Yahoo tests RSS mashup for masses
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(InfoWorld) - Yahoo Inc. has launched a service called Pipes designed to let regular users mix different RSS and Atom feeds and create data "mashups," a process that so far has required programming knowledge. Pipes features a drag-and-drop interface that the company hopes non-technical users will find simple and intuitive as they manipulate content syndication feeds to combine data in new and useful ways. An example of a Pipe is this one , which meshes listings from Craigslist with data from Yahoo's local search engine to display apartments for rent near any business, Yahoo said. Another one collates news about topics chosen by the user from a variety of sources. "Pipes' initial set of modules lets you assemble personalized information sources out of existing Web services and data feeds. Pipes outputs standard RSS 2.0, so you can subscribe to and read your pipes in your favorite aggregator. You can also create pipes that accept user input and run them on our servers as a kind of miniature Web application," reads Yahoo's description of the service , posted Wednesday night. While Pipes today lets users mix data from RSS and Atom feeds, Yahoo hopes to extend the service to support other data formats, Web services, processing modules and output renderings, Yahoo said. For example, Yahoo will open up access to the Pipes engine to programmers and add support for the KML data source, which is used to display geographic data in Google Inc.'s popular Google Earth mapping application and Google Maps Web site. The initial response from observers has been enthusiastic. "Yahoo's new Pipes service is a milestone in the history of the Internet," Tim O'Reilly, founder and CEO of computer book publisher O'Reilly Media Inc., wrote on his blog . "While it's still a bit rough around the edges, it has enormous promise in turning the Web into a programmable environment for everyone." The Pipes Web site, available throughout this morning, was nonetheless down at press time, displaying the message: "Our Pipes are clogged! We've called the plumbers!"
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(InfoWorld) - Kapow Technologies will announce on Tuesday general availability of Kapow Mashup Server 6.2, featuring access to RSS and ATOM feeds in the building of mashup applications. The product features a set of technologies enabling users to collect and mash content from the Web as well as corporate intranets. New in version 6.2 is the ability to define RSS and ATOM feeds for any Web site or intranet so they can be used in a mashup, said Joe Keller, Kapow chief marketing officer and a former vice president at Sun Microsystems. RSS and ATOM join industry-standard APIs such as SOAP and REST that can be used to access data sources. Mashups, which piece together applications out of Web content, are becoming enterprise-ready, Keller said. "I think the impact [of mashups] is they're moving into the enterprise and helping deliver applications in a fraction of the time and the cost that it takes to do it with other methods," he said. Currently, the number of Web sites available to mashup makers is very limited, Keller said. Out of 108 million Web sites, there are only 374 APIs for building mashups, said Keller, citing industry figures. Kapow seeks to improve this situation. "There's a long way to go to make all of the Web available to mashup builders," he said. Mashup Server supports Web 2.0 technologies such as AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) and Ruby and re-purposes Web-based application components into data access APIs. This is done using point-and-click techniques. With the product, data or content can be accessed from any browser-enabled application or Web site. Mashup Server has been used to build mashups for functions such as SOA enablement and content management system and portal integrations. Momondo.com, a European-based Web site for travelers, uses Mashup Server for a vertical search engine to comb the Web for flight prices. "The reason we built it was around 2004, our clients, which are business travel agencies, were having a problem with the Internet fares," said Thorvald Stigsen, CEO of Momondo. "They used booking sites or booking engines, which donât have access to all the low-cost carriers. So we selected the Kapow platform and developed a number of robots that scanned all the low-cost carrier sites in Europe and beyond." Currently, Momondo researches 246 sites using Kapow's technology. "The speed is very impressive," Stigsen said. Momondo has faced a challenge with JavaScript, through which different airlines made it difficult to scrape their pages. But Version 6.2 fixes some of the issues related to JavaScript execution, Stigsen said. Also new in the release is improved Web-clipping capabilities for Web pages that use JavaScript and Flash. Web clipping involves the ability to clip a piece of a page. Another addition in Version 6.2 is full support for the Firefox browser. New methods to collect content from Excel spreadsheets are featured as well.
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Put RSS Feeds On Your Web Page  If you're interested in putting RSS feeds on your Web page but you don't have a lot of server/programming expertise, you might want to try the RSS Digest tool at http://www.bigbold.com/rssdigest/ . This tools has some nice extras on it, though at the moment ...
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If you've ever needed a good project to get started with combining PHP and Ajax, you should definitely take a look at this new tutorial from the PHPHacks.com website today. They demonstrate how to create a simple RSS reader combining the power of PHP and the client-side abilities of Ajax.   They start by explaining some of the terms they'll be working with, including:  RSS - and an example document XSL - to help create the RSS feed SimpleXML - to read in and parse the info from a remote server  After that, they jump right in, creating their first file - the main functionality for the application (on the PHP side). They opt to do everything by hand and not use any of the frameworks that are already out there so you can really understand what goes into it. They provide all of the code you'll need to get things set up, including the CSS to get things nice and styled and a few usage examples to show you how it all ties in together.
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There has been a lot of talk  recently about the problem of RSS feeds which include full content on high bandwidth sites such as MSDN blogs.  When RSS is used for a site with both a great amount of users, and with frequent updates, the bandwidth required to deliver realtime events can be problematic.  Its a real problem.  The RSS model requires clients to download the ENTIRE feed if even ONE item has been modified/added.  This means that if you have 55k subscribers, with 15 RSS items in your feed, and you want to publish one more post, all 14 additional posts need to be re-downloaded by the client.  There are a lot of potential solutions. HTTP deltas are one solution but too difficult to imp ...
