RSS Multiplying Like Rabbits

I think, at a child’s birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift would be curiosity. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt ~

Over the past few days I became more interested in RSS feeds, and wondered if there was some way to display them inside my blog. I already knew there was an MT plugin for that purpose, but that wasn’t quite what I needed. I wanted a multi-purpose web-based feed reader that I could install on my own server, pull the various results into my blog with PHP includes, and use for more than just news or blogs. I stumbled across zFeeder over at SourceForge.net and decided to install that on the server and play around with it a little. On the first evening, I managed to create a custom MT template and pull in the RSS feeds of some of my friends and fellow-bloggers. Some folks’ rss feeds either aren’t well-formed or aren’t being recognized by zFeeder, or they just don’t have a readily available feed url to read. To those folks, I suggest they go take a look at FeedBurner which can create a feed for them. Recently FeedBurner has a new style of feed called SmartFeed, and what this does is adjust “on the fly” your feed to optimize it for whatever feed reader or application pulling in the feed. It works with Atom, and most other syndication formats and feed readers, so if you need a feed for your blog, go visit their site and they’ll take care of you. The antipixel-style button they have available is based on one I made and sent to them — “Aine-inspired,” according to FeedBurner’s web designer, Matt Shobe. *grins*

Ok, so if that wasn’t enough, I then began looking at the various kinds of feeds available over at BlogShares, and realized I could pull my whole BlogShares Stock Portfolio into my blog, and I did that on another custom template in MT, so it appears on it’s own page inside this blog. And I thought, “Ok, this is kewl… what else can I do?”

So then I thought, “Well, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to click just one link and scan four or five world news sources’ headlines instead of going to googlenews and yahoo news and a half dozen other sites?” And then I went hunting for World News rss feeds and found a few likely looking ones, built another MT template and pulled in those World News Feeds, and that works pretty well.

And then today I was looking at the other BlogShares feeds and realized that there are feeds available for each Industry (these are like, categories of blogs), and since I’m the Art Industry mogul, I keep a blog just for blogs about Art. I thought it would be neat to see what that Industry feed was and figure out if I could incorporate it somehow into that Industry blog. Well, if you look over here, you can see the results of that feed in the sidebar of that blog. I’m currently listing the Top 100 blog stocks in the Art Industry, not the Top 250. zFeeder is nicely customizable by feed.

In the meantime, while all of this was going on, my sons found the destroyed nest of a cottontail rabbit, and whatever it was that destroyed that nest appears to have run off with the mama rabbit, leaving four baby bunnies behind. I’m hand-feeding them with baby formula and an eye-dropper. They’re just beginning to open their eyes, and they aren’t any bigger than a pack of cigarettes. Awww… my preciousssss. Aren’t they sweeeet?

***A lot of the links above are now broken (Jan. 2005) since I took down a few blogs, moved to a new server, and upgraded MT. I may or may not reinstitute the custom templates in the future, I haven’t decided. I may just look for better solutions and applications online.