilgar — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 15:48:55 -0800

The RSS feed from my blog is being copied in full (pictures and all, hot linking no less) to someone else's blog. The blog is is clearly a spam blog, harvesting hundreds of feeds and republishing them in full. The whois for this site is not helpful, what if anything should I do? The blog in question is livelonely.com (my site is blog.thesietch.org) seems it harvests from many many otehr blogs. I really would rather not have my content being republished on such a crappy site, specifically because I run a full feed.

Should I make them stop? If I did want to make them stop how can I find out who this person is, and make them stop?

RSS feed to track an investment portfolio?

electric_counterpoint — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 08:18:14 -0800

Looking for a site where I can enter a portfolio (stocks and funds) and generate an RSS feed that gives daily breakdowns of how each stock is doing. I'm a very hands-off investor, but I have some high-risk stuff and I'd like to make sure my IRA doesn't take when I'm not paying attention.

I've seen this thread, but I'm hoping in the last year something's changed online. I'd rather not do individual feed subscriptions for each stock in the portfolio, but rather get one update a day at markets' close telling me what's up. The more options, the better, of course.

I remember reading about one new site about a month ago. It was about investing, but with a social/community aspect. Very web 2.0, and it was the first thing I thought of when this question occurred to me. But, I can't find any reference to it now. In case this will generate the RSS I need, can anyone help my memory?

How to set up an RSS feed for my old-fashioned site?

clairezulkey — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 09:01:10 -0800

How to set up an RSS feed for my old-fashioned site? Please know that I only sort of know what I"m talking about in this post, so if my verbiage is off, don't hurt me.

Everyone is telling me that I need an RSS feed in order for my blog to keep up with readers and aggregators and whatnot. I wish I could just ignore the whole thing, especially considering the PITA that this is turning out to be.

I started my site in 2002--it was designed and edited via Dreamweaver, and my host is XO.com (the site is Zulkey.com.) My boyfriend tried to help me get an RSS set up by getting me on Dreamweaver 3, which apparently has RSS capabilites, but the problem is my four years' worth of archives.

I can go without setting up a feed for my old stuff, but I still have no idea how to do it currentl. It probably doesn't help that my site is text-driven and has one long post a day as opposed to several smaller ones.

Is there any way to set up a feed for this puppy that's not going to cause tremendous amounts of time? Would it be best to just transfer the whole thing to a new platform like Moveable Type? And if so, how can that be done? I wish I could just throw some money at the problem and buy some magical program that takes care of this for me in a relatively simple way.

If you want to tell me not to worry about it, that not having an RSS feed isn't hurting me tremendously in the long run, then I'll listen to that as well.

Thanks for reading this damn-long post.