Easy RSS Mashups

Transcription

Easy RSS Mashups

EASY RSS MASHUPS
FEEDWELDER.COM
Easy RSS Mashups
Five ideas for curating content for your website without
writing code
- Nicole Hennig, FeedWelder.com
Table of Contents
Introduction: Keep your website fresh with new content by creating RSS mashups
Part 1: Five Ideas for curating content with RSS mashups
1.
Save search results and dynamically display them in your site.
2.
Embed book lists in your website.
3.
Combine image feeds from photo-sharing & bookmarking sites.
4.
Combine video feeds to use in your website.
5.
Combine news feeds from the best blogs on a topic.
Part 1I: Using FeedWelder to create better mashups
6.
The limitations of free tools
7.
The FeedWelder solution: reliable, convenient, fast, simple
Who we are
Cofounders: Sands Fish, software engineer, and Nicole Hennig, user experience designer.
We work for the libraries at MIT and this project is our own, created outside of our roles at
MIT. We believe in providing reliable, easy-to-use tools for creative professionals: simple
tools, with a single purpose, so you can focus on your work.
Why we created FeedWelder: The idea for FeedWelder came out of a need we had for an
easy, reliable, and fast feed aggregation and display tool. We’ve used similar services in the
past, but found them unreliable, too time-consuming, or too ugly (free widget creation
services that embed their logos and offer little design control).
Webmasters everywhere need a simple, reliable, “set it and forget it” tool for aggregating
and displaying useful content in their sites. We have built that tool.
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Keep your website fresh with new content
I managed the websites for the libraries at MIT for over a decade. Like many institutions, we
have multiple, related websites with multiple authors. Even with a content management
system, there is still the problem that people who write pages for sites don't always have
time to keep their pages up to date.
One solution is to feed some pages of your site with fresh content (your own and open
content from others) using RSS mashups. There are many tools that help you do this. We
liked this solution, but found the existing tools to be lacking in ease of use or reliability. So
we decided to create a better tool for this purpose: FeedWelder.
The five ideas below will spark your creative thinking and help you get started with curating
content for your sites. In part II we’ll show you how FeedWelder can make this easy.
Part I: Five ideas for curating content with RSS mashups
1. Save search engine results as a feed (and blend multiple saved search feeds).
Did you know that you can save the results of a search as a feed and get embed code for
that feed to display in a web page?
Here’s an example of a web page that is being fed with the results of the search: “content
curation” from the Bing search engine.
http://easyrssmashups.com/savedsearch-as-a-feed/
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Here’s how it works:
1.
Type your search query into http://bing.com. For example, type:
“content curation”
2.
On the results screen in the address bar, erase everything after your search terms:
before:
http://www.bing.com/search?q=%22content+curation
%22&go=&qs=n&form=QBRE&pq=%22content+curation%22&sc=8-18&sp=-1&sk=
after:
http://www.bing.com/search?q=%22content+curation%22
(If your search has quotation marks around the words, be sure to include the %22 at
the end of the keywords. It represents the quotation mark).
3.
Next append this to the URL: &format=rss
Here's how it will look:
http://www.bing.com/search?q=%22content+curation%22&format=rss
4.
That feed can be combined with other feeds using FeedWelder or other mashup tools.
Do as many searches as you like and copy the feed URL for each one, as described
above.
In part II of this guide I’ll show you how to use FeedWelder to combine multiple
feeds and get embed code for your website.
As of this date, there doesn't seem to be a way to do this with a Google search. If you find a
way, please let me know! (nicole@feedwelder.com) However, there are feeds for Google
News searches. After searching http://news.google.com/, scroll to the bottom of the page
and click on the RSS icon. That will bring up a feed with a very long URL that you can copy
and paste into your feed mashup tool.
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This is a feature that you can look for in any search tool. Saved search results are incredibly
handy when you can construct the searches ahead of time for your readers and auto-fill web
pages with the results.
_________________________________________________________
2. Book lists embedded in your website:
Create easy-to-update lists of books that have their own RSS feed. Then auto-fill
your website with these lists.
