Archive: 2006 December / bluno.org

Paper Thin Walls

December 20th, 2006 music

New to me, but probably sooo 2005, Paper Thin Walls has a good take on music reviews, music community, mp3 blog.

Any guesses as to their CMS of choice?

Mail.app and GTD

December 16th, 2006 dailies

Some great tips for those of us who live in Mail.app and need to Get Things Done: Mail.app GTD Perfection

The Berg Sans Nipple // Along The Quai // Released January 23rd, 2007 // Team Love Records - 10/21/2006 - Page 1

December 13th, 2006 dailies

The Berg Sans Nipple // Along The Quai // Released January 23rd, 2007 // Team Love Records - Sweet! Can’t wait!

Not an amateur at all…

December 13th, 2006 web

If you’ve seen this already, I’m not sorry. I just saw it and had to share:

6 things

December 13th, 2006 random

uh-oh, I’ve been tagged with a blog meme. If it was anyone but Syd, I probably wouldn’t play, but instead of being a blog grinch, here goes:

I have a soft spot for pop/dance music. Like “Toxic”, by Brittney Spears. Great song.

When I was a kid, I wanted more than ANYTHING to play football for the University of Nebraska, but then i found skateboarding and punk rock.

After 15 years of being a vegetarian in Nebraska, I moved to San Francisco and Started eating meat.

I don’t do fiction. If I read, it has to be real stories. I highly recommend Woody Guthrie: A Life

Roads not taken: Teacher. Chef/Restauranteur.

When I was 19 I went to Peru. I saw the Southern Cross, verified that the toilets swirl counter-clockwise when flushed, and was pee’d on by little monkeys sitting in a tree in the Amazon.

Tagged:

Soy is making kids ‘gay’

December 13th, 2006 dailies

Soy is making kids ‘gay’ - Uhhh…

Wikipedia to delete James Kim entry?

December 12th, 2006 dailies

Just saw that the James Kim entry on Wikipedia is marked for deletion. That would be a shame.

Lincoln among nation’s top digital cities

December 12th, 2006 Lincoln

Lincoln among nation’s top digital cities - Unfortunately the state legislature passed a law prohibiting Lincoln’s public power system from utilizing existing infrastructure for data services. Competition is fierce; I wonder if Lincoln can keep up.

Hacking journalstar.com RSS

December 10th, 2006 Lincoln, web

I’ve recently switched over my RSS subscriptions to Google Reader. Google Reader makes reading and managing a high volume of RSS feeds so effortless and intuitive, I was inspired to visit some of the sites I hoped to add to my feed reading list. As a recent expatriate of Lincoln, Nebraska, naturally I wanted to add the Journal Star, Lincoln’s local paper, to my read list, but it was apparent that the paper’s online division (or more likely, their tech-ignorant publishers) has not come around to embrace RSS. I wasn’t surprised, but still disappointed.

I found I wasn’t alone in my frustration.

So, I sat down to write a quick blog post complaining about their lack of feeds in the dawn of 2007 - but then I thought, “Who wants to read that?”. So I started looking for an alternative RSS-enabled news source for Lincoln, Nebraska.

Google news offers RSS feeds of searches on the site (RSS Feed for “lincoln nebraska”), but it isn’t comprehensive, and is mostly sports news anyway.

The UNL newspaper, the Daily Nebraskan, has a wide variety of feeds (DN RSS Feeds), but I really had enough of the DN in my years of attending classes at UNL. Thanks, but no thanks.

I SWEAR I had a feed of ‘most printed articles’ from the Lincoln CBS affiliate KOLN, but those ended up being mostly recipes, so I unsubscribed. Can’t find any mention of RSS there either.

I headed back to Google to see if anyone had set up a way to scrape Journal Star headlines and output them to RSS. No luck there either.

Lincoln, it seemed, wants to keep its news to itself.

As a last resort, I headed back to Google searching for all sorts of search combinations of RSS and Journal Star and I found this little gem: http://www.journalstar.com/?rss=huskerextra.

And after a bit more research, trial, and error, I found the format to their publishing system’s RSS output.

Here’s how it works. Their publishing system users a url structure like this: http://www.journalstar.com/articles/2006/12/10/news/local/doc457b548b7be44737957995.txt. The key to accessing the RSS is the directory structure between the date stamp (i.e. “2006/12/10″), and the ugly document name in the URL (i.e. “doc457b548b7be44737957995.txt”)

Just plug this directory structure in as the value for the RSS url parameter and you get: http://www.journalstar.com/?rss=news/local. Magic!

Here are some examples, with a handy link to add to Google Reader:

Even the police calls, bankruptcies and resurant inspections have RSS feeds. What fun!

Since the feeds exist, WHY wouldn’t they be promoted on the site? Clearly, they don’t realize that “RSS is the paperboy” (see question #4). An RSS subscriber is clearly more engaged and interested in the content. They are more likely to turn more pages, participate in comments, and post links on their blogs, in turn driving more traffic to the site. I don’t expect them to provide full content feeds, though some sites have had encoraging results.

So, now that this cat is out of the bag let’s hope that the Journal Star doesn’t try to stuff the cat back in. It would be simple enough to disable access by a variety of ways (.htaccess etc.). If they do disable the feeds, it will be clear that the Journal Star doesn’t understand this powerful and simple method of content delivery, doesn’t respect it’s users, and doesn’t care to learn.

We’ll see.