New Feature: Pbase Feeds

[ctstone]

We are pleased to announce the addition of feeds to PBase.com.

Here's a quick FAQ. We will be more widely publicizing this feature after we get an initial response here in the forums.

What kinds of feeds does PBase offer?
We have two community feeds:
Recent Gallery Updates: http://feeds.pbase.com/feeds/recent.atom
Recent PaD Uploads: http://feeds.pbase.com/feeds/pad.atom

And we have 3 user feeds:
Gallery Updates: http://feeds.pbase.com/feeds/emily/galleries.atom
Photo Uploads: http://feeds.pbase.com/feeds/emily/photos.atom
Comments: http://feeds.pbase.com/feeds/emily/comments.atom
Replace emily with any username to see the feed for that account.

What is a feed?
A feed is a file containing a list of updates to a given site that is easily readable by a feed reader.

What is a feed reader?
A feed reader is an application or website that loads feeds from a collection of web sites and presents their latest content in a simple, easy-to-read format.

What about my private comments or hidden images/galleries?
Only information that is already publicly available on PBase.com is available in your feed

How do I get a feed reader?
There are many options available, but here are the ones we have the most experience with:
Google Reader (web based)
NetNewsWire (Mac OS X)
Vienna (Mac OS X)
Sharp Reader (Windows)

What feed format does PBase support?
We use Atom 1.0 feeds.


We expect to add more feeds to this service in the future. First on the list will be feeds for any given gallery and feeds for updates made to any given usergroup.

We will also be adding code to certain pages so that a feed icon will display in the address bar of certain browsers that support feeds, indicating that a feed is available.

Please feel free to share your comments and suggestions, as well as your preferred feed reader.

[dang]

This is great! I couldn't wait, so I set it up manually. Within only a few minutes, "My Yahoo" has it in my page.
Thanks!

[srijith]

This is wicked! Great job guys!

Is there any way you can add the actual photo associated with the feed item? For example, in the recent photo uploads feed, could each item also have the small/medium image?

Also, any chance of a feed for random images, just like the ones that show up in the profile right now?

It even validates perfectly, though there is one warning.

[ctstone]

dang - I had nothing but trouble with My Yahoo during the testing phase, but I'm glad to hear it's working for you

srijith - I prefer the validator at W3.org. That namespace warning is silly! Also, I'm not sure I understand your question about the photo - are you using a reader that supports XHTML? You should see a medium-sized image in the content section.

[srijith]

srijith - I prefer the validator at W3.org. That namespace warning is silly!

Fair enough

Also, I'm not sure I understand your question about the photo - are you using a reader that supports XHTML? You should see a medium-sized image in the content section.

That was because I was being a bit stupid. I just previewed the feed in Firefox and that showed only the logo image but a preview in a proper feed reader (Bloglines) does show the image per item.

Thanks!

[andrys]

dang - I had nothing but trouble with My Yahoo during the testing phase, but I'm glad to hear it's working for you

I use RSSReader which has been working for everything else while
Yahoo kept failing.

These links give me (for Emily's and for mine)
the following error message:

"Feed contains an unexpected RSS or Atom version number."

Haven't tried Google Reader yet, but it doesn't force sorting so
I've stayed with RSSReader, which is usually very adept.

Thanks for any clue.

[andrys]

Chris, they work fine with google reader.

http://google.com/reader/view
for those who want to try that

Could y'all look at the RSSReader problem? Many people use that
reader.

Thanks. This is terrific.

[andrys]

Sorry, this thread doesn't let us edit old stuff.

Chris, really Terrific job you've done, including the photo uploads and the
way things appear -- and giving us comment updates as well.

I find that many people don't know about feeds or how to use them, so
on my front page, I've linked on 'RSS feed' to a tutorial/info page.
If others are interested in that, see http://www.pbase.com/andrys

I favor google there because it's pretty good and there are lots of tutorials. For the Luis Bunuel page slide-show hompage, going to an
actual tutorial threw the page off, so I go just to an info page.

[srijith]

I use RSSReader which has been working for everything else while
Yahoo kept failing.

These links give me (for Emily's and for mine)
the following error message:

"Feed contains an unexpected RSS or Atom version number."

According to http://www.rssreader.com/rssreader.htm
RssReader support RSS versions 0.9x, 1.0 and 2.0 and Atom 0.1, 0.2 and 0.3.

According to ATOM RFC, http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4287 the latest version is 1.0

Given that the RFC is dated December 2005, looks like RssReader has some catching upto to do!

[bobt54]

Seems to work so far with Outlook 2007.

With the sheer volume of posting in the community feeds, I am thinking that that could get out of hand really fast. Not sure how useful they would be.

[ctstone]

andrys - There are so many RSS Readers out there that I would highly recommend discontinuing use of RSSReader until they offer full support for Atom 1.0. As srijith pointed out, Atom 1.0 has been in use for 1.5 years, so it's not like this is a bleeding edge format. However, I will check the logs and if it appears that a high percentage of users are using software incompatible with Atom 1.0, we may decide to offer an alternative RSS 2.0 feed. However, I do not foresee us supporting older versions of either standard.

srijith - Firefox actually does show a parsed HTML preview when the content type is set to "html." However, all of our content types are set to "xhtml" since it has a defined namespace. I do like that Firefox shows the logo image (your portrait image, if it is set). Not many Feed Readers actually do anything with it.

bobt54 - I agree about the huge volume of entries that arrive via the community feeds. For this reason, I would recommend setting your feed reader to discard old entries from this feed when new entries arrive.

For Windows users without a favorite Feed Reader - I came across some "top 10" lists published by other sites:
http://email.about.com/cs/rssfeedreader ... indows.htm
http://blogspace.com/rss/readers
I tried Sharp Reader for about 3 minutes and it seems fairly nice. It has a much better interface than RSSReader IMO.

Please continue to share comments, suggestions, or problems you have with any PBase feeds

[matiasasun]

Outstanding! Great news. Bravo.

[andrys]

Chris, I can see why you wouldn't bother wasting time supporting a reader
which isn't being kept up to date.

For Windows users without a favorite Feed Reader - I came across some "top 10" lists published by other sites:
http://email.about.com/cs/rssfeedreader ... indows.htm
http://blogspace.com/rss/readers
I tried Sharp Reader for about 3 minutes and it seems fairly nice. It has a much better interface than RSSReader IMO.

The Google reader you recommended at first in your list of two
is extremely easy to use and, as I mentioned, works well with your
feeds. It's the reason I'm linking visitors to my page to it right off
(mainly for those who just wonder what a reader is).

Thanks for the bigger list!

[flemmingbo]

Fantastic, excellent work Chris!!!

I am setting up a blog site for my trip to Australia later this year and the feed works perfectly in a rss widget, have a look if you like:

http://blog.flemmingbojensen.dk

regards, Flemming

[ctstone]

flemmingbo - I'm pleased to see that our feeds are so compatible with WordPress. It also looks like your Danish characters are being encoded properly, which is good. Let us know if you find any special characters that do not encode quite right

everyone - I uploaded the standard/official feed icons in various sizes, feel free to link to them from any of your pbase pages.
http://i.pbase.com/site/feed_16.png
http://i.pbase.com/site/feed_32.png
http://i.pbase.com/site/feed_64.png
http://i.pbase.com/site/feed_128.png
these files are also available in .gif format. more at http://www.feedicons.com/