Fixing RSS Reader Panel (Hooray for Open Source)

As you may remember, I've been using the RSS Reader Panel Extension to Firefox to read RSS feeds. Unfortunately, it had a few problems with sites using the atom protocal, including most Blogger sites.

Fortunately, the source code for the RSS Reader Panel is available. Someone with more Javascript experience than me found the problem and fixed it. Details are available at the Reader Panel Message Board. (See message 546.) So far, the fixed version works great. Hope the fix makes it into the next official version.

And the Problem With RSS Reader Panel is

You'll remember I'm using the RSS Reader Panel extension to Firefox as my RSS Aggregator. And it works really well.

Except on this Blog. If you add Linux & Things to your RSS bookmarks, and then click on the link, everything looks normal. On the sidebar below the bookmarks you see the article titles. In the "content area" you see the first few lines of each article. However, when you click on an article you get the message

We're sorry but the Username/Password combination you've entered is either invalid or you don't have permission to access this Blog.

I contacted Blogger support, who gave me a nice answer which showed me that they'd really looked at the problem but, unfortunately, their answer comes down to "not our problem, man". :-( It seems that when Blogger produces its Atom-formatted XML file it produces two links per article. The first is an internal link for Blog*splot, and the second is the permanent link to the article. As far as I can tell, Blog*splot is the only site that does this. I've examined some other Atom files, and none of them seem to have more than one link per article. However, Blog*splot does produce proper XML code, according to http://feedvalidator.org, so I guess it's legal. The permalink is identified as type text/html, while the other link is type application/x.atom+xml, so it shouldn't be too hard to figure out the correct link.

I've posted a bug report with Reader Panel Support, so hopefully this will get fixed soon.

And One More RSS Thingy

Hey, look at this: this very Blog publishes its own RSS Feed. Who knew? Apparently I signed up for this when I created the Blog, but I didn't know what I was signing up for. There's even a summary page, which consists of the first few lines of each article.

And More Stuff About RSS

Slate (from MSN, but I don't hold that against them) has an article on speed-reading the net, which is all about how RSS works. They even have a collection of popular RSS feeds, including the Washington Post and the New York Times, not to mention the Drudge report. This is an OPML file, which means you can't read in your browser. To use it with the RSS Reader Panel, open up the RSS sidebar, click on Tools, click on OPML Import/Export, and follow the directions. All this is to introduce the launching of Slate's own RSS feed.

While following the links in the OPML file, (specifically, Drudge -- you can look up the link yourself) I found a link to Myway.com, which is a portal that looks the way Yahoo used to look. Clean, no adds, no popups (not that users of Mozilla Firefox have to worry about that). They offer their own webbed based email (of course), but allow you to access any other webmail account with a click or two. Very nice.

Another thing I learned about RSS and the Reader Panel: Many (not all) RSS feeds contain story summaries. Just using the RSS sidebar doesn't show these summaries, but if you click on View => Open in Contents Area and then click on the RSS feed, the summaries will show up in the browser window, with the links still in the lower panel. If tabbed browsing is enabled, doing a middle-button mouse click will open up the summary in a new tab.

Leap Day, When Mike Learns about RSS Readers

Well, he learns a little bit, anyway. As I understand it (and if you want to correct me, hit the email button on the right):

If you go to a page such as Syndic8.com, or random other pages, you'll see an orange button labeled "XML".

At the bottom of every Slashdot page, there is a link labeled "RSS".

Click one of these links, and most likely your browser will do something strange. Mozilla Firefox prints the message "This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it. The document tree is shown below." and then dumps the XML source.

So what are these pages, and how do you read them? RSS (sometimes) stands for "Really Simple Syndication". As far as I can tell, it's a collection of bookmarks for a website. For example, Slashdot's RSS feed is a list of the current articles appearing on the Slashdot home page. The advantage of the RSS feed, rather than your own bookmarks, is that the page is dynamic, that is, it gives you the current Slashdot home page, not the way it looked the last time you went there and bookmarked every article. The articles don't have to come from the same page, they can be distributed throughout cyberspace.

There's more information on this at XML.com and news.yahoo.com. The later link has a bunch of RSS feeds for Yahoo's news service.

OK, that's well and good, but how do you read these things? You need something called an RSS aggregator. Many are listed in that last link.

But, since RSS is essentially a collection of (dynamic) bookmarks to web pages, why not use a web browser to read them? The Mozilla browsers don't support RSS directly, but you access feeds using an extension. (There are extensions for Mozilla itself. Use Google to find them. In Firefox, see "Tools=>Options=> Extensions."

There are several RSS extensions for Firefox. I chose the RSS Reader Panel. You install this in the usual manner, which means you're trusting someone to send you good code. Fortunately, this is in your own file space, so you can't trample on things belonging to root or another user. (Under Linux. In Windows, this isn't true, of course.) The RSS Reader Panel (RSSRP) install itself, and you restart your browser.

Next, create a bookmark folder. It doesn't matter where. I called mine, duh, "RSS Feeds". Under "Tools=>Options=>Extensions" click on "RSS Reader Panel", then on the "Options" button at the bottom. There is a menu which has a scroll button with all of your bookmarks. Highlight the RSS Feed bookmark and click "OK".

Add any XML or RSS feeds you'd like into this folder in the usual way.

Now go to "View=>Sidebar" and click on "RSS Reader Panel", or just hit "Alt-R" on the keyboard. On the left-hand side of the screen, all of your RSS bookmarks will appear in the top half of the sidebar. Click on the one you want. In the bottom half of the sidebar will be the titles currently available from that page. Click on the one you want and it will appear in the main part of the browser window on the right. Get rid of the sidebar by clicking the "X" in the upper right-hand corner.

I don't know if I'll use this all that much or not. Time will tell, I guess.