Monthly Archives: January 2004

RSS extensions

You may not have realized it, but NewsGator 2.0 supports arbitrary RSS extensions. Yep, arbitrary – you can define whatever extension you like, and NewsGator will be able to use it in one way of another. Let’s explore how this works, and what you can do.

First, what is a RSS extension? Here’s a trivial example. Suppose you have a RSS item:

<item>
  <title>My Post</title>
  <link>http://example.org/post14.htm</link>
  <description>Here is what I have to say.</description>
</item>

Pretty straightforward. But I could add my own data to this item:

<item>
  <title>My Post</title>
  <link>http://example.org/post14.htm</link>
  <description>Here is what I have to say.</description>
  <greg:CoolFactor>10</greg:CoolFactor>
</item>

But if I do this, most client tools will completely ignore the CoolFactor element. Until now.

With NewsGator 2.0, there are three different ways you can deal with extensions:

Map data to a column – you can take any extension data and map it to a column in Outlook. For example, I could create a column in Outlook called “coolness”, and map the above CoolFactor data into that column. I could then not only see it, but sort on it, or whatever else I’d like to do with it. NewsGator users, go to NewsGator/Options, Rendering tab to see these mapping options.

Render custom data in the post body – NewsGator 2.0’s rendering engine now uses XSLT, and you can customize the transforms used to render the items. What’s more, any custom data (such as the CoolFactor element is available to these transforms…so you could have a custom rendering based on this data by building a new stylesheet. For example, change how big the font is based on some value, or have a big blue number in the corner showing the custom data.

And further, a feed can “recommend” what stylesheet should be used to render it. NewsGator won’t automatically download stylesheets (for a number of reasons, mostly security-related), but if the named transform exists, it will use it.

Custom NewsGator Extensions – NewsGator 2.0 provides a new extension API, which can be used to do any arbitrary processing on RSS extension elements. You can do literally anything you want to here – examples:

  • Create a meeting request in Outlook based on custom data in the feed
  • Create a contact in Outlook based on custom data
  • Retrieve content from a web site or internal business system and include it in the rendering

The possibilities are endless. The extension API is not yet up on the web site (it will be soon), but it available on request to anyone who would like to use it.

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Arizona Motorsports Park shut down

From the Arizona Republic:

The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors ordered the closure of a controversial West Valley racetrack Wednesday…when it opened for business last spring with a Sports Car Club of America racing event, residents immediately began complaining about the noise of revving engines on the 2-mile course just south of Luke Air Force Base.

A sad day. I’ve raced there – and it’s an awesome track.

I just don’t get it about the noise. Sure, a race track isn’t a quiet place. But it is literally right next to an air force base. When we were there, we literally had to cover our ears sometimes as the jets would fly a few hundred feet overhead. Now THAT is noise, and a whole lot louder than the track was.

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NewsGator Mobile Edition

Another in a series of posts describing the new NewsGator 2.0 and NewsGator Online Services:

Imagine this scenario. You’re at a conference, and your community of bloggers (who are also in attendance) are talking about getting together that night to meet for a drink. You’d love to meet up with them, and put a face to the names. There is a lot of discussion on everyone’s blog, talking about where and when to meet.

But you’re without your laptop. Or the battery died. Or you forgot your Wi-Fi card. Or you just can’t get connected. Whatever the problem, you’re off the air. But you _do_ have your cell phone, which can connect to the net.

So you pull up your favorites, click on the link for NewsGator Mobile, and you see a list of the recently updated blogs you’re looking for. You click a link, and there it is – the meeting place and time you needed. It doesn’t get any easier than that.

That exact scenario came up this year for me at PDC – and that’s when I realized the value of a mobile edition (which was only an early prototype at the time). But more recently, an even better situation came up:

You’re at a conference, waiting to meet with an important member of the press to do an interview about your company’s new product. While you’re waiting, you pull up NewsGator Mobile Edition on your phone, and read some comments from people talking about your product, how they use it, and what they think of it. One of these posts is a great testimonial and use case, and you use it in the interview.

Yep, that one’s for real, too. I can’t emphasize how cool it is to have instant access to your feeds – any time, any place. Or a subset of your feeds, if you prefer to set it up that way.

And it’s not the same as some of the other feed readers for mobile devices. The others make the assumption that you’re going to read your content on the device, and the device only. But that’s not really the way most people work; most folks tend to use their mobile devices as a companion device to their laptop or desktop. And NewsGator Mobile is designed around this premise – tightly integrated with the NGOS synchronization system…so it makes you more productive.

