WELL Blogs tweaks and feedparser upgrade

I've updated WELL Blogs to use the the latest version of feedparser. This newer version of the parser provides feed content in Unicode so I've updated the bot to encode things in UTF-8.

I've also made a few other enhancements to deal with variations in the flavours of RSS an Atom such as supporting summaries.
¶ 11:37PM in WELL Blogs

OPML for WELL Blogs

I'm now also generating a list of the blogs that are included in OPML at wellblogs.josephson.org/opml.xml.

OPML is a file format that can be used (amongst other things) to exchange subscription lists between applications that read RSS so for example if you're using an RSS news read you can use this link to sychronise a list of WELL blogs or to add individual ones without manually copying and pasting the URLs or whatever.

For example, in FeedDemon this is done using the "New Channel Group" or "Synchronize Group with Online Directory" commands.
¶ 10:35PM in WELL Blogs

Links and permalinks (in RSS 2.0)

Today, Dave Winer linked to a post by Brent Simmons about link elements in RSS 2.0 and whether they should be permalinks or if they should point to an external page.

I think this is relevant to a couple of the wellblogs feeds so probably one of the next updates I'm going to do is to handle this by looking for guid elements that look like URLs and using these as permalinks where available.
¶ 02:19PM in WELL Blogs (via Scripting News)

Auto catch up for new feeds added to WELL Blogs

I made a change to the script yesterday so that when an RSS feed is requested for the first time we effectively do a catch up on that feed and the items fetched that time are not visible on the page. The idea here is to prevent too many old entries being shown, kind of like how a WELL conference is marked as seen the first time you visit it. Any new posts entered after that first time should appear.
¶ 11:47PM in WELL Blogs

WELL Blogs launched

It's now up and running at: wellblogs.josephson.org

It shows excerpts from posts sorted chronologically and indicates which blog they are from. I've been testing it for a week or two using 4 or 5 blogs.

There is also an RSS feed for the WELL blogs page itself at: wellblogs.josephson.org/rss.xml
¶ 06:44PM in WELL Blogs

A WELL bloggers group blog?

I recently remembered about xian's suggestion for creating a web page that combines posts to weblogs by members of the WELL. I've now made a start on this.
¶ 11:39PM in WELL Blogs