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In a new tutorial over on PHPBuilder.com today, they demonstrate how to create and work with one of the most popular data exchange formats on the web today - RSS.   Recently I was looking for an RSS aggregator. I was having surprising difficulty finding one that did exactly what I wanted. [...] I began seriously considering writing my own. This month, I show you how to create a basic RSS reader yourself.   He gives a simple primer to what RSS is and what it looks like (explaining the XML spec) and includes an example of what a simple document looks like. He uses the older XML functionality in PHP (expat) to do the parsing and includes to code that he uses to get the job done.
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News and information junkies are taking a new look at RSS, a technology that helps them feed their habit without getting overwhelmed in the clutter of the information age.
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InfoWorld - Kapow Technologies will announce on Tuesday general availability of Kapow Mashup Server 6.2, featuring access to RSS and ATOM feeds in the building of mashup applications.
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Chris Alden blogged  the other day about Rojo going past 800k feeds in our index:  "We indexed our 800,000th feed yesterday, making Rojo one of the largest feed search services already. If your RSS or Atom feed is NOT indexed by Rojo already, all you need to do is to enter that feed into the "Add Channel" window on the right side of the Content tab, and we will add it. All of the feeds we've indexed are searchable in the "Search Rojo" window, also on the right side of the Content tab. Please let us know what you think of our search!"  We're quickly finding new feeds.  The feed discovery seems to be pretty steady. The on difference between Rojo and Technorati  is that they track weblogs *and* ...
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Feedster's RSS Feed Job Search Engine  RSS is hot and RSS search engines continue to get hotter by taking advantage of all of the bandwidth draining RSS feeds that are literally running all over the web for all different types of content oriented sites. Recently RSS search engines have concentrated on ...
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RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is about sharing content with new audiences. Here, you'll learn how to replay feed content in your Web pages with RSS Replay, a Dreamweaver extension created by the author. By Ronald Northrip. 1018
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If you're both a WordPress an Mint user and are wanting to integrate them the easy way, check out this new entry from Chris Hartjes about combining the two.   Now, the installation is fairly easy but there was a weird bug that was appearing, where a check to see if you are running a licensed copy of Mint kept getting triggered when I tried to access my feeds via a feed alias. The solution? An ugly hack, if you ask me.   The problem was with a Pepper for Mint called Bird Feeder Pepper that helps track RSS feed usage. The solution he found was a snippet of PHP code you'll need to insert into several of the feed scripts WordPress offers (as provided).
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Lukas Smith has posted his review of a book from Packt Publishing - "PHP Web 2.0 Mashup Projects: Practical PHP Mashups with Google Maps, Flickr, Amazon, YouTube, MSN Search, Yahoo!"   Duane from Pakt asked me if I would be interested in reviewing a few books for them in my blog. I picked "Mashup Projects" from the list of just released books, since I am interesting in the topic and I am actually going to give a presentation at the internal "PHP Day" we are doing at Optaros in November.   He points out the good (good writing style, well-chosen examples) and the bad (a log list of errors and oversights in the code). He also talks about the contents of the book - the different examples and the final more major project. Overall though, he sees it as a good book, one that would be a good introduction to mashups for PHP developers (if you look past the formatting issues).
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Someday soon, you might be &quot;Mashed&quot; by your friends. Yahoo has leaked information about an alpha version of a new social-networking site it is creating, called Mash, where users can customize each other&#39;s profiles.
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Those little devils who keep the gears turning inside the Twitter machine added a toy that's got the community sending public love missives whizzing around. You can figure it out yourself, or you can cheat and read this howto. @lovelyperson   Substitute the name of your lover in place of "lovelyperson" and you've just broadcast your love to all of TwitterLand.  While we're on the subject of Twitter, a couple of other items. 1. A must-read piece in today's NY Times, gives a clue why kids don't go for Twitter if their parents use it. No kid wants to be observed by his or her parents. Would they go for it if their parents weren't there? No one knows.  2. Conventional wisdom says you can't build a scalable distributed Twitter out of RSS. At first I accepted this, as a puzzle, then I remembered that's why we put the cloud element in there. I felt that for some applications polling would be too much. Since the cloud element has been largely ignored, most of the the apps of RSS couldn't scale to do what Twitter does. But if RSS desktop apps like NetNewsWire or FeedDemon were adapted to understand the cloud element, and if a proxy system was worked out to get through firewalls and NAT, it might just work.  3. Or you could use XMPP.
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Feedburner feeds are being used on more and more sites.  More innovation in the RSS space is certianly a good thing.  One problem we always had is that RSS seems to have *too* much innovation. People are trying to innovate and bend and shape the RSS specification meet their needs but sometimes things can get out of control.  A recent example is what FeedBurner is doing with the 'link' element in their RSS feeds.  Lets use John Batelle's RSS feed as an example.  John has an RSS feed at:  Which is redirected to:  (I should note that FeedBurner setup a really nice CSS style for this feed but it would be nice if they added Rojo  to the list of feeds you can subscribe to... anyway... )  Now i ...
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It seems  PubSub.com is offering a bounty  on an HTTP Delta implementation of RFC 3229.  This seems in response to the current meme  of RSS and Atom syndication bloat.   First off this is certainly *very* generous of them.  I'd like to see this happen more.  Good for you guys!  I myself  have thought that HTTP Deltas were a viable solution but I was wrong.  Of course most people aren't familiar with HTTP deltas.  Eseentially what an HTTP delta enables is a client/server differential protocol that can exchange a patch from the server to the client.  The client is then patched and it will then have the updated version without having to transfer the *entire* document again.  For example say you ...