This page is being fed with a book list
from Worldcat.org.
http://smallwow.com/tinyhouses
The embed code is generated by
FeedWelder.
If you would like to include on your site a list of books that can be updated without touching
the code of your site, try WorldCat Lists.
Worldcat.org is a global catalog of library collections (more than 10,000 libraries). Anyone
can create a free account and use their list-building tool to create a book list.
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Each list you create on WorldCat has an RSS feed. Using FeedWelder, you can combine and
embed those lists on your websites.
Here's how it works:
1.
To create a list, first sign up for a free account
on Worldcat.org. Go to your profile page,
look for “lists” and then “create a new list.”
Alternatively, you can start by searching for
a book. On the book page, click “add to list”
and then “create a new list.” Look up
several books and keep adding them to your
list.
2.
Here is a list I made of books about “tiny houses.”
http://www.worldcat.org/
profiles/nic221/lists/2461401
At the top of the page is a button
marked, “RSS feed.”
Click it, then look for the “view
xml” link on the page that comes
up. Follow that to get the feed
URL.
Here's the “tiny houses” feed
URL:
http://www.worldcat.org/
profiles/nic221/lists/2461401/rss
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3. If you like, you can use FeedWelder to combine the feeds for more than one book
list and get embed code for the mixture of feeds (see part II). After you've
embedded the code on your site, those who are maintaining the book lists can add
new books by using Worldcat. Those titles will automatically appear on your web
page. This means that the page authors never need to touch the code of your site.
This is an easy way to allow a group of people to maintain lists of books for your
website.
There are other book sites with RSS feeds that you may want to try. One of my favorites is
Goodreads. You can find the RSS feed at the bottom of the page for any list of books. Use it
in the same way as Worldcat to make easy-to-edit book lists that will appear in your
website.
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3. Combine image feeds from photo-sharing
sites:
Gather feeds of images from tools like
Flickr, Picasa, or Pinterest and blend them
in creative ways.
Here’s a site that shows the latest photos from
feeds on image-sharing sites, like Flickr.
You can gather feeds from various photo sites,
blend them with FeedWelder, and display them on
your site, using FeedWelder embed code.
This is especially useful if you maintain your
photos in Flickr, Picasa, or Pinterest and want to
display them in different ways on websites that
you own.
If you’re wondering about copyright issues for
photos and the practice of aggregating content
from other sites, see this article from the Citizens
Media Law Project at Harvard. It provides legal
best practices for aggregation with RSS.
The Rise of the News Aggregator: Legal
Implications and Best Practices. (PDF)
Here are the practices they recommend:
•
Reproduce only those portions of the headline
or article that are necessary to make your
point or to identify the story. Do not reproduce
the story in its entirety.
•
Try not to use all, or even the majority, of
articles available from a single source. Limit
yourself to those articles that are directly
relevant to your audience.
•
Prominently identify the source of the article.
•
Whenever possible, link to the original source
of the article.
•
When possible, provide context or commentary
for the material you use.
To be sure the content you are reusing is legal, try the Creative Commons Search. Many
authors have designated their work (images, video, text, all formats) as legal to reuse and/
or modify under certain conditions.
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http://search.creativecommons.org/
Pinterest
If you are using Pinterest, here’s a set of tips for location original images, so that you can
make sure your pin links back and properly credits the image owner:
http://www.pafa.net/archives/3745
Some sites are expressly giving permission to use their images on Pinterest, by showing this
button:
Here's how to find the feeds on Pinterest. Look up a particular user and add “feed.rss” to
the end of the URL.
Example:
http://pinterest.com/yokoono/
http://pinterest.com/yokoono/feed.rss
To get the feed for a particular board, try this. Remove the final slash, and add “.rss”
http://pinterest.com/wholefoods/our-favorite-books/
http://pinterest.com/wholefoods/our-favorite-books.rss
The feed will show you the last 20 or so pins created in that board rather than the full
contents. You won’t be able to see the comments for pin but your feed will be updated when
new items are added.
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Picasa
For a Picasa album, click the RSS link that appears at the bottom-right of the gallery or
album page, or under the “link to this album” on the right side of the album page. Then
copy the link that appears in your address bar as the feed URL.
