Thanks to a tip off in the comments, I've fixed my RSS feed. When I moved from the old version of MovableType the index.rdf file didn't get regenerated as before but instead the atom and rss feed got generated instead - unfortunately my feed at feedburner didn't know that! I've since changed the feed at feedburner to use the atom feed AND updated the meta tags in the template to point to the feedburner site.
Recently in RSS Feeds Category
I signed up for a beta invite to cocomment this morning and got an invite code a couple of hours later. Unfortunately it doesn't work in MovableType (yet) but it does work in Wordpress and blogger. I'll start using this to track most of my blog posts on the web when possible. I did find that the default installation of redirectremover extension screwed up the bookmarklet (and also screwed up my url123.com bookmarklet too) so disabling that made it all work properly.
No Need to Click Here - I'm just claiming my feed at Feedster
For some reason my feed is not being picked up as mine at feedster.I've changed my RSS feed this morning due to a couple of new features that Feedburner have released. They spent thursday adding new features to Feedburner to celebrate to their last day in their old office (most people would have spent the day moving furniture!) One of the features is the ability to geotag an RSS feed so the absoblogginlutely feedburner feed now has the general location from my zipcode added. I'm not sure which rss readers will use this information but I'm sure it won't be long before aggregators start to add this functionality in. I've also removed my flickr feed from automatically being included as I don't always want my flickr photos included in this website feed so you may want to subscribe to my flickr photos here
I should really start a new category called feedster.
Anyway, going to the handles page on feedster gives the error message "File not found: '/home/feedster.com/htdocs//z/templates/st_v2_myfeedster_pb_en.htm'" - oops.
Now feedster is really starting to annoy me as their whole username/password/email account system is broken.
When you sign up for a username and password at feedster you also give an email address. However, you can have multiple accounts with the same email address in the database (as I've just proved by logging in with a new accountname and the same email address that is already valid on their database). However, if you have forgotten the password for an account and request a new password, the new password is unlikely to be for the original account that you signed up with - therefore you can never log in with this original account.
However, if you then login as a new account (my third account now) and try to claim the feed it originally says that the feed is not in the database and it needs to be added and then when you click on the add this feed to the database you get "string(73) "Duplicate entry 'http://feeds.feedburner.com/absoblogginlutely' for key 1"" followed by "Thank you for letting us know about this feed. We’ll index it on our next pass (generally within the next 1 to 3 hours)!" So we now have the situation where user account names do not match up with email address's and the passwords AND there may, or there may not be more than one unique urls in the database.
I actually caught the aim account online last week and asked if they could have a look at it and they said they would later in the day but it still doesn't work - very frustrating.
Update After posting this I go down to the pc where I was originally working and see an IM giving me a working username/password - so thanks to feedster2003 on IM - now I just need to delete the spurious accounts :-)
Update2 Now that I'm in, I can't change my password - I'm guessing it is because it goes something like this..... update password="new password" where username=username and oldpassword=oldpassword and emailaddress=emailaddress and I bet one of those is wrong....
Anyone else having problems with feedster? I've been trying to claim my blog but as it won't let me log in with my username and password it is a bit difficult to do. If I put in my email address (which is not my login id) then the new password gets sent and I can read it, but when I put it into the form it tells me that the username/password is incorrect. Emails to the feedback contact don't get answered.
Then this morning I went to check and found that my feed has been deleted at the request of the user - huh????? The only thing I've done is changed my default feed on the web page, but the old feed still gets published and I didn't explicitly ask for it to be deleted. grrrrr
I changed my rss feed location to Absoblogginlutely on feedburner as this should hopefully reduce the amount of traffic that I use, I only need to provide 1 feed, flickr photos can be included and I also get an easier method to track stats and clickthroughs from the feeds. You the user, should not see that much of a difference. At the moment I have not put in redirects for my current feeds, so current subscribers will use my feeds, new subscribers will get the feedburner feed.
I've also signed up for a gravatar with a new email address so expect to see that on your blog comments soon and I'll soon be adding the plugin to this site for comments.
For some weird reason my cache feed only picked up one of my finds from yesterday. I've also realised that the main page won't update unless I post a new item to the main page either so I'm going to have to rethink that idea (or post more often)
I'm trying to work out how to include a RSS feed into an index page of one of my blogs and came across Learning Movable Type: Simple RSS Customizations. Although it has not yet provided me with an answer, it has provided me with some more reading to do on other rss matters.
rssparsers might be handy for doing work outside of MT but the best source I found so far was mt-rssfeed plugin but I have not got that working yet. But it's late and I need to go to bed so I will try again another night.
I've dropped the MSN feed for Absoblogginlutely as everytime my reader updates the feed it adds another X number of entries to the feed - again - even though the results are the same as the last time the query was run.
If you try to get your Bloglines password emailed to yourself because you've forgotten AND can't remember your email address then you get "You have entered an incorrect email address" followed by "Your password has been emailed to you". Oops!
Also the email that I did get sent to me (when I remembered what my email was) doesn't actually have any content. (It did - but it wasn't showing up in my web interface to email)
I've signed up to a MSN group this afternoon but there doesn't seem to be a rss feed for it. Shame as its a high traffic mailing list and I could do with being able to skim it as part of my rss reading.
