random musings from a serialist
New: an RSS feed for comments
I have created a feed for comments made on any of my blog entries. I didn’t even realize it was possible to do this until today when I saw it mentioned in a discussion of RSS feeds over at The Shifted Librarian. Here is a great resource for a template for Movable Type users.
Art Rhyno has created an RSS feed for his library’s new books list.
I had been attempting to puzzle out some coding to get an RSS feed automatically generated from our new books list, but time and a learning curve have prevented me from getting very far on it. I know what needs to be done, and I’m fairly certain that all I need is a little bit of Perl code. Since I have not really worked with Perl beyond tweaking the little bit I needed to tweak when setting up this blog, it would take me quite a bit of time to learn the language. In any case, it appears that Art Rhyno at the University of Windsor has already created an RSS feed for his library’s new books, and they use Endeavor Voyager, as well. I’m hoping he can help me out with a feed for my library. It would have been cool to do the programming myself, and I expect that even with Art’s help, I’ll still need to tweak it, but on the other hand, I don’t know if I’d ever get something programmed on my own.
Update:
Art responded to my comment with a link to the basic instructions on how to set this up. Cocoon? Modula-2? LISP? Maybe I need to re-think my desires to learn some programming. I suppose it will be good for me in the long run.
Snappy new term for RSS aggregators.
Karen asks, “How long before major browsers integrate aggregators? (And when are we going to find better names for these tools?)”
1. I wondered if Mozilla might be developing something like this, so I took a look at their website. Turns out that someone has created an RSS reader plugin for Firebird. There are also Aggreg8 and NewsMonster for both Firebird and Mozilla. It looks like there are several other plugins being developed, as well.
2. I offer the term feeders. It’s short, snappy, and to the point. Of course, it will only work if other people use it. If you like the term, I suggest you start referring to your RSS aggregator as a feeder.
Anna gets semi-techie about RSS and OPACs.
Yesterday, I was thinking some more about uses for RSS with library OPACs. The idea of having an RSS feed for new books continues to nag me, but without more technical knowledge, I know this is something that I couldn’t make work. Then something clicked, and I called up our library systems administrator to ask him a few questions. As I suspected, our new books list in the OPAC is a text file that is generated by a script that searches the catalog database once a week. I began to ponder what it would take to convert that flat file into XML, and if would it be possible to automate that process.
I grabbed a copy of the flat file from the server and took a look at it, just to see what was there. First off, I realized that there was quite a bit of extraneous information that will need to be stripped out. That could be done easily by hand with a few search & replace commands and some spreadsheet manipulation. So, the easy way out would be to do it all by hand every week. Here* is what I was able to do after some trial and error, working with books added in the previous week.
A harder route would be to put together a program that would take the cleaned up but still raw text file and convert each line into <item> entries, with appropriate fields for <title> (book title), <description> (publication information & location), <category> (collection), etc. This new XML file would replace the old one every week. If I knew any Perl or ColdFusion, I’m certain that I could whip something up fairly quickly.
The ideal option would be to write a program that goes into the catalog daily and pulls out information about new books added and generates the XML file from that. I suspect that it would work similarly to Michael Doran‘s New Books List program, but would go that extra step of converting the information in to RSS-friendly XML.
If anyone knows of some helper programs or if someone out there in library land is developing a program like this, please let me know.
* File is now missing. I think I may have delete it by accident. 1/13/05
What if your favorite professional journals were delivered to your desktop via RSS?
Today I was commenting to my boss that I had found a resource of professional literature that was not dry or irrelevant — all of the library blogs sent daily to my RSS feed reader. That got me thinking a bit more, and it made me wonder what other uses could be made of RSS. One that had occurred to me the other week is having an RSS feed of new books as they are added to the catalog. I even found some discussion of such a tool on several blogs, as well as a resource called Project FLOW which plans to put together a toolkit of innovative add-on features for web OPACs.
Another idea that occurred to me this evening is publication through subscription RSS feeds (or even open-access models). For instance, the PLoS Biology journal recently released to the world could announce new articles or issues by making them available through an RSS feed, instead of or in addition to their current method of email announcements. Similarly, if I have an online subscription to Serials Review, I could get articles sent to me through some sort of secure RSS feed available only to subscribers. This method could come in handy for those publications that post articles online before they are published in the print editions, which mainly occurs in the sciences.
Now, I am not someone most people would consider to be an original thinker, so I figured that if this idea had occurred to me, then surely some of the more geeky types would have thought of it already. Sure enough, Wired already sports this feature on their website. Maybe some of the geeky library publications will soon follow?
I now have mt-blacklist running for both of my blogs. It really wasn’t necessary for my other blog, since I don’t allow comments on that one, but I might one of these days and I figured it wouldn’t hurt. I hope it works!
I now have mt-blacklist running for both of my blogs. It really wasn’t necessary for my other blog, since I don’t allow comments on that one, but I might one of these days and I figured it wouldn’t hurt. I hope it works!
Ugh. My blog comments were spammed while I was out of town this past week. The only way I’ve found to really prevent this from happening is to block all comments, which I do not want to do. Any other suggestions besides IP banning (which I’ve already done) will be very welcome.
Ugh. My blog comments were spammed while I was out of town this past week. The only way I’ve found to really prevent this from happening is to block all comments, which I do not want to do. Any other suggestions besides IP banning (which I’ve already done) will be very welcome.
Job ads from the Chronicle are available through RSS feeds by category.
I have a keyword search set up that crawls Feedster every day, looking for blog entries using the keywords. Then, those entries get fed into my RSS feed reader for me to browse and view. This morning, I discovered that the job ads for The Chronicle of Higher Education are available through career-specific RSS feeds. If you browse to a particular catetory, you will find the XML button for that category at the top of the list next to the email notification option. Here is the librarian feed.
My response to The Shifted Librarian‘s question, “Does your library understand the growing significance of instant messaging and real-time chat? Are you prepared to provide services to these kids?”
The Shifted Librarian asks, “Does your library understand the growing significance of instant messaging and real-time chat? Are you prepared to provide services to these kids?”
My library has had to crack down on what is or is not on our public PCs, so our users are not able to download crap and fill up the machines. Instant messaging programs were not included on the desktop computers, but the laptop computers we allow users to check out do have several flavors installed (that’s mainly because ITDS owns and maintains those machines, as opposed to our in-house desktops). I regularly see students sitting in comfy chairs with the laptops, IMing to their hearts content.
We’ve toyed with the idea of doing live digital reference with IM, but since so few people have made use of our email Ask-A-Librarian service, we aren’t sure that it would be worthwhile. Maybe in the future.
They re-took my picture for the liaison flyers, and I like the second one much more than the first, so it has replaced the first picture in the upper left corner of this blog. Also, I have added a listing of the five most recent comments posted to this blog on the sidebar (just below … Continue reading “changes”
They re-took my picture for the liaison flyers, and I like the second one much more than the first, so it has replaced the first picture in the upper left corner of this blog. Also, I have added a listing of the five most recent comments posted to this blog on the sidebar (just below the topics). I don’t know if anyone else cares about it, but I find that feature useful on other blogs that I read. It keeps me up to date on any commentary added to a posting after I have already read it.