Flickr
Flickr has many options for feeds. See this page for a complete list:
http://www.flickr.com/services/feeds/
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Here's an example of how to construct a feed URL for a particular Flickr tag, in this case the
tag: “digitalnomad.”
http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?tags=digitalnomad&lang=enus&format=rss_200
You can fill in “tags=digitalnomad” with the tag of your choice.
Since the Flickr API for constructing feeds has so many options, it isn't always obvious how
to use it. Luckily, someone has created a “Flickr RSS Feed Generator.” This tool makes it
easy for you to enter multiple tags and change the sorting order.
Flickr RSS Feed Generator
http://www.degraeve.com/flickr-rss/
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4. Combine video feeds to use in your website.
Gather feeds of videos from sites like YouTube, Vimeo,
Internet Archive and TED Talks. Use FeedWelder to get
embed code for filling a web page with links to videos.
Next are some suggestions for places to get video that
you can reuse, with information on how to find or build
the RSS feed links.
Internet Archive
The Internet Archive is a great source of public domain video that's free to use (as well as a
huge amount of content in other formats). This page explains the different feeds available:
http://archive.org/help/rss.php
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Here's a feed URL for their “open source video” collection:
http://archive.org/services/collection-rss.php?collection=opensource_movies
On most of their collection pages you can find an orange RSS button as a way to get the
feed.
http://archive.org/details/opensource_movies
You can also browse through their sub-collections. Each of those has its own feed, look for
the orange RSS button. There are many wonderful sub-collections, here's one:
http://archive.org/details/buckminsterfuller
If you want to be more specific about which movies to include in your feed, you can use
FeedWelder to filter your feed by keyword.
YouTube
Every YouTube channel has an RSS feed, but it's not easy to find, since the RSS buttons
seem to be missing (as of this writing). Here's a way to build the link.
Use this format, and replace the XXX's with the channel name.
http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/base/users/XXX/uploads?alt=rss
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For example, here's the “@Google Talks” channel:
channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/AtGoogleTalks
feed: http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/base/users/AtGoogleTalks/uploads?alt=rss
Be sure to use the channel name that appears in the URL of the channel page, in this case
it's “AtGoogleTalks,” rather than the visible name on the page (@Google Talks).
Another example:
channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/OreillyMedia
feed: http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/base/users/OreillyMedia/uploads?alt=rss
TEDTalks
Here's a page that TEDTalks offers about their feeds:
http://www.ted.com/pages/198
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You can choose all videos, high-definition videos, or audio only. In addition, you can browse
TED Talks by theme: http://www.ted.com/themes. Each theme page on TEDTalks has its
own feed. Here's the “how we learn” theme page and feed URL:
theme page: http://www.ted.com/themes/how_we_learn.html
feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/tedtalks_video
Look for the orange RSS button or link on those pages.
_________________________________________________________________________
5. Combine the best blogs on a topic:
Create a mashup of blog feeds, sorted by date. Embed this into your website for
continual fresh content.
This page contains a mix of feeds from 10 blogs on a topic, sorted with the newest stories
on the top.
http://smallwow.com/location-ind
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Most blogs have RSS feeds. Look for the orange RSS button or link, usually found near the
top or bottom of the page.
How to find the feed URL if it's hidden
Some blogs don't make a visible link to their feed, but the feed does exist. If you don't see
a link to the feed, try adding “/feed/” to the end of the URL. This works for blogs on
Wordpress.com and self-hosted Wordpress.
For example if the blog URL is:
http://warriorwriters.wordpress.com/
the feed URL will be:
http://warriorwriters.wordpress.com/feed/
If a blog is using its own domain name, it still might be using Wordpress (self-hosted). So
try the same trick if you don't see the feed link.
http://airlineroute.net/
http://airlineroute.net/feed/
Where to find blogs on your topic
Alltop.com is a good place to start. It aggregates stories from many blogs and displays the
top five headlines from each. Click on a topic and you'll find blogs. Visit the blog of your
choice and look for the RSS icon. Click on the link and copy the URL from the browser
location bar.
