SoylentFoo

After all of the hubub this weekend about how FeedBurner is ‘trouble’ and ‘bad for us’, I wanted to make a quick note of a couple of ways to serve your feeds through FeedBurner in a way that makes it possible to easily and seamlessly bring your feeds back under your control at any time.

1. Use FeedBurner’s MyBrand service (which is now free) to serve your feeds using a domain you own. This lets you serve your feeds with a URI of http://feeds.mysillyblog.com/mysillyfeed or the like. In the event Google ‘preferring’ Google Reader for feeds burned by FeedBurner (something I’m confident Google will never do), you’d just point feeds.mysillyblog.com back to a server you control, and in the blink of a TTL, your feeds are yours again. For details on implementing MyBrand, check out Danny Sullivan’s great guide: Stay Master of Your Feed Domain.
2. Advertise your feed at a URL on your blog (http://mysillyblog.com/index.xml), then redirect users to FeedBurner with a 302 Found redirect. Straight from the HTTP specifications, this tells your browser or RSS reader:

   Since the redirection might be altered on occasion, the client SHOULD continue to use the Request-URI for future requests.

   Here’s a nice guide detailing how to properly redirect your feed to FeedBurner using a 302 Found response code. In this case, if Google / FeedBurner ever sins against you or your mother, your feeds can be instantly and seamlessly moved away from FeedBurner by removing this redirect.
3. For the extra paranoid, combine methods 1 and 2!

I’m a huge fan of FeedBurner, and like Fred Wilson, don’t share the concerns of Dave Winer about FeedBurner’s future. At last count, I manage around 225 feeds in several FeedBurner accounts, and don’t ever plan on going back. But, if the need arises, I take comfort in knowing how easy is is to leave. To quote Fred’s post:

That gives me all the comfort in the world. I love it when services make it easy to leave. When they do that, I tend to stay.

There are a million excuses for not blogging, but none of them are valid. I’m going to skip the excuses, and get right to the announcement.

Welcome to SoylentFoo

SoylentFoo has been in the making for quite some time. It was February, I believe, when a friend and I traded some server work on his blog and some design work. 10 months and about 50 "where is soylentfoo?!?" IMs later, I finally found some time to make it all happen.

What is the Secret of SoylentFoo?

“Does that mean there are too many metasyntactic variables? Are they feeding metasyntactic variables to other metasyntactic variables?” – Katie, after watching me work on the blog for a while, and then digging at Wikipedia

The name needs no explanation, in my mind. If you’re looking for one, I can’t help much. Sorry. Make of it what you will.

As part of the package, there’s an entirely new jnewland.com – a temple of ego on steroids if you will – complete with rss and opml feeds, and subdomain mappings for all of the parts:

• links from del.ico.us
• music from last.fm
• photos from flickr
• status from twitter

Now, I promised that I wouldn’t make any excuses for not blogging, but I feel an obligation to at least give evidence that I’ve been doing something in the meantime. We’re not going to call these excuses, OK?

Now that that’s settled, here’s what’s been going on in my life in the past year:

• I’ve moved from Athens, GA, to Bozeman, MT, and back again to Atlanta, GA.
• I’ve gotten engaged to the love of my life, and will be married on June 30th, 2007.
• Katie and I bought a house – we’ll move in on Dec 15th – only 10 short days!
• We adopted a puppy, named “Foxy” for her dark tail. We wish she’d grow out of her puppy phase, and fast :(.
• I’ve overseen the migration or creation of just under 200 blogs.
• Worked on no less than 15 Ruby on Rails apps

Looking back, it seems like a lot – but surely I could have slipped more than 10 posts in between those 6 bullet points. I’ll try harder this year. Promise.

For quite some time, I’ve been using TVRss to download episodes of The Daily Show that I’ve missed. TVRss scours a couple Bittorrent sites for TV shows, and provides RSS feeds of any search result. For example, here’s the RSS feed for recent episodes of The Daily Show. I currently subscribe to this feed in NetNewsWire and download the new shows as they appear.

