bioneural.net » opml

A web standard icon for geotagging

Bruce — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 13:35:39 +0000

Geotagging (or geocoding if you prefer) is the act of associating your content (blog posts, photos, feeds, etc.) with a geographic location (e.g. via latitude and longitude co-ordinates). Thus tagged authors can "mash" their content together with the likes of Google Maps, or the Flickr Map if photography is your thing. However, co-ordinates are typically encoded within metadata (or microformat) tags making them visible to machines but hidden from people. We have de facto web standard icons to help identify feeds, OPML, and sharing—so why not for geotagged content? Update 29.02.08: Thanks to everyone who gave feedback or otherwise contributed to the process of taking this proposal forward. Comments are now closed and further feedback should now be directed to geotagicons.com, where you can now download the new community-designed geotag icon. The goods I propose a web standard Geotag Icon, to be used freely by any geotagger or geotagging service. Here is what it looks like at 128px: At 32px: And at 16px: Important: These images are not final; this is a proposal. Please do not hotlink to these images. You can download them individually by right-clicking the one you want, or as part of the draft Geotag Icon Development Kit here. Family line-up The family resemblance is obvious: Why not complete the set? Grab the Feed icon, the OPML icon, and the Open Share icon. Update 27.03.08: The Open Share Icon Project offers a free, open, community-driven alternative to the trademarked and brand-linked ShareThis.com icon. Icon specification It should be similar in style to existing de facto web standard icons (hereafter ...

Baking SimplePie with favicon topping

Bruce — Sat, 01 Jul 2006 00:17:52 +0000

From http://www.bioneural.net :

Having settled on SimplePie as a solution for embedding iStockPhoto feeds, I decided to see if I could use it to parse the latest posts from multiple sites in my OPML file (blogroll if you prefer). Would it really be as simple to cook as it sounded? There were qualifiers, however. I wanted to show only a selection of headlines at any one time. I wanted to vary the order in which the sites were listed. And I wanted to automatically fetch and display the favicon for each site. Armed only with copy-and-paste level PHP know-how, I was going to need help in the kitchen—that much was clear at the outset. Update 18.08.06: Ryan has added error handling for feeds which specify no author; this eliminates most of the fatal errors I was getting with some feeds. If a particular feed doesn't work for you there are several things to try: Is it specified in the page (required for auto-discovery) or must you specify the full feed URL cf. the domain name? Is the feed valid? If a site offers RSS and Atom feeds (WordPress sites do by default) try varying the feed format. Also, specifying the actual feed path rather than relying on auto-discovery should reduce display time. Many thanks Ryan! Link lists Lists of links to other sites are just plain boring. But they can be functional, potentially serving a number of purposes: Bookmarks that the siteowner uses to track sites of personal interest; Serving readers by linking to sites with related news ...

Convert RSS feeds in Safari to OPML

Bruce — Fri, 03 Feb 2006 14:22:31 +0000

From http://www.bioneural.net :

Convert RSS feeds in Safari to OPML: An XML stylesheet that will scan Safari's Bookmarks and find only the RSS feed entries. The output can then be redirected to an OPML file for import to readers like NetNewsWire Lite.

iBlog + OPML + Bloglines = reading list

Bruce — Sun, 09 Oct 2005 15:24:13 +0000

From http://www.bioneural.net :

This option for sharing a reading list ("blogroll") may be of interest if you use an RSS reader like NetNewsWire than can export your subscriptions in OPML format. Here are the steps: Export (some or all of) your subscriptions from NetNewsWire to OPML. Choose if you want a flat list or to group by folders. Register (free) for a Bloglines account. Once registered click on the My Feeds tab at the top of the screen. Then, click on the Edit link. At the bottom of the left panel will be a link to import subscriptions. Create an XHTML file (say, bloglines.html) to contain your reading list. In the body, for example, add this line: Replace the blogroll?id (here "bm") with your own Bloglines ID. Create a pop-up link to your reading list (if you want to save space) from your iBlog home page in the Navigation Editor. For example: Reading list

Google searches via RSS; search blogroll

Bruce — Mon, 26 Jul 2004 18:44:18 +0000

From http://www.bioneural.net :

How many times do you visit Google to re-run a particular search? Would like like to know what Google ranking your site/ name etc. has, and when it changes? How often do you remember reading about something on one of the blogs you read, and subsequently have difficulty finding it via a general net search? Do you use a search engine like FreeFind on your own blog, and wish for a similar tool that will search through your blogroll? Then you'll want to check out these services... Google Alert Google Alert: ... lets you track anything on the Web by running daily Google searches for you and emailing you when new results appear. This first email includes up to 50 results per search which you may have seen before. In the future, brief email alerts will include only new results that have not been reported before. Google Alert improves with time by learning which results you find the most relevant. After a few alerts, the relevance of each new result will be indicated with a rating of 1 to 5 stars. With your trial Google Alert service, you're limited to tracking only 3 search terms, and only the top 50 results per search. For far greater tracking power, you can track up to 50 search terms and the top 500 results per search with Google Alert advanced services. However, you aren't limited to getting the results of your custom searches by e-mail: you can subscribe to them via RSS feeds as well. The Google ...