Embed your own blog feeds in your websites.
If you have your own blog or set of blogs you can use FeedWelder to combine them in
various ways and get embed code for your related websites. Wordpress is especially useful
for this because you can create categories for your blog posts and each category has its own
feed.
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Here's how we use this on the MIT Libraries websites. Our news blog has many categories.
http://libraries.mit.edu/news
< ---- Categories
One of our categories is “scholarly communication.”
http://libraries.mit.edu/sites/news/category/subject-areas/scholarly-communication/
We have a separate website, focused on this topic:
http://libraries.mit.edu/sites/scholarly/
You can see that we've embedded the feed for that topic on the home page of this site.
Since this site runs on Wordpress, we're using a Wordpress RSS widget to embed the feed.
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It shows the top headlines from that category of our blog in a compact way on the site.
This allows us to centralize our blog, and syndicate our stories to our various websites,
rather than creating separate blogs for each site. Those who are interested in all of our
news topics can subscribe to the central blog, and those who are interested in just one topic
can subscribe to that.
We made a page that lists all of our feeds here:
http://libraries.mit.edu/sites/news/rss-feeds/
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You can look for a page like this on many sites, for example BBC News has a page that lists
all their feeds.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10628494
RSS widgets are not always as flexible as you would like
Sometimes the widgets provided by Wordpress and other content management systems
aren't very flexible. Perhaps they let you control the number of stories to show, but not how
they are sorted. They often don't allow you to combine multiple feeds, change the sort
order, or decide which elements of the post to show or hide, such as title, author, source,
date, description.
Sometimes widgets are ugly! If you're designing a professional site, you usually want to
make your widgets look less like ugly boxes and more like an integrated part of your design.
Website authors want more control over formatting of RSS feed content.
If you want to have more flexibility, with control over the formatting, try FeedWelder.
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Part 1I: Using FeedWelder to create better mashups
A. The limitations of free tools
There are many free tools for working with RSS feeds. They vary in how reliable they are,
some are hard to use and some can slow down your page load.
They also vary in what features they provide. Some tools are for combining feeds only,
giving you a new feed URL. Other tools will give you embed code for your website from a
single feed. You can use two of these tools together to make RSS mashups.
After testing many unreliable tools, I found a few that are worth a try if your needs are
basic. Here are two that I like:
1. ChimpFeedr: http://chimpfeedr.com/
This site is owned by the popular service for building email newsletters, MailChimp. It’s
reliable and easy to use. Paste in multiple RSS feeds and get one new feed URL that is the
mashup of all of them.
It does not offer embed code, or any other special features for sorting or controlling the
feeds, but it's a basic, simple tool that's easy to use. You don't need to create an account to
use it, so you'll need to make your own system for remembering which mixes you've
created and what their URLs are. If instead, you have an account on FeedWelder, you’ll have
one central place to keep track of all your mixed feeds.
2. Yahoo Pipes
Have you ever tried using Yahoo Pipes to make something creative with feeds? If your
experience is like mine, you spent too much time learning it, ran into some problems and
never had time to go back to it. There are tutorials and training about Yahoo Pipes, but who
has time to work on those? Also, if you search for “alternatives to Yahoo Pipes,” you will
often see people complaining about its lack of reliability.
3. Use Google Reader bundles to combine feeds and get embed code
Google Reader: http://reader.google.com
If you use Google Reader to read RSS feeds, you're in luck. It's worth creating a free
account to try this. Google Reader has folders for organizing your feeds.
- Start by putting the feeds you wish to mashup into a folder.
- Click on the folder name and under “folder settings,” select “create a bundle.”
- Give your bundle a name and if you like, a description (optional).
- Save it and then you can either “get a link” (to get the URL of your new feed), or
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“create a bundle clip,” which brings you to a page with the embed code to copy into your
website.
Create a bundle
Name and save your bundle
Get the embed code for your site
This will be sufficient for some purposes. You’ll get a basic-looking “widget.”
