Aurlog

McCann RSS feed

Following the rampant success of my Big Brother RSS feed (now defunct and Channel 4 now provide their own feed (not to mention the separate feeds from Digital Spy and The Sun)) and CILIP Lisjobnet RSS feed, I bring you an RSS feed for another very prominent site that strangely doesn't have one, although it does describe itself as a blog/diary: Gerry's Blog/Diary, which is part of the Missing Madeleine page (I would advise you to turn down the sound before entering the site (not to mention images, as the many pictures of eyes are unsettling to say the least)). It is the daily diary of Madeleine McCann's father and is frequently quoted in the press. The feed can be found at http://www.aurochs.org/internet/blogging/madeleine.php.

I must say that I am in no way connected to the case and I don't honestly think this will contribute to the effort to find the missing girl at all: there's a fair case for saying this case needed less publicity, not more, although it is clearly too late now. However, it may be useful to someone wanting to keep track of the affair. I am not making any more comment on the rights and wrongs of the parents' actions, the police investigation, the press treatment of the story, or what might have happened. I kind of really want to, but I won't, at least for now*. If nothing else, I don't have the time to write a post of the length to say everything I would want to say, which is also what prevents me having a general rant at the quality of BBC news, a post that has been brewing in my head for some years and which is not unrelated to the subject of this post.

* Except for not recommending you visit Madeleine McCann Latest News where you can dowload a Maddie toolbar (version 1.7), vote for Madeleine McCann Website Blog at the Madeleine McCann Top-Site-List (there's only one site there, curiously), send on an email that will apparently save Madeleine McCann's life, find out precisely how many days, hours, and seconds she has been missing for, download a "Maddie News" Google search bar and a Madeleine Latest News Widget for your website, and find out the lastest news on her disappearance.

A.D. VII ID. AUG. MMVII

Permanent link | Comments (0) | Comments RSS (subscribe)

CILIP Lisjobnet RSS feed

I have now created an RSS feed for library jobs presented at CILIP's Lisjobnet vacancies site: subscribe to http://www.aurochs.org/internet/blogging/ciliprss.php. As I've said before, I am amazed that the professional organisation representing those who are meant to be at the forefront of information delivery haven't already done this. They only have a simple search interface and an email sent every fortnight. I would like to add the ability to refine the RSS feed, much as you can refine the search on the site itself, but that will have to wait until I have the time/inclination/etc. As I am not actively looking for jobs at the moment, this is not such a high priority.

That there is a clear demand for this service is shown by the fact that I've had an unadvertised not-fully-functional version of this working for ages, only really findable through Bloglines, and two other people (sadly anonymous) have signed up for it. It was not fully functional before as the full list of Lisjobnet vacancies is presented over an unpredictable number of separate pages (at the moment 8). The old version could only read page one, so it threw up only a handful of vacancies and ignored many of them. The new version reads the number of pages from the first page of results and then checks all of them. In the end, the final fix would have taken 2 or 3 minutes were it not for me missing off a $ in a really stupid place in the php code.

I must really stress that there are some caveats to its use: firstly, it is not official and should be taken as is. Secondly, although the prototype version has been stable in serving up jobs in the correct format, I cannot guarantee what CILIP will do to the format or availability of their vacancies: even a small change in the HTML coding will bring it down until I can correct the code. Thirdly, I have done as much testing as I can to determine whether it shows all jobs, but have not done enough testing over time to be 100% sure. Yesterday it showed all 75 jobs with no problems in Google Reader; I'm not so sure about Bloglines, but I think it is OK. If you have any findings about this let me know.

Finally, I would be very interested to know if anyone uses this RSS feed and if people find it useful or have any comments.

A.D. XVII KAL. IUN. MMVII

Permanent link | Comments (0) | Comments RSS (subscribe)

Water and information shortage

There was a water cut in Sandy yesterday. I thought the shower had just conked out. We had some water in the tanks for the bath and so forth so I didn't think much of it and went to work. It was then interesting to see how far I could follow developments at work. I first found out about the cut, and could tell my wife about it, as the RSS feed I have set up for Biggleswade Today had the information in my feed reader when I came into work. Hurrah.

To follow developments, I looked up the Anglian Water site. A search for Sandy gave me an incident page which, although grammatically awful and low on detail, at least had the main points and was time-stamped. I had a meeting from about 2 till 4. When I got out, Biggleswade Today had triumphantly added another news item saying that the water came back at 3 (again, I could tell my wife at home and she could start actually using the water); the Anglian Water page just disappeared: there was nothing to say there ever was a problem and had that been my only source of information, I wouldn't have known what that meant. A bit rubbish. As for the BBC, they had eventually put an article via RSS saying that there was a water cut. It still says so now and they haven't issued any updates yet.

Conclusion: hurrah for Biggleswade Today; almost good but boo for Anglian Water; ho hum for the BBC.

A.D. III NON. APR. MMVII

Permanent link | Comments (0) | Comments RSS (subscribe)

Bunch of RSS

The CILIP RSS feed threw up a training session from UKeiG which, untypically for the CILIP RSS feed, amused me. It said:

Don't know your RSS from your elbow? Haven't a clue where to hang the blogroll?

