Welcome to the new Tim Yang’s Geek Blog

I need some help with a project that I’ve been trying to get off the blocks for several months now. It’s called Nuposts.com and it’s a public hosted RSS aggregator. Basically if you’re a user, you can login and create a new publicly-accessible RSS aggregator page based on a specific topic. Let’s say, the topic is New York City. So every blogger from New York City will be able to login and add their RSS feed to the aggregator page and the latest items from their feeds will display on the page.

Eventually as Nuposts becomes more popular, each room will become a blogger community site for the topic of the page. Each room is like a blogring and meeting place for like-minded bloggers but with all the latest news from its members. If you want the latest news from the bloggers of New York City, just go to the Nuposts.com New York City page. Or if you want the latest about knitting, go to the Nuposts page where all the knitting bloggers hang out. Each room will eventually have optional community tools like forums and chatrooms and maybe even photo storage.

Nuposts, as a public RSS aggregator, allows anyone to create new rooms, as many rooms as they want. You can create rooms as specific as Chihuahua Fanciers in Johannesburg. And you can promote your rooms with built in publicity tools with the ability to search Blogger or Technorati to find other like-minded bloggers and email them about your new Nuposts rooms.

Nuposts has two kinds of target audiences:

Blog readers who are interested in a genre of blogs. They will be able to see which of their favourite bloggers has updated and be introduced to new bloggers of the same genre. They come back again and again to the room homepages to see what’s the latest in their favourite genre.

Second, Bloggers of a genre. Sharing in a Nuposts room reinforces their association with their chosen genre and they will be able to attract new traffic from Nuposts blog readers who are interested in their genre of blogs. They visit the homepage of their chosen genre once to tell Nuposts to get their RSS feed. But they will visit the forum again and again to parlay with other bloggers who blog about the same genre.

Right now, the project needs a couple programmers in PHP (or Ruby as the case may be) to help code the interface and the modules. I started the project off with a project description of the features, the timeline, the goals to be reached at each point of the project timeline and a wireframe of the homepage of each Nuposts room. It’s a big project. Really big. And the programmer who was working on the project had to leave because of work commitments.

I’m afraid there is no money. I have no funding. It’s all volunteer work until an angel comes along. If you’d like to help out, please do email me and I’ll give you more details and access to the project wiki. Thanks!

Technorati Tags: Nuposts rss

I thought this was pretty cool. But I was expecting Microsoft to be the first to introduce this feature. Immedi.at gives you a bookmarklet which you click on when the website you want has a auto-discoverable RSS feed (or click on the bookmarklet when you are on the actual feed url). But I find it inconvenient that Immedi.at doesn’t save my IM settings so I have to re-enter them every time I want to bookmark a new feed for IM alerts.

immedi.at helps you to keep track of online information as it changes. It sends you an instant message whenever any RSS or Atom feed you want to monitor changes. immedi.at works with all major IM carriers including MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, Google Talk, Jabber, and AIM/ICQ.

http://immedi.at/

Technorati Tags: Instant messaging rss

A friend and IM-collaborator, Eric Thom of RSSapplied.com, needs an RSS consultant and blogger immediately.

RSS Applied has been focused on the business opportunities presented by RSS and Weblogs for years, and we’re ready to bring another person onboard. This position will involve intense daily research focused on the latest RSS technology news, business blogging strategies, corporate communications, podcasting applications, as well as blog design and navigation.

All inquires should be addressed to Technorati Tags: Job rss

This is a really nice script that displays photos from any Flickr.com RSS feed on your website.

Technorati Tags: Flickr rss

RSS-feed.org is a beta site that lets you create a publicly accessible webpage that shows news from all your favourite news sources — as long as they have an RSS feed. Right now RSS-feed.org doesn’t allow you to add just any feed (only the ones they’ve selected), but the existence of this service only highlights that people want to have a say in how they have news displayed to them. RSS may be hot, but it’s not how everyone wants to consume news. A significant portion of people just don’t want to use a feed reader for whatever reason and Web 2.0 engineers need to take notice.

This week, I made Macgregator, a webpage that aggregates news in Mac-related topics that I’m interested in. Although I judiciously use an RSS feed reader, I don’t want to constantly consume Mac news. Although I’ve been using a Mac for over a decade, I’m just not that interested in the latest and the greatest in everything Mac. I sporadically read Mac stuff from a few sources and I needed a way that lets me do it conveniently without having to bombard me with reminders of that I’m missing out. I want to consume some news when I want and if I want to — not when some robot tells me to. For me, that’s why sites like RSS-feed.org will have a place in the future.

