Look Quickly: the scratchpad Hits Daypop’s Top 40
I’m sure this will change before you see it, but the scratchpad’s post asking about how to place a feed on a site (not to be confused with creating a feed for a site) is near 26 on Daypop’s top 40. To my knowledge, that’s the first time any of my blogs have hit Daypop. It looks like Daypop got the link from Bruce Umbaugh on Salon.com, who seems to have gotten it verbatim from Lisa Williams, a Thursday night participant.
So I guess now would be a good time for me to say, as one of my faithful readers observed, that no one really answered my question. I was hoping for something really concrete that doesn’t involve running the feed through a third-party first. I’ll keep looking. Maybe that programmer can come up with something, unless he’s given up already.
Thanks for letting me know, GE!
Update: The scratchpad is no longer on the list, but Wikinews is. At least right now.
Addendum: The scratchpad got a whole 16 hits from being listed on Daypop. There were four more referrals from Lisa’s post, which points to the scratchpad.
October 29th, 2004 at 11:11 am
Sorry you didn’t get any answers the first time. I’m sure Jenny Levine has a way to do this because she’s been promoting it in her talks. If you search on convert rss to html or rss parsers you’ll get a few. Here’s a link to one: http://www.geckotribe.com/rss/carp/ but I can’t say how well it works. Here’s another one: http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/feed/
October 29th, 2004 at 12:35 pm
The page I pointed to does have tools that are stand-alone, install it on your own server solutions, as well as ones that use a third party. Here’s the link: http://www.rssgov.com/rssparsers.html
Since anything that does this will require some scripting, all of the programs that you would install on your own site will work (or not) depending on whether your server already has the “libraries” that the program needs to work (a PHP script would need the PHP library, for example). Third party services consolidate this, because they control the server the program is on, and so the maintainer only has to make sure his or her own server has both the program and the libraries the program requires).
So if you use one of the standalone tools, you have two approaches you could use:
1. Install it and see if it works. If it works, you have the right libraries
2. Do a little research to find out how you can figure out what libraries are on your server, either by asking the maintainer, or using some tool that “scans” the server and says, okay, this server has PHP, Perl, Python installed. I don’t know much about the latter, I’ve been teaching myself PHP, and I know after I did the first exercise there was a thing on checking what version of PHP you had…