RE: [syndication] A story and some new software

["Jeff Barr" <jeff@vertexdev.com>]

Great story.

> I think that for RSS to be adopted by the rest of the world, and 
> for the average Joe to *get* syndication, it has to be made much 
> easier. As in: "Click here to add this feed to your site." 

If we can come up with a generic way to encode the right info, 
we can put a link like this on each and every syndic8 feed info
page, with little recipes and encoded URLs for every popular 
publishing system.

Jeff;

> -----Original Message-----
> From: { d m p } [mailto:dmp@fray.com] 
> Sent: Friday, November 09, 2001 11:13 AM
> To: syndication@yahoogroups.com
> Subject: [syndication] A story and some new software
> 
> 
> Hi Syndicators --
> 
> Long time lurker, first time poster....
> 
> Hi! I'm Derek. I make a bunch of sites. Most of them have 
> been around for years, so I've just begun retrofitting them 
> to produce RSS. After going through the process for three of 
> my sites, I began to feel frustrated by how little of a 
> payoff I was getting from the feeds. I totally get the 
> potential of RSS, but it felt like I was doing all this work 
> to send my feeds off into nowhere.
> 
> I know about Syndic8 and Dave Winer's fine efforts in this 
> area, but since I didn't want to use a desktop app (like 
> Radio or Ceres), my options were limited. And since I don't 
> run my own server, I couldn't get any of the aggregators I'd 
> found to work (I can't install Perl modules). Frustrated, I 
> posted a kvetch to my site.
> 
http://www.powazek.com/zoom/log/archive/00000219.shtml

What happened next is why I love the web. Ben Brown heard my plea and
sat down and wrote a personal RSS aggregator called RSS Monkey. It's
simply it allows you to grab and display RSS feeds custom templates for
the output, and can be run as a SSI without installing anything that
would require a root password.

Finally I could put up one page that displays my own feeds and updates
itself!

http://www.powazek.com/rss/

I think that for RSS to be adopted by the rest of the world, and for the
average Joe to *get* syndication, it has to be made much easier. As in:
"Click here to add this feed to your site." Perhaps there's other
software out there that I don't know about (Likely!) but Ben Brown's RSS
Monkey is the first one I've found that's relatively trivial to install
and use.

I thought y'all might be interested in checking it out. The software
should be available for download later today.

http://brandbenbrown.com/display.html/rssmonkey

Rock on,

-- Derek





-+-
Derek M. Powazek, real person
 home - http://powazek.com/log/
 work - http://powazek.com/forhire/
 book - http://designforcommunity.com/



 

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