If you use FeedWelder instead, you’ll get these advantages:
• Select which elements appear in your mix of feeds: author, title, date, source,
description.
• Sort by title or date, and hide duplicate stories.
• Control the look and feel by selecting from a menu of basic styles.
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• Keyword filter – show or exclude stories that contain your keywords.
• Our caching system pulls the content from our cache, so that if the source feeds are
slow or down, your page load time won’t be affected.
B. The FeedWelder solution: reliable, convenient, fast, simple
http://feedwelder.com
If you want a reliable service that offers the most control over your feeds, yet is still very
easy and quick to use, try FeedWelder! We built this tool out of frustration with existing
tools.
Here are the problems we solved:
1. We made it super-simple to use. No learning curve.
2. You can select which elements appear in your mix of feeds: author, title, date,
source, description, you can hide or show each and control how much of the
description appears in your mix.
3. You can control the look and feel by selecting from a menu of basic styles. If you are
CSS-savvy, you can control it a bit more by adding a little bit of code, or you can
keep it plain and let it pick up the style of your website.
4. No more slow page loading! Our caching system pulls the content from our cache, so
that if the source feeds are down, it won't slow down the loading of your pages.
5. There is a keyword filter so that you can filter out stories that contain certain words
or phrases, or elect to only show stories that contain certain words.
6. FeedWelder is completely web-based, so there is no software to download or install.
Just log into FeedWelder.com to create and manage your feed mixes.
FeedWelder is a subscription service with free trials, so you can fully test it before
subscribing. If it's not for you, you can cancel at any time. No long-term commitments.
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FeedWelder will make it easy for you to keep your sites fresh with auto-updating
content that you have curated and filtered with the best sources. It will save you
time, and if you are building websites for others, allow you to provide more value
to them by giving content authors tools for curating content on their sites.
FeedWelder is simple to use – Here's how it works.
Make up a name for your mashup (called a “mix”).
This is only visible to you.
Add feeds.
You may use just one feed, or multiple feeds.
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Get embed code.
Paste this code into your site and you're done.
Customize the look and feel
If you want more control over the output, you can set options for sorting, hiding or showing
various elements, keyword filtering, and options for look and feel.
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If you know a bit of HTML and CSS you can enter it in FeedWelder and save your choices as
themes. We also have some pre-made themes for you to use.
Example: Using free widgets vs. using FeedWelder
Here’s a typical free widget.
Problems:
a. Light blue titles are hard to read.
FeedWelder gives you total control over fonts
and colors.
b. Titles & some descriptions are cut off.
FeedWelder gives you control over how much
of the title & description to show.
c. Source & date of each story is not
visible.
FeedWelder allows you to show or hide each
element of the feed, such as source, author,
date, and description.
d. Logo of the widget service is visible.
FeedWelder standard & pro accounts allow
you to hide our logo.
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Here is the same mix of feeds using FeedWelder. Options are set to:
•
•
•
•
•
show the whole title
show the complete description
make the area wider to fill in the body of a page
use the same fonts and colors as the site’s page
add a separator rule between each story
All of this and more is configurable in an easy and convenient way. You can decide exactly
how each mix should be displayed in your website.
You select from our pre-made themes or create your own themes and save them for reuse.
We also have a caching service, so that if the source feeds are down, your pages will still
load quickly. Slow page loads are a huge problem for services without caching! (We’ve
experienced this on our websites before we built FeedWelder).
FeedWelder mix with custom display settings.
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We hope you've enjoyed this guide to building RSS mashups. Using feed mashups will keep
your site updated and fresh, providing value for your readers and saving time for the staff
who update your site. FeedWelder is the easiest, most convenient way to build these
mashups. It saves you time and gives you the control you need to create beautiful,
professional sites.
Try FeedWelder now!
• Free trial.
• Pay by the month or year.
• Upgrade, downgrade, or cancel your subscription at any time.
If you enjoyed this guide, tweet it or share it with your friends and colleagues!
Free guide. Easy RSS Mashups: Five ideas for curating content, by
@feedwelder. http://easyrssmashups.com/ (please retweet)
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Easy RSS Mashups

Transcription

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