Thursday, January 10, 2008

Get your feed on for free!

I've enthused in the past about NetNewsWire (NNW), the RSS and Atom newsreader client for Macintosh, and my love has only grown since the release of version 3.0. I've also come to really like and rely on the Newsgator web application and its super-slick iPhone counterpart. NNW syncs automagically with my Newsgator account so, no matter where or how I check my feeds, they're up to date.

So, knowing that the software and service come with my personal stamp of approval, what else can possibly be done to get you to give it a spin? Ah, of course: make it absolutely free to download and use. (Of course, I didn't do that. The good folks at Newsgator did.)

Congrats and thank you to Brent Simmons for the lovely tool—in which I spend increasing portions of my day—and its continued improvement and refinement.

Wednesday, June 13, 2007

Sneaking feeds from the PD

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch website is a bit of usability nightmare, but most vexing is its spotty use of RSS feeds. You can generally get news headlines and section headlines, but they're not full-text feeds and they have a firehose approach (for example, you can get a feed of all columnists but not just pick and choose your favorites).

Last year, the paper launched a bunch of blogs and they continue to roll out others. Powered by WordPress, the PD Blog Zone is as frustrating to navigate as the rest of the site and its feed selection is no exception. If you rely on auto-discovery, you wind up with a feed of comments from all blogs, not the original content. The individual blogs have no obvious links to their feeds either.

But last week, I accidentally discovered how to trick the PD into giving up its blog feeds: Just take the address of the blog and append /feed/ to the end. So, for example, if you're a transit geek like me and want to follow the new Driver's Seat blog, the feed address would be http://www.stltoday.com/blogs/news-the-drivers-seat/feed/. Alas, they're still not full-text but at least they provide a few lines whenever the site updates.

Are the blogs themselves any good? It's a mixed bag. The Driver's Seat is new and largely focused on the roads (necessarily, given the current mania around the I-64 reconstruction), but there are occasional public transit and Metro tidbits and it may improve with both breadth and depth in time. I've only sampled a few of the others and haven't found anything else particularly feedworthy to stick into my NetNewsWire yet.

Wednesday, August 9, 2006

links for 2006-08-09

• TubeSock - Rip videos from YouTube
  "TubeSock converts YouTube's native FLV file format into H.264, MP4, or MP3 files." You can do it from the command line, but $15 is a small price to pay for convenience. Nifty.
  (tags: youtube macintosh utility)
• YouTube - Lorchcast
  Oh, this poor fella. In television, once things go wrong, they tend to domino. (This is from a hometown station I used to work with, way back in the day, so it's particularly painful to watch.)
  (tags: television bloopers khqa schadenfreude)
• Hazzard Ahead
  Johnny Hazzard has a weblog. As if I needed another reason to drool. How can you not get behind a guy (ahem) who looks like that and has Elaine Stritch singing "The Ladies Who Lunch" as his theme song? Hubba hubba Johnny.
  (tags: johnnyhazzard)
• Subtraction: Feeding the Hand That Fed Me
  Khoi Vinh modifies the new "standard" syndication icon and offers it up to the world. Just like the Times, ma!
  (tags: rss syndication webdesign icons)