Dec 19, 2005 1
If you’re in the UK feeling a bit put out that your Gmail (er, I mean Google Mail) account doesn’t seem to feature the new Web Clips functionality, then the easy way to remedy that is to go to your Gmail “Settings” link at the top of the interface and then select your “Gmail display language” to be English (US).
Mar 27, 2005 0
Well, like a dork, I didn’t actually realise that Yahoo! News already offered up the whole RSS feeds for news keywords thing when I started. However, the fun thing of course with the API that Yahoo! are offering is that it doesn’t take a whole lot of time to create another script that dishes out the same thing in another ‘rival’ syndication format:
Atom enabled Yahoo! web feeds examples
The syntax of the URL is almost identical to that of the RSS feed http://undercrank.com/yahoo/atom/news/«keywords» (the equivalent RSS version would be http://undercrank.com/yahoo/rss/news/«keywords». This is a slight change to the previous syntax posted, but the old format is still perfectly valid and won’t break for those already using it.
As before, the feed validates nicely has good friendly HTTP caching facilities built in, as as a special bonus it conforms to the Tag URI recommendations pretty well too.
Use is made of the extended Author tags for each article, and support for multiple languages for each entry is available – although it appears that Yahoo! returns “en” as the language for everything, even, if it’s not.
Finally, I’ll post up the source once I’m convinced I’m doing everything the ‘right’ way.
Mar 23, 2005 5
Excited by the prospect of a reasonably usable search API being made available by Yahoo!, I’ve put together a small project that will create an dynamic RSS 2.0 feed based on the Yahoo! News Search hooks.
The feed validates nicely, and also deals well with the tests created by Unpolluted; it has GZip handling, HTTP Expires, Last-Modified, ETag and If-None-Match support built-in.
The usage is very simple – point your aggregator of choice at http://undercrank.com/yahoo/rss/news/KEYWORD, replacing KEYWORD with your appropriate search term. Some examples are given below:
I’ll release the source when I’ve tidied it up a bit so you can host it on your own boxes, but feel free to try it here for the time being.
Mar 18, 2004 1
For reasons I’m not entirely sure of, I’ve put together a feed of this site in iCalendar format (as used most notably by Apple’s iCal).
This is another one to be filed under “because I can”, but having blog post summaries appear in the calendar is well, interesting. Taken a step further, iCal could become a simple news aggregation tool that gives a more natural view of blog updates in relation to eachother.
The iCalendar file, and the source code for the index template are available. iCal users can subscribe using the webcal:// protocol by using this link.
There’s a few issues to be aware of if you feel like taking this further:
Timezones are hard-coded, as there’s no support in MT to write out “GMT“, or “Europe/London” as might be expected.
All the ‘appointments’ are one-minute long.
The summaries and descriptions tag as per the spec should wrap at 75 octets in length; however, I’ve not figured out a decent way to do this in MT. A plug-in might help here.
The template requires MT 2.66 or higher (I think), as I used some of the new tags required for Atom support (in particular <MTIfNonEmpty> and <$MTEntryModifiedDate$>).
