Aaron Johnson Now with 50% less caffeine!

instantFeeds 1.0.1

I updated the instantFeeds plugin tonight to fix a couple bugs with the postgres and hsqldb installation scripts that the guys on the Ignite Realtime site found. You can download 1.0.1 (again, assuming you have already!) and get the latest snapshot of the code here.

instantFeeds: real time notification of RSS updates via Openfire

I wrote a long winded post a couple months ago with a nebulous title called “IM and RSS: Rome is on Fire” where I talked about the feed bot that I wrote for Wildfire (which is now called Openfire). It’s been up and running now for a couple months, giving me a chance to work [...]

Using Outlook 2007 as a RSS aggregator: Not so much

I installed the 60 day preview of Office 2007 a couple days ago to try out some of the blogging / RSS features it included. Publishing from Word 2007 to a blog via the MetaWeblog API? Works pretty well (but seriously, Word to create a blog post?). Outlook 2007 to read feeds? [...]

IM and RSS: Rome is on Fire

Last August, Marshall Kirkpatrick (another Portland resident) posted an entry to TechCrunch about a company called FeedCrier which:

… makes it easy to receive rapid notification of new items in an RSS feed by IM

I bookmarked the link on del.icio.us, noting offhandedly that it would probably be easy to do something like this using Wildfire and [...]

Blogs: Not just for breakfast anymore, part II

A couple weeks ago I added a short post to the Jive Software corporate blog entitled ‘Blogs: Not just for breakfast anymore‘, In the post, I hoped to squash the notion that blogs are all about opinions and are useless within a corporation, which was the ‘opinion’ of quite a number of people that took [...]

ROME and wfw namespace elements

I created a ROME parser and generator for wfw:comment and wfw:commentRss elements today. You can read all about it here and download the source code here.
Not sure what the wfw:comment or wfw:commentRss elements are for? Imagine you’re reading my blog in desktop aggregator and you want to post a comment to my blog. [...]

ROME and custom Generator elements

The majority of the articles I’ve seen on using ROME to create Atom and RSS feeds don’t show you how to customize the optional ‘generator’ element that both Atom and RSS support. It’s really easy. I’m assuming that you’ve already created and populated a SyndFeed instance:

SyndFeed feed = ..
WireFeedOutput feedOutput = new WireFeedOutput();
WireFeed wireFeed = [...]

RSS/Atom feeds, Last Modified and Etags

Sometime last week I read this piece by Sam Ruby, which summarized says this:

…don’t send Etag and Last-Modified headers unless you really mean it. But if you can support it, please do. It will save you some bandwidth and your readers some processing.

The product I’ve been working on at work (which I should [...]

Using Lucene and MoreLikeThis to show Related Content

If you read this blog, you probably paid a smidgen of attention to the Web 2.0 Conference held last week in San Francisco. Sphere was one of the companies that presented and they launched a product called the “Sphere It Contextual Widget for blogs“, which is JavaScript widget you can add to your blog or [...]

ROME, custom modules, publishdate and RSS

At work, I’ve taken on the work of migrating our RSS feeds currently being produced using JSP to ROME. Since we’ve added a few custom elements to the feeds available in Jive Forums (things like message and thread counts), I’m taking advantage of the feature in ROME that gives you the ability to programtically define [...]