KC Lemson post about eventlogs to rss sounded interesting as it would be nice to sit and my desk and watch the eventlogs roll in as emails - I'd stand a better chance of catching errors before the problem got too bad (Our exchange server ran out of memory on Friday and monitoring the event log would have stopped the weird errors we were getting as users). Anyway, she links to Greg Reinacker's Weblog - Event Log Monitoring with RSS which looks great except you need asp.net installed and the ability to compile the program. Shame as I don't have either of those two on our servers :-(
Unfortunately i've subscribed to some of the posts on the Feedster blog which has the option to email you every time someone comments on a post. A feature that would be REALLY useful when you want to track what someone responds to your comment with. Unfortunately the feedster blog doesn't have any flood or script protection as some idiot who shall remain nameless keeps sending a dumb comment to the blog and therefore sending me a notification. So far i've probably had 40+ emails. Grrrrrr. Email has been sent to the owner to try and get something sorted quick.
Super Simple RSS looks like a good utility to turn notepad type text into rss feeds. Perfect for putting on the companies website without a full blown MT type installation.
I discovered pubsub yesterday which sends an rss feed of search results to you, a bit like feedster does. Unfortunately feedster still insists on including my website when I search for absoblogginlutely but pubsub gave me 29 new results this morning, not one of them containing the word absoblogginlutely and most of them waffling on about new specs for RSS formats! Pubsub has gone from my aggregator.
Thanks to Neil's suggestion and finally getting round to implementing it, I've got my blogspot to rss converter working. Taking the source code from a mirror of voidstar's rssify and changing rss:item to blogPost and changing the span to div, I can now read blogspot web pages in my rss reader....and this will be easily adaptable to other web pages too. Now all Ihave to do is find those blogspot pages I've been meaning to keep an eye out on.
People have been raving about the page that shows you who subscribes to your rss feed but it doesn't work for me, with a
Macro error: Can't evaluate the expression because the name "http://absoblogginlutely.net/index.rdf" hasn't been defined. message appearing. (and I get the same (unfriendly message) for any of my urls that I put in.
Just found that MobileRSS has a rss reader for PDA's - will be useful to put on the axim as I've been wanting something like this for a long time and not found it yet. Will just have to wait until I get home until I try it out.
I've been trying to set up a feedster search that will show blogs mentioning absoblogginlutely but not my blog. Apparently Feedster Search: absoblogginlutely should do the trick, using their tools menu - but as you can see it still returns my blog :-(
Awasu now has a cool third party plugin that pops up a notification when things get posted to the event log. If this worked on all machines to create an rss feed, this could/would be a killer app and a great excuse to run an RSS reader on the desktop all the time, not just first thing in the morning,lunchtime and evening (which is when I tend to run mine)
I tried to subscribe the LangaList to mailbucket's email to rss utility but the utility unfortunately strips out the reply-to field so I can't reply to the confirmation email required to actually sign up. Shame really as this would be nice as a low traffice rss feed.
Seybold has a great slideshow introduction to RSS formats which explains in simple terms the makeup of the different formats of RSS feeds and what is required/optional in each format. Wish I'd seen it before doing my Comic feeds (and I can now confidently state they are in 0.91 format)
Anyone else have problems seeing more than one cartoon in their rss reader for My temporary Rose is Rose feed? Feed on Feed only shows one picture yet Awasu shows me 5
After tinkering with my rss feed and from the encouraging response back on my question about whether the rss feed is valid I did some more tinkering this evening and I've now managed to create two feeds for RoseisRose and Rudy from comics.com by using dos batch file programming, sed and wget to do all the work. By running this script on my w2k machine each day I'll have a feed updated with the latest daily cartoon. I can't make this feed available for general consumption because of copyright issues but I don't think it breaking copyright by using it myself. See cxliv or dwlt for more discussions on this issue.
I've tried making an rss feed by hand but for some reason it doesn't seem to be quite right. I've compared my Rudy feed with the Tapesty 5th wave file and I can't see any obvious difference as a text file, but firebird colour codes the tapestry feed and leaves mine as plain text (and doesn't render mine in my rss feeder.)
any ideas of what I could be doing wrong?
Chris mentioned MailBucket which is an email to RSS converter which converts email sent to a mailbucket.org address and converts it to a rss feed at mailbucket.org/address.xml. This looks really good and I've added a mailing list that I'm on to this to see how usable this format is. I'm not sure how replying to an xml feed will work though - will have to wait and see.
Got FeedOnFeed to work from a cron job by using the following syntax. It was pretty obvious really - don't know why I didn't think of it beforehand. curl -s -S http://user:pass@absoblogginlutely.net/directory/filename.php This means I don't have to rely on the machine in the office being kept switched on.
Added Feed on Feeds to my website to have my own RSS reader hosted on my server. This works like Bloglines but has the advantage that its hosted on your own server (requires Mysql/PHP) so not relying on a third party. I'm just trying to get it to work as a cronjob but can't find the location for get on my hasweb hosting.
