December 21, 2007
Foundeo's 2007 End of the Year Sale
Foundeo is holding a special promotion through the rest of 2007. We have bundled Foundeo's popular Image Effects Component for ColdFusion 8 along with the full source of our Simple Feed Parser for ColdFusion for $49.99 (you save $139!).
July 12, 2007
8 Ways to Save Bandwidth on your RSS Feed
One of the things you will notice after you have published an rss feed is that it will consume a lot of the bandwidth. For example on Spendfish.com 18% of the requests are for RSS feeds. This is no wonder since feed readers may download your feed several times a day even if nothing has changed.
July 09, 2007
RSS Presentation Code and Slides
Several people have asked me for the code samples and slides from my RSS presentation at the CFUnited conference (Working with RSS in ColdFusion). As promised, the slides and code examples are now up online.
May 29, 2007
iTunes Podcast RSS Enclosure URL Encoding Tip
I am working on publishing a podcast in iTunes for one of my clients. From what I have read on various blogs iTunes can be very picky, so I thought I would post this for anyone else having this problem.
February 22, 2007
Yahoo Pipes Generates Invalid RSS Feeds
I was doing some regression testing today on foundeo's feed parser for ColdFusion today, and when I saw some posts today on Yahoo Pipes, so I thought I'd add one of their RSS feeds to my test harness.When I ran the test I found that the dates were not parsing correctly.
October 31, 2006
Trick or Treat - Web 2.0 Goodies for ColdFusion
I am happy to announce the latest creation from foundeo: fusionKit.fusionKit is a CD full of some handy ColdFusion components and UDF's. It is a similar concept to the DRK's that Macromedia used to sell, but is it's 100% ColdFusion.
September 22, 2006
Zookoda For Sale
Zookoda, a RSS to Email service company has announced that they are going to auction off their service (domain name, source code, etc.).
January 10, 2006
Apple still likes their RSS icon
I noticed that Apple is still promoting their blue RSS icon in the marketing material for their new iWeb software in iLife '06. This despite the fact that Microsoft has said that IE will use same feed icon as firefox.
November 07, 2005
Simple Flex Tutorial
I've been learning Flex for a presentation at my local CFUG, and I'm actually quite impressed with how much you can do with so little code.
October 06, 2005
SoloSub is for button addicts
You may have noticed that I've had this solosub button on my site for a while, I launched the solosub service about a while back without telling anyone. I just put the button up on my site, and waited to see if it would catch on. So far I think it has, so let me explain what it is.
September 13, 2005
Howto Create an RSS 2.0 Feed
If you can learn HTML, you can easily learn how to build your own RSS 2.0 feeds. I'll take you through the steps to creating an RSS feed from scratch.Step 1: XML Declaration
Since RSS 2.0 must validate as XML, the first line in your rss feed must be the XML declaration.
September 12, 2005
Google Sitemaps Accepts RSS and Atom Feeds
In addition to Google Site verification I also noticed today that Google sitemaps is now accepting formats other than their sitemaps protocol schmea.Google sitemaps now accepts RSS 2.0 and Atom 0.3 feeds.
August 07, 2005
How to Disable the Safari RSS Feature
If you don't use Safari as an RSS Feed reader (I use bloglines), the feature can get kind of annoying. Every time you click on an RSS feed, it is redirected to a feed:// url.
July 25, 2005
Finding Feed subscribers from the User Agent
I just noticed last week that some of the online web aggregators (such as bloglines, newsgator online, live journal, etc) will send the number of subscribers in their HTTP user agent. For example:NewsGatorOnline/2.0_(http://www.newsgator.com;_20_subscribers)
Bloglines/2.
June 24, 2005
American Express does RSS
I just got an email from American Express inviting me to sign up for their RSS beta test program. Here's how they define RSS in the second paragraph of the email:RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication.
