New tool - RSS feed generator for user's recent gallery

[srijith]

I have made a script that outputs the latest gallery update of a user as an RSS feed.

Please note, the URL of the script has been updated yet again on Jul 26. Please use the one shown in this updated post below...

Just point your RSS reader to this URL

http://www.srijith.com/pbase/username.rss
or
http://www.srijith.com/pbase/username.xml
or
http://www.srijith.com/pbase/username.rdf
where username has to be substituted with the username of the person you want to track.

For example, the latest gallery update of user srijith is available on Pbase at
http://www.pbase.com/srijith/root&view=recent

This can be accessed as RSS feed from the URL
http://www.srijith.com/pbase/srijith.rss
http://www.srijith.com/pbase/srijith.xml
http://www.srijith.com/pbase/srijith.rdf

That should allow your users to keep track of your new additions and updates to your pictures. Check my gallery to see how you can advertise this feature to your visitors.

Also check out Robert's gallery to see how you can use this RSS feed to create a list that can be displayed in your root gallery.



Older version
The older version of the script was available as
http://www.srijith.com/pbase_recent.pl?user=username
This has been discontinued. Please use the format mentioned above.

[arjunrc]

Good stuff ! Do you think you can add another attribute for titles ?
regds
arjun

[srijith]

Didn't get what you meant. Each item already has title, link and description tags as per RSS 1.0

[arjunrc]

Oops sorry - I did not scroll down

Didn't get what you meant. Each item already has title, link and description tags as per RSS 1.0

[arjunrc]

Srijith, I'm very new to this RSS/feed/ATOM concept, so a question for you.

Suppose I want to display a small icon on my galleries saying 'subscribe to my RSS feed'. I hear a lot of people subscribe to this stuff - how do I do it with your tool ?

regds
arjun

[srijith]

The way RSS works is simple, it provides an XML based file with an overview of the content on your website, be it your weblog posts, stories, poems or your gallery details. RSS readers (web based like bloglines.com, or desktop based like sharpreader.net/) fetches this XML file and checks if there is anything new in your file, if yes, it is displayed on the reader. All that is needed for these RSS feed readers is an URL for your XML/RSS feed, which is what I provide with this script.

So, all you need to do is provide link to the URL
http://www.srijith.com/pbase_recent.pl?user=arjunrc
as your RSS/XML feed. A person who uses an RSS reader will specify this as the source of the feed.

There is one small problem. If you are using a feed reader that is installed on your own machine, things works fine and you can specify how frequently the reader should go and fetch the feed to check for new items. But for feed readers like bloglines.com that are web based, they have a default period that they use for their frequency. This could be one or two days even. Thus the news about the creation of a new gallery may not reach the reader fast. To get around this, there are services called "Pings" which tell these websites that "hey.. my RSS feed has changed, you might want to fetch the latest one". It works for almost every case, except for this utility I am providing since there is no way my script knows of any change in the feed (as it does not keep any state etc.) The best place to do stuff like this is at the Pbase server side, but I really don't think slug and team are interested in these new cool tools.

So, my script cannot "ping" these services. However, the gallery can do it manually. Whenever you create a new gallery and you think people are following your progress through RSS, go to the URL
http://blo.gs/ping.php
and fill up the required fields and manually "ping". This ping will be propagated to most of the rss readers services and they should notice the ping.

Hope that was clear enough... why do I have a feeling it was not

More writeup on RSS - http://channels.lockergnome.com/rss/resources/

[arjunrc]

Thanks ! gotcha

If you go to http://www.dpreview.com - Phil has an "XML" button (top right)
that however seems to provide a file with .rdf extension as opposed to yours which is a browser readable data - whats the difference ?

regds
arjun

[arjunrc]

Ok, I added it to my site - can you see if I did it the right way ?
Now what do I need to do to get millions to subscribe to my feed ?

regds
arjun

[srijith]

If you go to http://www.dpreview.com - Phil has an "XML" button (top right)
that however seems to provide a file with .rdf extension as opposed to yours which is a browser readable data - whats the difference ?

well the extension can be rss,xml or rdf based on the syntax version. Ya, it is messy. If it was a static file you could have a file extension like that, but inthe case of the script, the RSS file is output dynamically. RDF is one language most browsers and server don't understand. So they serve it as binary. However XML and RSS files are displayed in a normal browser just like the output of the script. Take for example the RSS feed of my weblog
http://www.srijith.net/trinetre/index2_0.xml

Ok, I added it to my site - can you see if I did it the right way ?
Now what do I need to do to get millions to subscribe to my feed?

Yup, that is just the way it has to be done. As for how to get subscribers, it is just going to be your regular readers who want to keep a track of your gallery but don't want to come to your pbase site every day just to check.

[saskia]

Hey, this is great. Thanks for the service, srijith!!

[robert]

I have added it to my site... too cool!

Thanks Srijith!

[arjunrc]

Srijith, just a quick feedback. It seems that folks who use a lot of this RSS stuff also use RSS readers which have the ability to 'auto-detect' sites with RSS feed (lots of browsers do, like Maxthon and maybe even firefox).

The problem with an RSS feed that does not end with .xml (or other extensions) is that these 'scrapers' fail to recognize the site as one that provides RSS feed.

regds
arjun

[srijith]

Srijith, just a quick feedback. It seems that folks who use a lot of this RSS stuff also use RSS readers which have the ability to 'auto-detect' sites with RSS feed (lots of browsers do, like Maxthon and maybe even firefox).

The problem with an RSS feed that does not end with .xml (or other extensions) is that these 'scrapers' fail to recognize the site as one that provides RSS feed.

regds
arjun

That is true. Hmm.. let me see how I can work around this. I have a small idea how I can do it, will get back when it turns into working code.

[srijith]

That is true. Hmm.. let me see how I can work around this. I have a small idea how I can do it, will get back when it turns into working code.

And, it is done! Please check the original post above for the new URLs to use for the filename extension support that Arjun mentioned in his post.

[arjunrc]

Oops, Srijith, looks like I was wrong. Even after adding the extension the RSS aggregator tools were not detecting feed. Then I googled and discovered that you need to specify an RSS Feed in the head section of the HTML code for aggregators to pick it up, like so:

Code: Select all

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="http://www.yourdomain.com/rss.xml">

Too bad !