ryan kennedy's blog

I totally forget who to thank for pointing this out. I caught it in one of my feeds, but it was a couple of days ago. Anyway, I finally got my invite code to use Feed43 (Feed For Free). It’s awesome. I will say that it’s probably not for novice users. The interface requires you to know HTML and a bit about pattern matching. So it’s unlikely my mother will ever use it.

But…if you have the tools and the talent, Feed43 will let you take any feedless web page and generate a feed for it. You can find individual sections of the page or repeating segments and turn them into RSS items. This is great for me because there are several sites I find myself occasionally polling to see if there are any updates (because they don’t publish a feed). Now I can easily set up feeds for whatever and just add them to my aggregator.

It will be interesting to see how web site operators handle this. This is obviously a really simple way to screen scrape sites that use ads to generate money. You could easily set up Feed43 to scrape a site and send you back the bits you want, minus the ads. I imagine this will prompt some people to start randomizing their pages a bit or to simply ban traffic from the Feed43 systems. Hopefully there are a few smart people out there who will see this and get a hint to start generating feeds of their content. They could start generating feeds with embedded ads and it would make an easy enough route to get the data that people wouldn’t bother with Feed43.

There’s nothing I can see in the terms of service that would prevent users from generating new feeds and then sharing the URLs with others. Maybe I’ll see if I can come up with some slick ones and post them here.

Update: Reading is good for you. I found the Feed43 FAQ:

Q: Can I share my feeds with others?

A: Of course you can. Just send them a link to your feed, or even place this link on your web site.

There’s quite a buzz lately about our CFO and her recent statements regarding search:

• Yahoo Cedes Search to Google and So Do I – Steve Rubel
• Yahoo quits? – Things that make… you go hmm

People are totally blowing this out of proportion. Everybody thinks this means that Yahoo! has conceded that we don’t want to be the best search out there. Crap. Total crap.

There’s a very large difference between being #1 and being the best. Apple zealots know what I’m talking about. Linux fanatics know what I’m talking about.

Just because you use the product with the highest market share doesn’t mean you’re using the best product. Steve Rubel of all people should know this, seeing as how he’s a recent Apple convert.

A recent post by Jon Oltsik titled “What the heck is Yahoo thinking?” recently crossed my radar…and not in a good way. It seems his wife was sent email letting her know that her Yahoo! Mail Plus account is set to expire. Aren’t we polite? She wasn’t sure if it was a phishing attempt, however, so she sent her husband (Jon) in to investigate.

Jon says, “Yahoo sends its subscribers a billing e-mail from a cryptic domain, cc.yahoo-inc.com, with absolutely no prior warning.” I’m sorry Jon, next time we’re going to send you email, we’ll send you an email warning ahead of time. Oh…and we’ll be sure to send it from a yahoo.com domain instead, because you know…we don’t just give those out for free. So you know it’s legit.

Jon goes on to say, “The e-mail of course asks you to verify personal information and supply your credit card number–an Internet taboo if there ever was one.” Someone should tell those Amazon guys that their entire business model is taboo. Those stupid gits, do they think we were born yesterday. Who on earth would give out their credit card number over the internet?

Of course, the whole time Jon thinks there’s a possibility someone might be phishing him. He doesn’t bother to point out that every URL he’s been accessing has been a yahoo.com URL. Nor does he point out that the ordering system is served entirely off of an HTTPS URL with a certificate, signed by Yahoo!

Jon’s entire post feels like a flame. Like something just happened to him and he’s so mad he has to tell everybody about it. Without sharing any details of the email message or the URL flow his wife went though, he dumps his emotions into bytes on a page and voila!

If you get email from Yahoo! telling you that your Plus subscription is about up and you’re not sure if the email is legit, head over to https://billing.yahoo.com/. You can see everything you’re being billed for, when your next payment is due, what the amount is and what payment method you’re using.

First, I hate Bloglines. Then, I hate it some more. When it seems like my hate has come to a simmer, it flares up once again. Somehow, I manage to find patience and forgiveness for a product that has mostly served me well.

No more. While this isn’t a new occurrence, it’s been happening A LOT lately. For whatever reason, Bloglines is showing me feed items twice. Not like in the past where I’d read it and then it would show up as unread later on. I mean they’re showing it to me twice right in the app. Look at the screenshot (click it for a bigger view). That’s Engadget. For whatever reason, most of the posts being shown to me are being shown twice.

It’s been going on for over a week now. At first I just thought that something might be wrong with the Engadget feed. I thought maybe it wasn’t Bloglines’ fault. I’d believe that if not for the fact that I saw it in more than one feed. It seems to happen more often in Engadget than in other feeds, but I’ve definitely seen it in other feeds.

So I’m left with a dilemma. I have the tools. I have the talent. I can write my own aggregator. I can take an open source aggregator and install it. I can suck it up and stick it out with Bloglines. I can write my own OPML import for Yahoo! Mail Beta. I hate every one of those ideas.

So instead I’ll sleep on it and maybe something will come to me in the morning.

As I type this, Bloglines is having more issues with language switches (see comment #11 by Robyn, from Bloglines). With all the troubles I’ve had, you’d think I’d be fed up with Bloglines by now and that I’d have switched off. But there’s reasons I haven’t:

1. All my feed are belong to Bloglines. I have 194 feeds being tracked by Bloglines right now. That’s a ton of data. I realize I can do an OPML export and move my feeds to another provider, but once I get there I’m going to have to read each and every feed so that the read/unread state is consistent with Bloglines. That doesn’t sound like fun.
2. 99% of the time, Bloglines is just fine. There are some circumstances when it has some rather nasty issues (remarking items as unread, not updating feeds or showing me the UI in another language). But for the most part, Bloglines hums along without issue.
3. Other aggregators just don’t work the way I want them to. The Bloglines way of reading feeds has become second nature to me now. It feels very natural. Few other aggregators are able to exactly duplicate this, causing me a bit of gear grinding when I try to use them.

So is Bloglines really as bad as I’ve made them out to seem? No, not really. I would say that I’ve probably been overly harsh on them here.

They have experienced growth issues. Who hasn’t? Any successful web site has, at some point, felt the crunch of an unexpected flood of traffic. It’s how you deal with that flood that counts. Bloglines has suffered a few bumps and bruises, but for the most part my feeds have remained intact and the service (in my experience) has rarely been unavailable outside of normal maintenance hours. At past companies and even at my current one, growth has always been painful. So I feel their pain and I’m going to cut them some slack.

The bottom line is, getting my “feed fix” has become very important to me. I easily spend an order of magnitude more time in Bloglines than I do reading my personal email (I won’t count my work mail). So when my main digital-crack supplier is experiencing technical difficulties, I get serious withdrawals that make me cranky.

In all, I still use Bloglines because it’s the best of the bunch. It does occasionally do something to make me mad, but in such times I’ll simply try to be a bit more understanding.

Update: Figures, right when I start talking nice about Bloglines it begins acting up again. As Robyn points out (look at comment #11), the Bloglines language problem is back again. This time I managed to get a full screenshot of it. It’s really odd that most of the UI is in Spanish but the hotkey tips are in English.