June 22, 2005
FeedBurner Awareness API
FeedBurner is introducing their Feed Awareness API. If you have a free account with FeedBurner you can get your feed circulation (number of subscribers), and number of hits on your feed using their REST api.If you have a pro account you can get item, and resyndication data from the API.
June 17, 2005
Guestimating blog feed readers
I don't have any fancy way of finding out how many people read my RSS feed, but one way of getting a rough idea is by assuming that every reader downloads the feed every hour. From my web stats I can see how many times my rss feed has been downloaded in a month.
June 15, 2005
How to add RSS Autodiscovery to your site
I sometimes see web sites or blogs that have RSS feeds, but fail to include the one line of HTML that enables RSS autodiscovery. Even some well known blogs such as 37 Signals - Signal Vs Noise omit the feature.
June 13, 2005
The Proper Content Type for XML Feeds
RSS Feeds have a content type problem. Most people end up serving them with the content-type: text/xml. But this practice is frowned upon for several reasons.
June 08, 2005
Adding an XSL StyleSheet to your RSS Feed
Evagoras Charalambous saw my article Adding a CSS StyleSheet to your RSS Feed and was inspired to create an article called Improving an XML feed display through CSS and XSLT.The CSS technique I use is easy to implement, and looks pretty good.
May 17, 2005
MarketingSherpa doesn't get RSS
I posted a follow up to an article that appeared in MarketingSherpa called: RSS in Reality: Not a Replacement for Email - Metrics & Best Practices on our our company blog. MarketingSherpa often has some interesting articles, though I'm told this is not the first time they have been way off base.
March 16, 2005
OpenSearch by Amazon's A9 Search Engine
Amazon's A9 Search engine has just added a very cool feature called OpenSearch. The idea is pretty simple, web sites can submit RSS feeds for their search results to the A9 OpenSearch web site, then users can search lots of sites from one portal, or search aggregator.
February 22, 2005
If-Modified-Since and CFML Part III
Roger Benningfield pointed out to me that most clients use a value from a Last-Modified header as the value sent in the If-Modified-Since. So you will want to ensure that you are setting that header as well, if your planning on checking for If-Modified-Since.
February 18, 2005
If-Modified-Since and CFML Part II
Now that you know how handle HTTP requests with the If-Modified-Since header in ColdFusion, lets take a look at how you might write a HTTP client using CFHTTP that sends If-Modified-Since headers:
February 18, 2005
Supporting If-Modified-Since HTTP header in CFML
The If-Modified-Since header in the HTTP protocol allows user agents (typically RSS aggregators, or Spiders) to check and see if the content they are about to download has changed since their last visit.
February 02, 2005
Adding a CSS StyleSheet to your RSS Feed
It's pretty easy to add a CSS stylesheet to your RSS feeds. I created one in about 10 minutes for my RSS feed. You can do a lot more with an XSL stylesheet (turn links into clickable links, etc), but CSS can make your feed look much less scary for the non-technical crowd.
November 26, 2004
Amazon Deals
New Amazon Deals Shopping Web SiteI just launched a new web site for Finding deals on Amazon called SpendFish. The site is built with CFML, and is still in Beta - there are tons more things I plan on adding to the site.
April 08, 2004
Parsing RSS 1.0 with ColdFusion MX
Well thanks to Sean Corfield I understand why I was having issues with namespaces when trying to parse RSS 1.0 with XPath.If you have a document with namespaces such as RSS 1.
April 08, 2004
RSS and XPath
I came across a handy reference article on xml.com today that gives XPath queries for RSS and Atom feeds. Just last week I was attempting to parse a RSS 1.0 feed in CFMX using the XMLSearch function. I'm running into problems however due to the name spaces in RSS 1.
September 12, 2003
Parsing RSS with CFMX
I came up with a code sample to parse RSS with CFMX today based on a question about CFMX XML functions on my local CFUG mailing list. It should do ok with RSS 2.0, and 0.91, and also well formed RSS 0.92. It won't work with RSS 1.0.
