Feedyes? Feedno! Finding a working YouTube RSS Generator

I’m trying to create a feed for a page that has no feeds:http://youtube.com/results?search_query=serious+games&search=SearchFeedYes is supposed to be able to do that … but annoyingly, the site continually has technical errors that prevent me from making a feed. First of all, it doesn’t show steps 3 and 4 … after showing steps 1 and 2. And secondly, after following the instructions in step 2, it tells me that the URL is invalid … after just using it to create a perfectly good list of recent videos.Arggh …Dapper has issues as well. In fact, in total, I probably spent about 45 minutes fooling around with FeedYes and Dapper before finding a service that actually worked …The best I found for YouTube RSS is actually YouTube RSS Generator, which looks decided low-tech but gave me a perfectly functioning feed in about 25 seconds.

October 25, 2007 | Filed Under technology, web2.0 | Leave a Comment 

Trying Google Reader

OK, I’ve moved my OPML to Google Reader from Bloglines and I’m going to give it a shot.Based on the last 15 minutes use, it’s probably going to stick.We’ll see …

September 27, 2007 | Filed Under blogging, design, personal, social media, technology, web2.0 | 1 Comment 

humble pie

The worst righteousness is self-righteousness. I know this from personal experience, since today, in recompense, I had to eat a wacking plateful of humble pie.

This morning I sent a fairly energetic letter to David Sifry. It wasn’t rude, but it was intense. The perceived problem? For the last 3 days, Technorati has not been indexing my content. I was not happy about it - especially since Technorati has been fixing its problems lately.

However, Technorati was not at fault
Three days ago, I added a RSS feeds link to my blog’s top-level navigation. Unfortunately, I named it simply “feeds.” When Wordpress creates a page, it gives that page a URL that is exactly the same as the title of the page … unless a page already exists with that name.

Well, in Wordpress, one does. But it’s not a user-created page … it’s the default location of your RSS feeds when you have full-text URLs turned on - as I do. So my new page was the exact location of Wordpress’ RSS feeds. And it took precedence.

So when Technorati was trying to index my site, it did. It indexed exactly what it should have indexed: a page with nothing on it but but some subscribe to my feed information.

David Sifry to the rescue
So here David - CEO of an important corporation - gets this not-nasty but not-very-happy email. And here David goes and checks my site. Checks source on my site. Discovers the issue, which is that the place Wordpress stores feeds at has been over-written by my new page. Emails me back - nicely.

I’d send you a longer message, but I’m extremely busy right now and wanted to get back to you quickly. Did you know that your feeds don’t currently point to your content?

http://www.sparkplug9.com/bizhack/index.php/feed/rss/
http://www.sparkplug9.com/bizhack/index.php/feed/atom/

These are the feeds that you point to in the of your blog, and since they are broken, Technorati isn’t indexing your blog.

When you fix it, please ping again, and things should work fine. For example, if you are using feedburner, then put this in your element:
< link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”RSS 2.0″ href=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/bizhack” / >

and take out the other ones. Then re-ping.

(I also had to delete the feeds page - just changing its title does not change its URL - and create it again with a new name: get fed. But Dave’s comments were the clue I needed.)

I feel about 2 inches tall. Thanks, Dave, and sorry for the trouble.

Humble pie is very much like Fisherman’s Friend - tastes awful … but it’s probably good for you.

October 3, 2006 | Filed Under blogging, mistakes, personal, technorati | 4 Comments 

Ephemera


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