bioneural.net » rss

Customizing WordPress feed content

Bruce — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 20:38:12 +0000

When I last looked at customizing feeds in WordPress, it was all to do with being able to offer a summary and full text feed simultaneously—making use of WordPress' flexible feed URL syntax and a .htaccess file. In this post I look at modifying the actual contents of the feed using a functions.php file (which may already exist as part of your current theme). Just as WordPress provides a number of hooks for adding or removing actions in your theme header (see here), so to do the core files that generate your feeds. Editing the core files is however discouraged (it makes upgrading a pain), and although you can build your own replacement feed templates an easy alternative is adding a few lines to your theme's functions.php file. As a perpetual PHP beginner I feel obliged to warn you that use of the following code is at your own risk. If there are any PHP/ WordPress experts reading this who can improve on my code please make yourself known ;-) Removing WP version info Somewhere, a while back, I read a tip about not including the WordPress version you are running in your template header—potentially allowing hackers to identify you as a target if you haven't kept up-to-date. It's easy to remove if present. For example, in the K2 theme just delete the following line from header.php: From bioneural.net:Mac-based web developers...]]> ... http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/ Rendered in a feed reader humans will see this: The Creative Commons icon is hopefully recognisable and links to the correct license; the link to bioneural.net ...

FeedDemon gets the Geotag Icon too

Bruce — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 12:04:09 +0000

From http://www.bioneural.net :

FeedDemon, purportedly the most popular Windows-based feed reader, automatically detects geotagged feed items. Form version 2.6.1b1 it uses the Geotag Icon as a visual identifier for plotting the location, "hidden" in metadata, via Google Maps. FeedDemon has lots of other great features, including synchronisation with NewsGator Online which I use when travelling (in conjunction with NetNewsWire on the Mac).

Mapping fun with GeoRSS and geo-discovery

Bruce — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 00:26:26 +0000

From http://www.bioneural.net :

Continuing the recent geo-fixation trend evident on this site, this article shares the results of a slightly deeper delve into GeoRSS and looks at a great browser add-on that offers auto-discovery of geotagged content in webpages and in some feeds. What is GeoRSS? Wikipedia describes GeoRSS as "an emerging standard for encoding location as part of an RSS feed." It also encodes location in Atom feeds, and rather than the singular "standard" there are actually two variations (GeoRSS-Simple and the more advanced GeoRSS-GML). A third encoding, W3C Basic Geo, is depreciated but still in use (e.g. by Flickr; see below). I happen to use the Geo Mashup plugin for WordPress to geotag articles on this site. As well as adding appropriate metadata tags into the head of location-specific posts, the plugin automatically adds GeoRSS-Simple encoding to my feeds. The GeoRSS-Simple feeds are identified with this namespace declaration in the header: xmlns:georss="http://www.georss.org/georss" Each item in the feed will be marked-up with a coordinate pair separated by a whitespace and enclosed in a point tag. For example: 50.185676 8.464943 And that's it. So what can you do with it? GeoRSS in your blog feed In WordPress you can create a feed for any category or any tag just by putting /feed/ at the end of the URL. This is ideal if you have a dedicated category or tag for geotagged content. In my case I had geotagged content spanning several categories, so I decided to go back and add the tag "geotag" to all my geotagged articles across all categories. This ...

A web standard icon for geotagging

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

From http://www.bioneural.net :

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 ...

Dashcode is easy, Web Clips easier

Bruce — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 13:18:14 +0000

From http://www.bioneural.net :

Dashcode comes on the Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) installation DVD. It's a tool for creating widgets (mini-applications made with HTML, CSS, images, and JavaScript) specifically for the OS X Dashboard. Apple did a great job in making Dashcode the epitome of simple so that non-programmers can create basic custom widgets with ease. And if installing Developer Tools isn't your thing, you can still create your own widgets using Web Clips. Dashcode You don't really need a tutorial, but if you'd like a quick overview there's a brief "howto" video on YouTube here. This YouTube video requires Adobe Flash Player. Dashcode provides step-by-step workflow instructions guiding you through the creation of your widget: It's a good way for non-programmers to get their hands dirty and let the creative juices flow. Download a Dashcode-built widget that retrieves and displays content from the bioneural.net RSS feed here. Web Clips Web Clips is also a feature of Leopard; these are widgets created via Safari's Open in Dashboard... menu option. Alternatively, click on the Web Clip button in the Safari menu bar: You'll be asked to select the part of the current web page that you're interested in; move your cursor around until the correct section is highlighted, then click on it to show the trim handles. Now click Add to create and install your new widget to Dashboard. For example, say I wanted to create a widget to display my (somewhat neglected) iStockPhoto photocast. I simply click Web Clips and select the appropriate area of my webpage where I have embedded it, ...

