Labels: digg
Had to ditch the Digg feed for the time being
Sunday, February 18, 2007
There was too big of a mix of wanted and unwanted content getting in there. Seems like Digg is very much still a tech site dominated by tech news even in its other categories. Digg began with a huge tech news audience and later opened up to try out larger politics and entertainment and other audiences. But it is still such a magnet for tech audiences that the news they post in other categories is like tech news with a political or entertainment slant. In this case the filter was just weak enough to not be able to distinguish between news about black people and news about black products. So from my 'blacks' keyword based RSS feed, Digg was turning up too many instances of headlines like "iMac in black" and "Cingular offers free battery for BlackJackers" and "Best XP Theme Ever - in Black and Blue." I can't have that. We're going to lose some good headlines but they should still get picked up by other filters. Keep watching.
Sunday, February 18, 2007
FeedBurner RSS & Email
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
I checked out FeedBurner's features. They offer some pretty decent enhancements so I submited the Nation Times feed. Now I can better track reader uses and activity (and compare the stats to the info I already get from Google Analytics).
So now FeedBurner helps deliver Nation Times content. The RSS feed is the same, however FeedBurner will now do what I hadn't yet made time to do — i.e. build an automated daily email. There are many ways to do this, many many solutions out there, but I just went inside FeedBurner and got that big project off my to-do list in a few clicks so I'm not mad at that at all and you ought to enjoy it too.
So now FeedBurner helps deliver Nation Times content. The RSS feed is the same, however FeedBurner will now do what I hadn't yet made time to do — i.e. build an automated daily email. There are many ways to do this, many many solutions out there, but I just went inside FeedBurner and got that big project off my to-do list in a few clicks so I'm not mad at that at all and you ought to enjoy it too.
Labels: email, feedburner, google analytics, rss
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
Just added: another hot feed to NT
Monday, February 12, 2007
Now Nation Times draws from Digg.com using its keyword-based RSS feature. I dig its search results better than those I turned up by using Reddit. It is likely that using this particular feed will result in repeat posts on Nation Times, but what this'll mean, in essence, is that the given articles are really being talked about and shared. This will be interesting to observe so I'm going to welcome it as they create an organic effect on Nation Times.
Monday, February 12, 2007
Access from anywhere
Saturday, February 10, 2007
I graduated from the deprecated frameset feature of HTML, mainly because use of a frame (for design reason) limited my ability to let people view NT through a mobile browser. So I moved the real index over to the root and now you can check Nation Times on your web-enabled handheld device. The existing HTML displays okay in my mobile browser but I will definitely develop a mobile markup version.
Saturday, February 10, 2007
WOW! Someone at NYTimes.com heard to me
Friday, February 09, 2007
Two days ago I submitted a scathing but well-informed error report to NYTimes.com's tech squad and whadayaknow, they fixed the problem in one day's time! Now Nation Times will get another great feed.
The whole idea behind my structuring Nation Times as I have has everything to do with maintaining a site that I don't actually have to maintain, y'know by hand. So I figured out how to automate its updates (for the most part). There was only one set of info that I couldn't access automatically, i.e keyword-based search results from NYTimes.com. So instead I setup NYTimes.com keyword-based email alerts. When I received those I'd post to del.icio.us and I setup that feed to update Nation Times with whatever news items I bookmarked. But I felt that that process still defeated my real purpose.
Then by chance two days ago I realized that I hadn't been looking for that info in the right spot. It turns out that NYTimes.com offers a Times Topic right along the lines of my keywords, complete with a feed URL and everything. So I got all excited thinking my last problem in life was solved, but then I noticed that the feed was displaying last week's news. So I got heated and sent in a detailed complaint (as all good consumers do) and to my pleasant surprise it looks like they fixed the thing at some time yesterday because I just checked it this morning and it's all up to date! So now Nation Times can get NYTimes.com feeds automatically and be a little better for it.
Of course I'll still keep the bookmark method intact, but that's intended for deliberate editor's picks, not some kind of pseudo-feed.
The whole idea behind my structuring Nation Times as I have has everything to do with maintaining a site that I don't actually have to maintain, y'know by hand. So I figured out how to automate its updates (for the most part). There was only one set of info that I couldn't access automatically, i.e keyword-based search results from NYTimes.com. So instead I setup NYTimes.com keyword-based email alerts. When I received those I'd post to del.icio.us and I setup that feed to update Nation Times with whatever news items I bookmarked. But I felt that that process still defeated my real purpose.
Then by chance two days ago I realized that I hadn't been looking for that info in the right spot. It turns out that NYTimes.com offers a Times Topic right along the lines of my keywords, complete with a feed URL and everything. So I got all excited thinking my last problem in life was solved, but then I noticed that the feed was displaying last week's news. So I got heated and sent in a detailed complaint (as all good consumers do) and to my pleasant surprise it looks like they fixed the thing at some time yesterday because I just checked it this morning and it's all up to date! So now Nation Times can get NYTimes.com feeds automatically and be a little better for it.
Of course I'll still keep the bookmark method intact, but that's intended for deliberate editor's picks, not some kind of pseudo-feed.
Labels: del.icio.us, nytimes.com, rss
Friday, February 09, 2007
I just yanked the Yahoo! News RSS feed from Nation Times
I am very hands-off with Nation Times content but I have monitored and monitored the Yahoo! feed for months and man, their news filter is just not sophisticated enough at all for my purposes. There is definitely such a thing as 'too much information' and that's what Yahoo! keyword-based news feeds are good for. Google's are a little better.
I kept seeing too many instances of non-news items slipping in there and quite often they'd even repeat two or three times as redundant posts. What Yahoo! grabs straight from PRWeb is usually the cause of the drama. I'm doing all I can to build a credible news resource here and this example from Yahoo! explains itself, shamefully. I checked Nation Times today just before going into a meeting about the abilities of RSS so I figured I might demo Nation Times as a good example. But I quickly decided against that when I saw this item above the fold:
"Breakthrough, Natural Hair Relaxer Makes It Easy for African-Americans to Achieve Loose, Soft Waves (PRWeb via Yahoo! News)"
Someone somewhere actually considered this newsworthy and Yahoo! filtered this right along with serious stuff. In fact, this embarassing item was right above something fed from Topix.net titled "Genetics linked to early births," so can't do the Yahoo! thing until Yahoo! can start doing their own thing a little better.
I kept seeing too many instances of non-news items slipping in there and quite often they'd even repeat two or three times as redundant posts. What Yahoo! grabs straight from PRWeb is usually the cause of the drama. I'm doing all I can to build a credible news resource here and this example from Yahoo! explains itself, shamefully. I checked Nation Times today just before going into a meeting about the abilities of RSS so I figured I might demo Nation Times as a good example. But I quickly decided against that when I saw this item above the fold:
"Breakthrough, Natural Hair Relaxer Makes It Easy for African-Americans to Achieve Loose, Soft Waves (PRWeb via Yahoo! News)"
Someone somewhere actually considered this newsworthy and Yahoo! filtered this right along with serious stuff. In fact, this embarassing item was right above something fed from Topix.net titled "Genetics linked to early births," so can't do the Yahoo! thing until Yahoo! can start doing their own thing a little better.