That's the stuff. It was however sad to see one of their reasons compelling people to come as:

Awareness of them [RSS, blogs, and wikis] amongst users will increase as Microsoft incorporates RSS and blogging into Office 2007, Outlook and IE 7 so don't get left behind.

Do we all have to wait for Microsoft to integrate everything before we jump in? Isn't half the point of all this that the platform shouldn't matter?. Never mind.

A.D. X KAL. FEB. MMVII

Permanent link | Comments (2) | Comments RSS (subscribe)

RSS feeds for Blosxom writeback-based comments on Aurlog (at least for individual posts)

After finding some of Sil's RSS feeds for comments on particular posts extremely useful and galvanised by his recent comments that

It really massively annoys me when I post a comment to someone's site and then have to keep checking back to see if anyone's followed it up

I decided to do something about it. Sil mentions co.mments which sadly doesn't work for Blosxom weblogs, definitely not those using the now rather dated writeback plugin as mine does. I also don't like the idea of using what is essentially another aggregator if, for example, I wanted to monitor one of my own posts. I wouldn't want anyone else to have to either, although having tried co.mments out on a few other sites I think it is very good.

In the true spirit of Perl-based Blosxom, the script that produces the comments RSS is written in PHP. This was originally obvious until I discovered Google Reader doesn't like .php on the end of the RSS feeds (Bloglines, which I use, doesn't care either way and I haven't checked any others). Anyway, this is no longer a problem. I have also included a Subscribe link which, like the one on the left for the weblog as a whole, uses Aquarion's SubscribeMe service. It doesn't yet use Sil's idea implementing one button for submitting a comment and subscribing to a feed, although I shall review that when he releases his promised generic version.

I haven't yet thought of a way to produce an RSS feed for all comments but am not sure I'm really bothered anyway. It would generally get bogged down in spam, this not being a high traffic site for comments and would be hideous to produce with writeback's data structure, lack of timestamping, and lack of unique identifiers for individual comments. I could (further) hack the writeback plugin, as I have already done to implement spam filtering, but then I wouldn't have time to write needlessly long posts such as this one.

Do, gently, let me know of the inevitable problems I have missed.

A.D. XV KAL. FEB. MMVII

Permanent link | Comments (4) | Comments RSS (subscribe)

Big Brother RSS feed yet again again

A little late as the final is this Friday, but I ought to mention that I noticed a week or two ago that the Big Brother site now has an RSS feed, part of a family of Channel 4 RSS feeds. The feed looks to be exactly the same (in output, I haven't checked the XML code) as mine except that a picture is added, something that I was loath to do anyway, thinking that republishing pictures is one step too many beyond screenscraping.

The other major difference is that the official feed already has 28 subscribers, on Bloglines anyway, despite its relative youth compared to the 2 subscribers (including myself, goodness knows who the other person was) that I generated.

I have to say I am actually quite vague about what happened in Big Brother this year as I have so many feeds set up in Bloglines that I have to filter my way through the same thing happening three or four times, on my feed, on Channel 4's, and on the Sun's feed (15 subscribers), which is independent as to content and is in many ways better than the official news. Next year should be easier.

A.D. XIX KAL. SEPT. MMVI

Permanent link | Comments (4) | Comments RSS (subscribe)

Big Brother RSS feed yet again

Big Brother are apparently introducing RSS feeds amongst other changes. Hurrah: I shall see what it looks like. In the meantime, try mine. Incidentally, in the comments to the last article, David Holtz suggested using FeedFire. I couldn't get any satisfactory results with it myself as the feed David had set up confined itself to headlines and, more importantly, the site needed payment as far as I could tell in order to do even the most rudimentary configuration.

Getting back to Big Brother, it does seem odd timing to introduce such changes to their site. I can't believe my own comments have had that much impact, but I do notice that even the Sun is offering a Big Brother RSS news feed, though not of course matching the news as delivered by Big Brother.

On a related note, I came across the Radio Times Big Brother Blog (via Jack Mottram), which is worth a read, though mostly opinion rather than news as such.

A.D. III KAL. IUL. MMVI

Permanent link | Comments (0) | Comments RSS (subscribe)

Big Brother 2006 RSS feed that actually works

The Big Brother rss feed I created with Feed43 didn't work. Although the feed seemed OK if you went and checked it, and although it presented very nicely when it did work, it never seemed to update on Bloglines, giving an error signal for days on end before spluttering into life again. No good and it seems I am not alone. I experimented with a few other screen-scraping feed creators:

I therefore had a go at doing it myself using PHP and a couple of regular expressions, and managed to make a feed identical (in output if not in XML coding) to the Feed43 one. And it works. Feed: http://www.aurochs.org/internet/blogging/bb.php. After doing this I wonder whether Feed43 will really have a market as the sort of people who can make sense of terms like 'whitespace' and symbols like {*}, {_}, and {%} will probably be OK doing their own exactly as they want it with a little code and a regular expression.

KAL. IUN. MMVI

Permanent link | Comments (24) | Comments RSS (subscribe)

Tom