Greg Reinacker’s Weblog

I finally got around to updating my subscription list, over on the right side of the screen if you’re viewing the HTML version of this site. This one is generated from my NewsGator subscription file.

In my case, it’s pretty simple - the page is rendered from a list in my SQL database, so I just wrote a quick (10 minutes) application to whip through my NewsGatorSubs.opml file, extract each outline element, and insert it into my DB. Even if you don’t use a database (most folks!), it would be easy to write a small XSLT transform to transform the enhanced NewsGator OPML into whatever you need.

FYI, you can find your NewsGatorSubs.opml subscription file at:

\Documents and Settings\<user>\Application Data\RAI\NewsGator\NewsGatorSubs.opml

Someday, hopefully there will be an easier way to integrate with your blogroll - but for now, this isn’t too painful, if you have some XML knowledge. If not, post what you need, and someone might help you. :-)

I’ve added the RSS 2.0 <author> element to my comments feed, which will make it easier to tell at a glance who posted the comment. Maybe Sam will follow suit - his comments feeds are pretty active…

NewsGator users, just make sure the “From” column is part of the view for that feed, and you’ll be all set!

Update: it would be cool if those of you who have combined feeds for multiple weblogs would support this as well. Mike already does this for the EraBlog combined feed (with dc:creator, pretty much equivalent to author); Scott, how about dotnetweblogs.com’s combined feed?

Sean Varley has an interesting post talking about embedded processors and trends in that market:

Processors sales run 50 billion dollars a year, but 98 percent of them are invisible.  The truth is that only 2 percent of all the processors sold actually go into your regular old PC…

And a big welcome to Tom Walker, who just launched his weblog yesterday while we were eating pizza and watching Alias. Tom usually has something intereresting to say - watch his weblog!

NewsGator 1.1 has been released! This is a significant release; many of the most-requested features have been added, and a few bugs have been fixed. You can download 1.1 here. And it’s a free upgrade for licensed 1.0 users. :-)

Change list (with a few pictures):

• “From” column now shows author if present, otherwise feed name:
  
  
   
• “Received” column now shows publish date, if present, otherwise retrieve date
• Feeds which require authentication are now supported:
  
  
   
• New message notification (task tray bubble) on Windows 2000 and later
  
  
   
• Optional per-feed update frequency
• Option to determine modified-post behavior (RSS guid support), which can eliminate duplicate posts for some feeds:
  
  
   
• Initial view setup for OL2002 removed (no longer necessary)
• Subscriptions moved to separate menu item
• Subscription list now sortable
• Proxy bypass on local setting now supported
• Added category support
• Added xhtml:body support
• Confirmation when deleting subscriptions
• Added user-defined Post Author field
• Updated online help for 1.1
• Added link to tutorial on initial setup screen
• Minor GUI changes
• Trial period reset for 1.1
• Fixed problem where Outlook would not close correctly if user logged off or shut down Windows without closing Outlook
• Fixed NewsPage bug when a feed title or post title contained certain escaped HTML elements
• Fixed problem if a folder exists, but doesn’t match because case-sensitive comparison
• Fixed problem with certain feeds (such as Wired News) that vary the posts between retrievals; NewsGator now buffers at least 50 read posts (or 2x) per feed.
• Fixed problem where if publish date was specified with a north american time zone (per RFC822), NewsGator would fail to parse it and revert back to the received date
• Fixed NewsPage problem with folder names containing ‘/’, ‘ ‘, and ‘\’
• Fixed a few other minor problems

Don Box writes:

Due to popular demand, my RSS/2.0 feed will soon support <content:encoded>, which will allow users of off-line readers (e.g., NewsGator, NewsGator, and NewsGator) to read my feeds without being connected.

Heh…NewsGator users aren’t a quiet bunch! :-)

I’ve had a lot of requests for NewsGator to be able to scrape non-RSS-enabled sites, and create a “virtual feed” from them. Syndirella supports this capability on the client side; MyRSS can also create a feed from any web site, according to their documentation.

Here’s the question I have. Do you think scraping content from a site is legal or ethical? I don’t think so. For starters, I would think there are copyright issues. You’re taking content, which belongs to someone else, and reproducing it in another form for your own use. Maybe this is allowable use, I don’t know…I’m certainly not a lawyer.

What about sites that make their living based on advertising impressions? Tools that scrape these sites are literally stealing money from them.

Any comments? Am I off base here?

If you’re using weblogs internally in your company, and you’re willing to talk about it, can you send me a note?  Thanks!

In case anyone missed this from the NewsGator updates feed:

Through our arrangement with O’Reilly & Associates, we are pleased to bring you Chapter 2: Content Syndication Architecture, from the new book, Content Syndication with RSS, by Ben Hammersley.

From the chapter introduction:

In this chapter, we’ll look at how RSS feeds are structured: both the feed itself and the way RSS fits into the whole web publishing picture.

Read the full text online!

[NewsGator News and Updates]

I recently received an email about the NewsGator menu in Outlook, which right now is added to the main Outlook menu bar. The person pointed out that if all add-ins added their menu to the main Outlook menu, we’d have a mess on our hands…and he suggested perhaps moving the menu to the NewsGator toolbar. SpamNet does this now - the “Cloudmark” button on their toolbar drops down their menu:

Seems like a reasonable idea, and a nice side effect would be it would eliminate the menu bug we have on Outlook 2000; but there’s something nice about just having the top-level NewsGator menu also. I’m on the fence.

What do you think?

Well this is pissing me off…newsgator.com has had some major issues since sometime last night:

Server Application Unavailable
The web application you are attempting to access on this web server is currently unavailable.  Please hit the “Refresh” button in your web browser to retry your request.

Administrator Note: An error message detailing the cause of this specific request failure can be found in the system event log of the web server. Please review this log entry to discover what caused this error to occur.

I tell you, I’ve been with my current hosting provider for some time, but ever since they were acquired by a certain other company, things have gone downhill in the reliability department. I’m not going to name them here (yet), as I’m hoping they get this fixed in a hurry and don’t want to piss them off. :-)

Anyone have recommendations for a high quality .NET hosting provider? I’ve heard good things about maximumasp.net, but I’m worried about their 2Mb/sec bandwidth throttle - we have times that go way over that. I’ve also heard good things about rackspace.com, but only on the Linux side. Anyone?

Update: it’s back up now, but I’d still like to hear some recommendations from you…