Something about RSS [RSS news and comments]

Podcasts at informednews.com:

informednews.com has just added podcasts section with some of the most informative podcast feeds. It works with and tags. Podcast feeds are fully integrated with your custom feeds list, 'My Feeds' section, available for registered users.

posted by O.  @ 5:26 AM ·

informednews.com

There was a long silence in this blog... Meantime, we worked on a few projects. Today, we launched a new website: www.informednews.com .

This is a one-stop website with most important & informative news feeds, organized in a few categories. Why would you need a RSS reader to read top news feeds when you can read them in your browser? Why to read news cited on other sites when top news sources have them? You have them here, try it.

Also, you can create a free profile with your preferred RSS feeds. Enjoy!

Security:

Last days we had some problems with website security. First problem was reported by Zinho regarding some minor problems with cross-site scripting. I think it's only a minor issue because there was nothing wrong that could be done, nothing to steal or reveal. However we took seriously this problem and fixed it. Thanks Zinho.

Second one, I think unrelated with first one, was an attack of our forum. Somebody found our site with google.com.vn and used an IP address from Australia. Then used an old SQL injection vulnerability, posted something in forum and changed admin password. This problem also has been solved now.

I don't find interesting these attacks especially second one, as long as they used old methods public documented on security sites. If you want to prove something find new holes in softwares and help people make them more secure, not applying old, no-brain script.

Iraq Cultural Property Monitor:

I received a very interesting email from Mr. John Simmons, Chairman of The Baghdad Museum Project (Iraq Museum International) saying they used our ebay2rss free script to create an eBay automated monitoring for stolen Iraq artifacts. They also provide a real-time RSS feed with live auctions from eBay, based on this script, at http://www.baghdadmuseum.org/icpm_rss.php.

Unfortunately, selling stolen artifacts is a reality, difficult to control or monitor. Any effort in stopping or reducing this problem is appreciated. Of course, we never thought when made this script that could be used for such a purpose, but we are very glad if helped.

Thanks for letting us know about using ebay2rss and good luck in your work.

IE7:

I've just read about Bill Gates' announcement at RSA Security conference in San Francisco about new Internet Explorer 7. You can read more details about this news in IE blog. As you can see the main target are Windows XP users, especially those with SP2. What about Windows 200 users? We'll see.

If you want to see how IE 6 (or 5) is doing right now try these stats from W3Schools.com. In Jan. 2005 IE 6+5 had 69.7% market share, and this month (Feb. 2005) is 69.2%. So, 0.5% less users are using IE, moving to other browsers, especially Firefox. In this case (Firefox) the trend is ascending, from last month they have 0.7% increase, reaching 20% of the market this month.

So, it's pretty clear Microsoft has to do something with its browser to get back their customers. Just for fun, see where MS was in Jan. 2004: 84.1%.

I'm very interested about what new IE7 will offer regarding RSS & syndication. Hopefully, we'll find out soon.

New web based RSS reader:

A major player has just launched their new web based RSS reader: Newsburst.com from CNET. After Bloglines.com aquisition by AskJeeves this market become more and more competitive. Some solutions include companies like Yahoo (my.yahoo.com), Microsoft (my.msn.com), Bloglines.com, Rojo.com and new Newsburst.com. Where is our simple RSS news reader ? :)

New MSN search engine with RSS support:

MSN.com has just launched their own search engine with some RSS flavours. First thing is my.msn.com with a web RSS aggregator. It won't be long till we'll see their logo () all over the net.
Second new thing is that MSN search engine is returning results in RSS format. For any search just add &format;=rss and results are in RSS format. Try this:
http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=rss+directory&format=rss

RSS e-book:

This news is quite old now but never it's too late ...
There is a new interesting e-book about RSS marketing called Unleash the Marketing & Publishing Power of RSS published by MarketingStudies.net. If RSS interests you I'm pretty sure you'll find something new in this e-book. It covers many aspects of RSS marketing (of course), but starts with the beginning: what is RSS? what problems solve RSS? and how to use it? It has parts for RSS publishers but also for RSS consumers with practical examples like using client side or web based RSS readers or where to advertise your RSS feed.

This book has also something interesting: many interviews with people behind some of the RSS related websites you are using currently. One of these interviews is with me :)
Read in this e-book what they think about RSS or where RSS will go.

eBay RSS (II):

Two important news:

- We decided to change the name of the script :). Now it's ebay2rss.php. Actually, initial name and link is still working.

- We've just launched a new free online service to create from our site your eBay RSS feed. Don't confuse these two things: one is the free software (ebay2rss.php) you can install & customize on your website, and the other is our hosted service for eBay2RSS. Now you don't have to install it on your own website - you can use it from ours. Of course, eBay2RSS service uses a customized version of our ebay2rss.php script. Read more about specific conditions for this service on its page (or see this demo).

eBay RSS:

We have just posted a free PHP script (ebayrss.php) to create RSS feeds from eBay categories or user products. If you are are selling products on eBay and have a web site you might be interested to add RSS feeds with your products. You could get visitors from RSS users because your RSS feed is available virtually for any RSS reader. This page is easy to install, full documented and simply to use. You should try it.

My MSN & RSS Support:

According to the news MSN is ready to expand RSS support with My MSN. They will add an RSS aggregator, developed in partnership with Moreover Technologies.

This was the informational part of the news and now the comments. In my mind is clear that MSN saw Yahoo success with My Yahoo which include an online RSS reader (aggregation). Yahoo links to add RSS feeds to their pages are everywhere and are very popular. MSN couldn't afford to avoid this technology, but the issue is that they implemented it only after other people proved it. The same, I think, will happen with adding RSS reader capabilities to IE (Mozilla Firefox and Opera already proved it).

One thing I don't like with My MSN is that nothing is displayed until you login. Looks like an email collector page where nothing is available until you give him email address. Here, of course is not the case, but My Yahoo solution where you already have some content you can customize is much better.

RSSlib v1.04:

We posted a new version of RSSlib with a new parameter: display_channel_name .
Default value is true. When setting this value to false channel name & link is not displayed.

RSSlib are freeware PHP and ASP scripts to display RSS feeds on websites with two methods: rss2html (producing HTML) & rss2js (producing JavaScript). They are simple but powerfull, and customizable.

Atom2RSS smart quotes:

We had some problems with encoding some characters with Atom2RSS service, especially dealing with (smart) quotes, but not only. Now, we are doing some conversions:

& #x2019; ( ’ ) + & #x2018; ( ‘ ) => '
& #x201D; ( ” ) + & #x201C; ( “ ) => "
& #x2013 + & #x2022; => -

Maybe is not the best solution, but hopefully this will solve problems.

RSS on consumer electronics:

According to a BusinessWire PR soon we could have RSS on consumer electronics as DVD Players & Set-Top Boxes, via NewsGator:

"NewsGator Technologies, the leading RSS software platform provider, today announced support for the upcoming DivX Connected Certification Program from DivXNetworks, Inc. Through the program, users will be able to easily access RSS news and information feeds from the popular NewsGator Online service on their televisions through low-cost, connected consumer electronics (CE) devices such as DVD players and set-top boxes."

Maybe in future we'll see RSS in many other devices not only on our computers or PDAs.

RSS2WAP.com reloaded:

We've just moved this free service to convert RSS to WML available on WAP devices on a new server. Old one was the slowest server possible and it worth something better. Also, code was converted from ASP to PHP. See it online at http://www.RSS2WAP.com . For any problems please let us know.