Table of Contents

Notes about RSS readers

I need to find/develop a tool to track blogs and blog comments, as well as stuff from other RSS sources. I will use this space to take notes.

EduFeedr

http://www.edufeedr.org/ Not updated for 13 months. Can take in blogs and comments, understand links between blogs, show social network graphs, understand if a blog entry is a submission for an assignment, etc. Also offline feature, and progress bar.

Also EduSuckr - the harvesting part (in php)

grssHopper

http://grsshopper.downes.ca/

Individual post comment feeds

wfw:commentRss

RSS can contain this tag, WordPress does. Contains link to comment URL. Blogspot publishes Atom by default, and does not include this tag in their RSS specification.

One problem with this approach is the number of hits - throughout a course, a student might publish twenty entries. Every time we update the feeds, we thus have to check 21 (comments + post feed) feeds for each student. Even at 20 students, that's 400 feeds!

Unified comment feed

Alternative is a singular comments feed. Might need more parsing, to make sure the comments are attributed to the right posts. Which tools publish singular comments feeds?

Standards

Ruby apps

  • http://raggle.org/about/
    • Ruby app (console/local web server), fully featured feed-reader
    • Development ended in 2005
  • http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=598&release_id=2185
    • Ruby app, feedreader. Only updated once. Code available.
  • Readless by Phillip
    • thesis project at Ryerson, blog reader that uses Machine Learning to sort through what you want to see
    • code on github

Ruby libraries

Not feed-related

Protocols for the future

  • Salmon - comments flowing both ways
  • OStatus
    • related to Identi.ca
  • Activitystrea.ms
  • RSS Cloud
  • http://code.google.com/p/pubsubhubbub/
    • plugin for WordPress, enables realtime updating of feeds (push, rather than pull)

Other things we want to import from

Loose ideas

Toolbox