September 2007 Archives

I've been thinking a lot about Web syndication "feeds" and different methods for aggregating them. As is the case with many Web 2.0 applications, our blogging service provides methods for syndicating or "feeding" the data out via RSS or Atom XML documents to Web browsers, plug-ins, feed readers, and other Web 2.0 applications which can display them. Most often "feeds" provide "recent changes" or new entries, but that doesn't always have to be the case. Many people who use the Web are familiar with RSS feeds even though they might not call them that. In Firefox, for example, a site with a "Live Bookmark" is one which provides a RSS or Atom "feed." The Penn State Portal has been using channels which are created from RSS feeds for years. "Feeds" are XML documents which have content but no formatting associated with them. These XML documents are in turn rendered in the browser or feed reader. Tools for rendering these feeds include built-in feed readers in Safari and IE7, the Sage plug-in for Firefox (my current favorite), bloglines, and various stand alone readers like NetNewsWire, NewsFire, Google Reader (one I also use), and FeedDemon.

What I've been working on in the last few days is using Google Reader and some of the built-in functions of the Penn State Blogs server to create aggregated blog feeds. I'll go into how some of this is done in later posts, but here's a feed exported from my Google Reader account which tracks 20 or so blogs of ITS people:

ITS blogs

By the way, if you're an ITS person and your blog isn't there, just let me know.

Here's a feed which I now use as a screen saver on my Mac (see "RSS Visualizer" on the Screen Saver preferences) which searches the PSU blog server for entries tagged with "politics":

PSU Blogs search results for politics

When I do a regular search on just the word politics in PSU blogs, I find about four times as many posts. What this means to me is that not many people are using the "Tags" feature of the Blogs server. Although we have discussed this on Kevin's blog, I'd like to implore people to make use of "Tags" in your blog posts. Also, we probably need a Nomenclature Czar to determine common taxonomies for posts in order to make them more findable, e.g. psuits or PSU-ITS. As one of my favorite project managers used to say, "We're not there yet, but we'll get there..."

So please, please feed the Web!

I didn't go to the Managers' Meeting today. Usually when I say that it's because I'm late. Today I didn't go because six years later, thanks to a leap year, September 11th occurred on a Tuesday. I was in that meeting six years ago when we read on the CNN site that a plane crashed into the World Trade Center. A little while later, we saw another plane crashed into the other tower. Most of us were sure the CNN Web site had been compromised.

We were wrong.

It was personal for me -- my brother lived and worked in Manhattan at the time. I have to admit that other than "The Bronx is up and the Battery's down," I really don't know anything about NYC's geography. It turns out he was dozens of blocks away, but we didn't know anything until about 2:30pm. He was fine and many of the folks in his office stayed at his place that night; some stayed the whole week.

When Flight 93 went down in "Central Pennsylvania," I received frantic calls from relatives. Here, we know that to the national media, Central PA means everything that isn't Philly or the 'Burgh, but they didn't.

I worked for Advanced Information Technologies at the time, and we delivered a message from President Spanier in about 20 minutes to all e-mail inboxes. That's probably faster than we'd ever done it before. Kudos to the guys, particularly John Kalbach and Jim Vuccolo for getting it out that fast.

Later that day, I had my MIS 445 class on System Administration. I decided that I should show up because I knew some people would. About half the class showed up. We talked about disaster recovery preparation and how C&IS was already in planning phases. We talked about getting the message out electronically. Mostly, we just sat around and expressed our disbelief about the events of the day.

We had heard about terrorism, but it was always somewhere else. That day, it hit ordinary people; ordinary people who just happened to show up at work on time.

No, I didn't go to the Managers' Meeting today. I stayed home and listened to WPSU-FM. At 9:05, my friend, WPSU Program Director Kristine Allen came on. She said that her programming today was going to feature American composers. The first piece she played was Aaron Copland's "Fanfare for the Common Man."

I lost it...