Here’s an interesting article I found by accident – PR Tactics – Using RSS for corporate communications by Phil Gomes.

…since not all announcements are wire-worthy — despite what your “Assistant Marketing Director, Luxembourg Region,” might try to tell you — company events of slightly less significance might be posted to the company’s RSS feed as the sole means of transmission, giving subscribers a richer view of the company.

This is exactly what we do for NewsGator – some news is wire-transmitted, but all news is in the news/updates RSS feed.

I’ve written some sample code to generate a RSS feed from the Windows Event Logs. This is very handy for monitoring servers – perhaps a poor man’s SNMP monitor. :-)

Here’s an screen shot showing it in NewsGator (click for larger version):

You can specify in the URL how many entries to return, and which logs to use. For example,

http://example.org/Rss.aspx?num=20&logs=Application,System

would return the 20 most recent entries, looking in both the Application and System event logs.

Download here – requires ASP.NET. If your server is on the internet rather than local, try it with my HTTP security samples [Basic, Digest] to securely monitor the event log of the remote server – very handy for those hosting on remote, dedicated servers.

I have not posted anything about the war on my weblog before, and I don’t intend to make it a habit. But I’m going to just this one time. I had lunch with my sister today, and she told me of a good friend of hers whose son is a marine in Iraq. This young man wrote a letter to his mom, which included two questions (paraphrased here):

I hear a lot about the protests, and how people back home are so opposed to this war and what we’re doing…why?

and

It doesn’t seem like there’s a big display of patriotism back home right now, like there was after 9/11 (people displaying flags, etc.). Why not?

Good questions – and not questions I want our troops to have to think about, while bullets are flying past their heads.

I, for one, am totally 100% behind our troops and what they’re doing. I don’t necessarily agree with everything our administration does, but once the decisions are made, they have my full support. The time for protest has passed.

And I’m going to look for a flag to put outside my house. I’m proud to be an American. And if any of our troops or their families read this, I’d like to say thank you.

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!

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?