Tag: rss

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Google Reader is Dead

Google Reader is Dead

Google have announced that they are retiring Google Reader in July.

Retiring implies that Google Reader will be taking life a little easier, spend a little more time in the garden, visit National Trust sites, watch Countdown. Retiring implies that we might actually see more of Google Reader as they will be less busy than they were before.

No Google is trying to tone down the reality, the reality of course is that Google are going to kill Google Reader dead!

I’ve used Google Reader for many years, but probably like most people in recent years I’ve not used Google Reader natively, I have used it to deliver RSS feeds into services such as FlipBoard. This has to be one of the reasons why Google are probably retiring the service, the main reason of course is Google+, however another reason must be that we used the Google Reader service (and API) but we rarely visited the actual Google Reader service on the web. This gave Google very opportunities for monetisation compared to other things they do such as Gmail.

There is some concern that the death of Google Reader will actually result in the death of RSS. The reason for this thinking is that curation and sharing of news has moved from RSS onto social networking sites such as Facebook and the Twitter.

Interestingly ask yourself where did you hear about the death of Google Reader first? Was it in Google Reader, or was it on the Twitter? For me it was on the Twitter, and this says a lot about why we are now using social networking sites for sharing news and moving away from RSS.

I do like RSS, it makes sense to me, an easy way to push content to people. However it never really made the mainstream, as a background tool it was perfect, but is (I nearly wrote was) reliant on good tools for making RSS user friendly.

I still want to curate and collate RSS feeds from various sources so I am now looking for a similar alternative, what are you going to do?

Graveyard Photo Source

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Feeder

I sometimes get asked how I create the RSS feed for my e-Learning Stuff Podcast so that people can subscribe to it from my blog or through iTunes.

Though it is quite easy using the WordPress software it is possible to get an RSS feed it doesn’t match the requirements of submitting to iTunes. Originally I used to parse the feed through feedburner, but then I found that the actual podcast posts were “lost” within the regular posts.

At that point I was resigned to using Notepad to write my own RSS XML file when I found out about Feeder.

Feeder is a fully featured application for creating, editing and publishing RSS and iTunes podcast feeds.

Feeder can create, download and import RSS 2.0 and iTunes podcast feeds with full support for the iTunes RSS podcasting extensions. Drag and drop enclosure files to create new items, Feeder will automatically tag audio and video files with artwork, etc in all popular podcast formats. Feeder makes editing your feed a breeze with auto-complete, templates, HTML tag insertion, previews and a customizable user interface that easily adapts to the task at hand.

Feeder can publish to FTP, SFTP, FTPS MobileMe, WebDAV or Amazon S3 servers and will upload the feed, artwork and enclosure files, post to the weblog and announce new content on Twitter and Facebook with a single click.

It is now a simple process to create the different podcast entries, it was also possible (following requests) to create a full feed of all my podcasts.

I now use Feeder to create the entries for my podcast RSS feed, though for legacy reasons the feed still goes through feedburner.

If you need to create RSS feeds for anything as well as podcasts then have a look at Feeder.