Add an iPhone-friendly feed to your website

Bruce — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 03:53:11 +0000

From http://www.bioneural.net :

SimpleReader Mobile has been facelifted so it looks great on an iPhone. Even if you serve full feeds containing images and styling, SimpleReader Mobile makes it super-easy to offer a lightweight alternative feed for those on bandwidth-deprived small screen devices. I added a hyperlinked icon to my sidebar with the following code:

RSS in Plain English

Bruce — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 07:41:07 +0000

From http://www.bioneural.net :

A well-conceived short video (3.5min) that emphasises the time-saving nature of RSS and shows beginners how to make use of it.

Vienna is impressive freeware newsreader

Bruce — Wed, 27 Dec 2006 05:12:37 +0000

From http://www.bioneural.net :

Vienna is an open source RSS/Atom newsreader for the Mac OS X. I prefer it to NewsFire and put it almost on par with NetNewsWire, neither of which are free. It has the same three-paned layout option as the latter for in-reader browsing which I favour. Highly recommended.

Getting local news while abroad

Bruce — Sat, 09 Dec 2006 04:52:27 +0000

From http://www.bioneural.net :

If you're abroad and want to keep a finger on the pulse of life at home, what are your options? You might sign up for satellite TV, buy an over-priced newspaper, or read online. But sound and moving pictures somehow make you feel more "connected". Streaming audiovisual content may be the answer. Local radio Peak FM is our local radio station in the UK. I used to catch the news bulletin as I drove to work, and often at lunchtime as I did my house calls. Although the traffic information isn't much use to me 12,000 miles away in New Zealand, it was nice to hear what was going on in the neighbourhood. Unfortunately, however, despite the station allowing folk to "listen live" over the net, I am barred from doing so with a New Zealand IP address: No way around that one. At least Simone can still listen to Hit Radio FFH. BBC television In the case of BBC News video content the restriction is partial—you can get narrowband content. Here is the narrowband player (actual size): To get the broadband stream outside of the UK we are asked to pay $40 per year, but despite there being an Intel-native Real Player for Mac, the sign-up page says: This service has not been designed for use on a Macintosh. Then I recalled writing about the BBC testing health-news video podcasts, noting that Ben Metcalfe had created an unofficial feed list that links directly to the streaming media. Interesting, I can subscribe to the broadband feeds despite my ...

Fixing feeds for the Siriux Gallery theme

Bruce — Sun, 19 Nov 2006 09:50:23 +0000

From http://www.bioneural.net :

As previously noted, the currently available RSS module (1.0.6) is incompatible with the Siriux theme for Gallery (2.1.2). I wanted to be able to offer a feed (photocast) for an album in my own gallery, but finding a hack for the code was only half of the problem. For some reason defining a feed in Gallery is very non-intuitive. Here's how it's done, step-by-step. There are perfectly valid reasons why you might want to offer a web (RSS) feed for a dynamic album on your website. In our case, as we explore and photograph Wellington ourselves, those with an interest in Project Koru can visually explore with us via a photocast/ photostream. If they subscribe to the photo feed, they go where we go. Hack the RSS module To improve compatibility with the Siriux theme, you need to edit Callbacks.inc, located in /gallery2/modules/rss/. As described here, make the following PHP edit: if (isset($blocks)) { foreach ($blocks as $block) { if ($block[0] == 'rss.RssBlock') { $params = $block[1]; break; } } } Define a feed Using the instructions I found here as a basis, with a bit of trial-and-error, the following steps proved successful. This assumes you have the RSS module installed and activated, and that the Item actions block is already set to display on album pages. First you need to add the RSS Feeds block: Login to your Gallery as administrator; Edit the Album for which you want to display a feed; Add the List of RSS Feeds block to show on album (and/or photo) pages and Save. Now go to Site Admin to set ...