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NewsGator POP Edition

Continuing in the series of posts describing NewsGator 2.0 and NewsGator Online Services:

One of the most common question we get is some variant of:

Does NewsGator work with Entourage? Outlook Express? Eudora? Lotus Notes?
 
I love the idea of reading RSS feeds in my email client, but I hate Outlook. Do you have a version for [insert mail client here]?

Up to now, the answer has been no…but with POP Edition, part of NewsGator Online Services, we now have a solution.

POP Edition works with any POP3 email client, which is just about every email client out there. You simply add a new email account to your client, point it to the NGOS server, and you can then retrieve your content as mail messages into your client.

It’s configurable, so you can make decisions about how the message will be formatted, and where the feed name will show up. We do this to make sure no matter what email client you’re using, you’ll be able to sort and group your messages the way you want, and build rules to sort them into folders if you like.

And of course, it works with the NGOS synchronization system…so your subscriptions follow you wherever you go, and you never have to read the same thing twice. And if you change settings on your client like whether to leave messages on the server, or delete them, those settings are respected by the sync system – so it will just do the right thing, as you would expect.

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NewsGator Web Edition

Uh oh, I’m letting down on the job…it’s already Wednesday, and I have a lot more to tell you about. :-)

NewsGator Web Edition, part of the NewsGator Online Services suite, is a web-based content aggregator which runs in a web browser.

Now there are plenty of other web-based aggregators out there…why do we need another one? A couple of reasons.

First, it works with the NGOS synchronization system (more info). So you can read posts at home with Web Edition, and when you get to the office and download posts with NewsGator for Outlook, you won’t have to read the same content. Unless you want to. And remember the sync system works with POP Edition and Mobile Edition too – more to come on that. Combine that with an online subscription management system, which even allows you to expose a subset of your subscriptions publicly as OPML, and we’re onto something here.

Second, it’s tightly integrated into the rest of the NGOS features – including custom search feeds and premium content…

Available January 19 at http://services.newsgator.com.

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Atom feeds and well-formed XML

Nick and Brent (here and here) have announced that FeedDemon and NetNewsWire will have strict parsing for Atom feeds, meaning non-well-formed feeds will not parse in those products. I totally understand their position, and sympathize with their arguments. However…

NewsGator 2.0, and all of the NewsGator editions being shipped as part of NewsGator Online Services on January 19, will parse Atom feeds using a very similar parser to that used for RSS; that means that most “questionable” feeds (of which there are a LOT) will parse ok.

The vast majority of our customers don’t care about well-formed XML – they care about getting information. Our tools are designed to make that happen.

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NewsGator Synchronization

As promised, here is the first in a series of posts describing NewsGator 2.0 and NewsGator Online Services.

NewsGator 2.0, and NewsGator Online Services (NGOS) provide synchronization capability for your subscriptions. The basic premise – your subscriptions follow you wherever you go, and you never have to read the same thing twice. There are three classes of information that is synchronized:

  • Subscriptions – so you can add/delete your subscriptions in one place, and the changes will be reflected on other machines.
     
  • Read/unread information – if you download an item on one machine, you won’t see that item anywhere else (unless you want to).
     
  • Which machines have which subscriptions – if you use NewsGator for Outlook at home and at work, you may want separate (but overlapping) subscriptions in each place. For example, you may have feeds at work that you can’t access at home, since they’re behind your corporate firewall.  NGOS allows you to specify where each subscription should apply, and just “does the right thing” when it’s time to sync.
The sync system is very easy to use – you just enable the synchronization option, and a wizard walks you through a very short process to set up the initial sync. After the initial sync, the system is completely automatic – you don’t have to do anything, or even think about it. It just works.
 
 
To save bandwidth, only differences are synchronized on each automatic sync. This ensures great performance, even on low bandwidth connections.
 
You can even (optionally) expose your OPML file publicly. My blogroll on the right side of my weblog is generated automatically using my public OPML file. You can specify which subscriptions should be exposed, and can expose as many OPML files as you like, with different sets of subscriptions.
 
Beyond NewsGator for Outlook, the sync system works with all NewsGator editions, including Web Edition, POP Edition, and Mobile Edition. If you’re away from the office, you can use mobile edition to read a few posts…or read everything on web edition from a public computer.
 
The API’s used for the sync system will be available for any interesting 3rd parties who are interested in making their applications work with our system.
 
More to come over the rest of the week!
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