Technorati Tags: news aggregation rss

Feed-mail.com is an interesting, if quite unusable concept. It’s email sent via RSS feeds. You subscribe to your Feed-mail feed and you get emails that are sent to that feed. Less spam, more secure. But the sender has to login to his Feed-mail account in order to send a message. And there’s no SMTP service either so you’re locked into Feed-mail’s interface. And one thing that irked me was that my password was inscribed into the feed’s url in plain. Major security risk. And I reckon Feed-mail also has the same security problem as receiving Gmail via Bloglines or any public RSS aggregator — you have to ensure that your feed has privacy settings. Feed-mail is still in beta so things might improve on usability.

Technorati Tags: Email rss

Newsgator has just released their API. Developers will have access to the following types of services:

• Complete subscription management capabilities
• Subscription synchronization between all products using the API, including NewsGator Online, NewsGator Outlook edition, FeedDemon, and others
• Post-level status synchronization (read/unread/deleted status)
• Bandwidth optimization by downloading only new content
• Community and individual ratings of feed content

Now I can understand the usefulness of releasing the API for middleware like Feedburner’s API, but I don’t understand the benefit for developers or end users of releasing the API for a client application. The only party I see benefiting from this directly is Newsgator itself.

Technorati Tags: Newsgator API rss

To understand why I think Feedblitz.com is so great, you need to know a bit of history. Both Feedblitz and Bloglet.com are services for bloggers to offer email subscriptions to their blog posts. Bloglet has the distinction of being the oldest blog-to-email service — it goes so far back that when it started, RSS wasn’t invented yet and it catered exclusive for the Blogger.com crowd. But Bloglet development stalled years ago. Till this day, it doesn’t have email address validation of subscribers and subscription admins don’t have any control over their subscriber base. You can’t delete badly-typed email addresses and you can’t export your subscriber list. Bloglet subscription admins are basically trapped with Bloglet.

Which is where Feedblitz comes in. Feedblitz gives me the chance to finally dump Bloglet and move all my subscribers out to a service that does have email validation and gives me some control over the subscription feed. You can tell Feedblitz to login to Bloglet and grab all the information out of your account, including the list of all the subscribers. I just managed to rescue all my Bloglet subscribers! Given the size of the userbase of Bloglet, I don’t know why no one had thought to do this before. It’s long overdue.

So I am now offering blog-to-email subscriptions again — but this time using Feedblitz’s email form:

Technorati Tags: rss Email

Randy has published a list of the most popular feeds that are being subscribed to via his RSS-to-email service. I chuckled when I saw that an RSS blog (Randy’s) is one of the top ten for email subscription. Apart from that rather obvious observation, I can’t contribute much else, except that I noticed significant numbers were subscribed to Chinese-only blogs. This got me to thinking: how many of the popular online RSS feed readers support multi-language interfaces? Bloglines.com is one. Yahoo and MSN of course do (they’ve supported Chinese interfaces long before they had RSS feed readers). But Newsgator.com, Pluck.com and Rojo.com do not.

Technorati Tags: Email rss Rmail

I’m subscribed to Godaddy.com’s RSS feeds for their domain auctions. Great stuff. I just learned that Portugal.com is up for sale for USD4.5million. And on the other hand the owner of Michaeljacksonisdead.com wants USD175,000 for that. I’m going to keep these RSS feeds subscribed just for their amusement value. As an added bonus, I learned from the sale of thechokinggame.com (USD$500) of a strange new trend that American kids are getting into - choking each other to see who passes out first.

Technorati Tags: Domains rss

I like myprogs.net because it introduces me to new softwares for OSX. But unlike other software directories, this one comes with recommendations. I get to see what other people are using and have enjoyed so much that they tell me about them. Sometimes, in the descriptions, I even find out why they liked the software. I’m subscribed to the RSS feed for OSX.

Technorati Tags: Mac Social networks rss

As news has spread very rapidly over the past day, Google News has added RSS feeds to their offering. And as has been observed, their RSS package has a good way of handling duplicate stories as related links. So here’s what I’ve been waiting for since I released the ScrappyGoo Google News RSS scraper. ScrappyGoo will still be maintained indefinitely because thousands of feeds have been generated from it so far and while I’m sure many of the users will start using the official feeds, a large percentage of the ScrappyGoo feeds will still continue to be used. The resources being used by ScrappyGoo is quite manageable.

UPDATE: Searchenginejournal makes the interesting point that Google will probably insert RSS ads into their Google News feeds. I’d forgotten about that. ScrappyGoo will always remain ad-free. So I’m definitely keeping it around and waiting for the surge in traffic when Google starts adding ads to theirs.

Technorati Tags: rss Google google news scrappygoo