Steve Rubel from Micro Persuasion shows how you can Become a Knowledge Management Ninja with Google Reader. In his article he explains how many under-utilized featrues in Google’s Reader product can help you sift through today’s information overload. Google Reader is - in my opinion - the best RSS reader I have used over the past 4 years. If you’re not yet using RSS, I would certainly suggest giving Reader a try.
If you have an active Subversion repository with a few users, you may be interested in this article that will show you how to Server your Subversion activity as an RSS feed. The instructions are for OSX, but I’m sure with a bit of modification, it would work fine on any UNIX based OS.
Yahoo! Pipes looks like a product that could change the way web designers and developers consume and user RSS. Pipes are a familiar terminology if you have ever done any Unix command line work. Pipes in Unix-land allow you to route the output of one tool into the input of another tool. The pipe character | is used as a separator between each command. So what makes Yahoo Pipes revolutionary? Well to start it provides a drag-and-drop interface that allows you to connect RSS feeds from multiple sources and perform operations like sorting, counting, and grouping. And it does this without requiring the developer or designer to write a single line of code.
There is some really good discussion and analysis of this new service from the likes of Tim O’Reilly, Jeremy Zawodny, Niall Kennedy, Richard MacManus, and even Google’s Matt Cutts.
IBM Developer Works has a nice tutorial that will help you begin working with RSS using PHP. RSS Syndication has now become mainstream, so understanding how RSS works is very important to any developer. This article explains the basics of RSS, some of its uses, how to use PHP to create an RSS feed from a database, and how to use the XML_RSS module to read an existing RSS feed and translate it into HTML.
SimplePie is a sweet PHP class that make it super easy and fast to add RSS and Atom parsing to your web apps. The class grabs content, parses and optionally caches the results.
Ever tried explaining RSS to a client and always feel like they never “get” it? How to explain RSS the Oprah way is a great article that explains RSS in very simple language. With this in hand, you could probably even explain it to your mom!
This is a bit older but interesting nonetheless. Niall Kennedy discovered that Google is about to release a Google Reader API. This is interesting in the fact that you can build your own RSS reader using Google’s API as the backed for your application. Niall has quite a few examples on how to use this API.
DeWitt Clinton (Amazon A9 lead engineer) has an excellent article that discusses some important technical details of RSS and Atom. In fact he points out a technical shortcoming of RSS that is very important knowledge for any developer who works with syndicated content.
Pete Cashmore has an article titled - Here Come the Edge Aggregators - that describes four new services that are aggregating RSS feeds in new ways. Services like Edgio and iNod scan RSS feeds looking for posts that are tagged with certian tags. In the case of Edgio the tag being aggregated is “listing” with the result of the aggregation being classified ads!
quickSub is a nifty DOM script that creates a drop down menu with options to subscribe to an RSS or ATOM feed using a variety of the most popular feed readers.