These RSS feeds don’t work with The Democracy Player just yet: the feeds simply link to the bittorrent file, but don’t include the critical enclosure element. But with a little help from Feedburner ’s SmartCast service, feeds from TVRss can be plugged into The Democracy Player, effectively creating a Internet PVR.

Now that I’ve sufficiently bored you with the technical details, here’s the simple step-by-step:

How to Subscribe to TV Shows Using The Democracy Player & Bittorrent & RSS

1. Download The Democracy Player
2. Search for a show of your choice at TVRss
3. Right click on the RSS/XML icon link and select Copy Link URL
4. Go to Feedburner, and paste the URL into the text field on the home page, check the “I am a Podcaster!” box, and click next.
   1. If you don’t already have a Feedburner account, you’ll be prompted to create one
5. Click “Next” to activate the feed
6. Copy the URL of the feed provided by Feedburner (it should start with http://feeds.feedburner.com/)
7. Open The Democracy Player, click “Add Channel”, and paste the URL of the feed into the field that appears
8. Sleep. In the morning, you should have an episode of The Daily Show to watch!
9. New episodes will automatically be downloaded as soon as they’re available on Bittorrent – I’ve found this to usually be a day after the show airs
10. Enjoy!

In my mind, this is the future of video distribution. The technologies of Bittorrent and RSS perfectly compliment each other: Bittorrent downloads are much faster when concurrently downloaded by a large swarm. Notifying software programs of new Bittorrent files via RSS creates a swarm very quickly, resulting in faster downloads for everyone. The Democracy Player combines all of these technical elements with a pleasant UI, and great video management tools. The result is nothing short of spectacular.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to watch The Daily Show...

Use NetNewsWire and want a list of your subscriptions on your blog? Here’s how I did it:

• Export your subscriptions from NetNewsWire to a flat OPML file. This file contains links to all of your blogs in XML format, we’re going to use a XSL Transformation to turn this into an unordered list (<ul>).
• Download TestXSLT, a free XSLT Transformation tool for OS X. Open the disk image and drag the TestXSTL icon to your Applications folder. Open it, and get ready for action.
• Open MySubscriptions.opml from NetNewsWire in TextEditor, and select all of the text using apple+a, then copy it using apple+v.
• Paste this into the XML tab of TestXSLT.
• Paste the following XSL stylesheet into the XSL tab of TestXSLT.

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
<xsl:output method="html" indent="yes" standalone="no" omit-xml-declaration="yes" />
<xsl:template match="/">
    <ul>
<xsl:apply-templates select="//outline" >
    <xsl:sort select="@title" data-type="text" />
</xsl:apply-templates>
    </ul>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="outline">
    <xsl:choose>
        <xsl:when test="@type='rss'">
            <li><a href="{@htmlUrl}"><xsl:value-of select="@title" /></a></li>
        </xsl:when>
    </xsl:choose>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

• Switch to the results tab and press Process. Voila! Your blogroll as an unordered list (<ul>), ready to copy and paste into your blog templates. Hope this works for you!

Have a Gmail account yet? Subscribe to my blog in Google Reader, Google web-based feed reader, featuring all of the speed (and keyboard shortcuts!!!) of Gmail.

I’m actually quite impressed with the speed of Google Reader considering that I’m on dailup this weekend. My new favorite key is the ‘j*’ key – press it on your Google Reader and watch how quickly new entries load in the whitespace. Google slick AJAX engine only requires that the next individual entry be loaded. No headers. No footers. No banner ads or blogrolls. This is brilliant – the exact same speed benefit that desktop feed readers get cooked into a web based feed reader that doesn’t even have to *think about synchronization. Add in labels (yep, just like Gmail) and the search that we’ve come to expect from Google, and you have one excellent web app.

The only feature I’m missing so far – integration with del.icio.us. I’m sure they’ll add it soon. It’s still in beta, anyway ;-)