Bloglines switched it’s user-agent from “Bloglines 2.1” to “Bloglines 3.0-rho” on Tuesday afternoon. My guess is that “rho” are the initials of a Bloglines search engineer who pushed his test code live without changing the user-agent but there could be some big changes coming in near future. If you are a FeedBurner user you may have noticed a large drop in your subscriber statistics over the past day (hat tip: jasonspage). I just heard back from Dick Costolo, CEO, and learned that FeedBurner had previously ignored this Bloglines user-agent as it was just a development test but they will…
Category Archives: Software
WordPress developers get corporate
This morning the lead developers of WordPress unveiled a new corporate entity based on the popular open-source blogging platform. The new company, Automattic, employs WordPress lead developers Ryan Boren and Matt Mullenweg, contributing developer Donncha O’Caoimh, and Andy Skelton. The new company will provide WordPress consulting services and develop and maintain services such as hosted blogging site WordPress.com and antispam tool Akismet. Automattic is a Delaware corporation founded on March 28, 2005 and previously mentioned on this blog as “WordPress Inc.” in late March. The company’s official launch is meant to coincide with the release of WordPress 2.0 later…
My Yahoo! feed API
Yahoo! has developed a backend infrastructure that can be easily deployed across various applications online or on the desktop with full synchronization and feed parsing handled on its servers. Developers could tap into the Yahoo! backend and develop new feed-aware applications quickly and easily on a robust platform already used by millions of users. Yahoo! just needs to publicize the code and make sessions a bit easier but I reverse engineered their code and I’ll give you a primer. Aggregator developers spend a lot of time dealing with issues such as proper parsing, feed storage, and at later stages…
iTunes Movable Type podcast tip
I like to output as much data as possible for feed aggregators, especially when one feed aggregator accounts for over 50% of my podcast listeners. I was frustrated that my podcast did not have a published duration until I realized there was a pretty simple solution: MTEntryKeywords. I almost never use the keywords field, yet it is already built-in as a storage option for every post. Perfect! No plugins necessary. Here’s how you do it. Add your podcast’s duration (mm:ss) as your entry keywords. Add a line to your RSS 2.0 feed:<itunes:duration><$MTEntryKeywords$></itunes:duration> The time column will now be populated in…
Week of the APIs
The latest episode of Om and Niall PodSessions is now available. This week’s theme is APIs and the new opportunities for service providers, developers, and end users. Kevin Burton of TailRank joined us to add an independent developer perspective to this week’s discussion. This week’s session is 26 minutes and 28 seconds in length and a 12.2 MB download. Topics Amazon introduced its Alexa web search platform on Monday. The new services give developers the ability to use content from Alexa’s crawler data and other web services in a hosted environment. Amazon is letting developers upload their own data, process…
Exclusive: TypePad outage update and details
Popular blog hosting provider TypePad.com was unavailable to its members for 18 hours today as a result of a failed storage upgrade during scheduled maintenance late last night. I visited Six Apart’s headquarters in San Francisco earlier this evening to talk with Six Apart employees about the events that transpired and the current state of TypePad’s blogging platform. I sat down for an interview with Anil Dash, Six Apart’s Vice President of Professional Products, about an hour after TypePad’s servers came back online. We discussed TypePad’s reliability issues over the past two months, what went wrong today, and how…
TypePad outage open post
Popular blog host TypePad just came back online after being down most of the past day. This outage affected hundreds of thousands of bloggers including mainstream media outlets such as MSNBC and The Washington Post. Given the high-profile status of TypePad and its members, this story is certain to be well-covered in the coming day and week. Today’s outage, coupled with the performance issues of the past month, has shaken the confidence of even the most dedicated users, and many members are seriously considering taking their business elsewhere. I spoke with one TypePad member who has used the service since…
Google Personalized homepage API
Yesterday Google announced an API to add content to the Google personalized homepage using a custom XML file. Last night I coded my first Google homepage widget to display a Technorati Mini on my personalized homepage with a pre-populated value of my blog URL. Here’s how you can check it out: Go to the Google personalized homepage and sign-in. Click on “Add Content” in the top-left corner. Create a developer section by adding a feed URL of “developer.xml.” You will now see a new “My Modules” section. Add a module by entering with http://www.niallkennedy.com/gmodule.xml in the URL field. You…
Answering Scott Gatz
Scott Gatz of Yahoo! poses a few questions on his blog that came up during a private dinner Monday night. I think some of the questions already have answers so I’ll post them here. It’s a bit feed geeky and may have an intended audience of about 20 people. No index flag. We need a way to mark an RSS feed as “OK to aggregate, but don’t show in search results.” For publishers who output a different feed per user, you don’t want to see 100 different feeds that are basically the same thing. I think the robots meta tag…
FeedBurner adds 7 pieces of flair
FeedBurner introduced FeedFlare this morning, a new way to easily add information to the bottom of your post content. FeedBurner creates small GIF files — about 300 bytes each — for each feature allowing supplementary information about the post to be updated without changing an item’s read status in an aggregator. FeedFlare launched with the following 7 features: E-mail a link to this post to a friend or colleague. E-mail the author of the post. This feature only works if you have already have defined the author’s e-mail address somewhere in the feed such as managingEditor element in RSS or…