I'm in the early stages of designing an RSS app, and I'd like to include syncing to an online RSS feed service as a feature. Most such apps make use of Google Reader's feed/syncing features, but Google is now moving sync out of its Reader service, and also its API remains undocumented. Are there any alternatives to Google Reader that offer online syncing of feeds with a desktop client, and which have a documented API?
There should be an answer to this question, but I don't think there is.
I think we got lazy. Maybe it's time to roll up our sleeves and get to work.
What about Newsblur?
http://www.newsblur.com/
Don't know anything about them, but they appear to have a reasonable facsimile of a product in this vein.
Here are their API docs. http://www.newsblur.com/api
They are a subscription service, but you can have up to 64 feeds for free.
A couple suggestions, the original web RSS Reader BlogLines is still around, though now under new management since MerchantCircle purchased the service late last year.
The APIs maybe still functional:
Or they may be deprecated/turned off, haven't tried the APIs myself.
If BlogLines API is no longer around a better bet is LiveDoor Reader (along with it's open sourced version is called FastLadder).
Livedoor Reader is a Japanese service, but FastLadder pages and documentation are available in english and Japanese.
Downloadable Open sourced versions for running on your own machines be they windows, Mac OSX, or Linux from here
There's also a FastLadder Google source Code page.
There are RSS apps for both IOS and Android that sync with LiveDoor Reader/FastLadder instances. Just search for LDR in their respective app stores.
I don't think there's a ready answer yet, but I think Brent Simmons has a rough spec of what could be a start:
http://inessential.com/2010/02/08/idea_for_alternative_rss_syncing_system
Basically, imagine a server that manages feed subscription lists and captures annotations for feed items. Those annotations for items would be things like (un)read, starred, shared, saved, deleted, or whatever else an app might want to attach to a feed item. It should stay simple and not fetch or process feeds themselves - other apps and libraries do that fine already.
Feedlooks looks close too with no ties to Google Reader - not sure about the API, though
http://www.feedlooks.com/
Years back, I'd used a self hosted Open Source app called Gregarious - It appears to have gone missing recently.
Here's the Gregarious Archive from 2010
http://web.archive.org/web/20100925221312/http://gregarius.net/
Another contender for the do-it-yourselfer might be utilizing SimplePie.org
Related
I'm trying to better understand user experience by seeing what users are doing on the site. There are various tools out there that will work to track the clickstream, and record pageviews, generating heatmaps etc.
However, they don't seem to work with meteor. Since meteor is not even using ajax - it's data over sockets - and I think the tools do not support this newfangled magic.
I was wondering if anyone has found a remote recording/click tracking tool that works with meteor?
For example:
- http://www.luckyorange.com
who have a note here about hooking into the browsers XMLHttpRequest.prototype.open but that's not gonna work with meteor and more socket level protocols, it seems.
mouseflow.com also just recorded a white screen.
crazyegg.com doesn't even support ajax.
There are some other mobile specific tools like:
- http://www.uxrecorder.com/
but that would require native SDKs. First off I just want to put this up for the web.
There's one company https://lookback.io/explore who actually develop their desktop site in meteor, but they are mobile/iOS only :(
it's quite time consuming to try these out so it would be good to know anyone else's experience, eg:
http://www.getapp.com/alternatives/mouseflow-application
How are people doing remote usability testing of meteor sites?
Mouseflow does work with Meteor, though you might need to enable some extra features in the Mouseflow dashboard. The most notable would be the enhanced tracking mode, Session Support, which is necessary to track Meteor pages.
Additionally, it might be necessary to block some scripts from being loaded in playback, but that is something the Mouseflow crew can easily do from their end, if you contact them through the support links.
Disclaimer: I work for Mouseflow
After trying all the tools, I found inspectlet
http://www.inspectlet.com/
and had no problems integrating that with meteor. It's a new tool and seems to be designed from the start with Single Page apps in mind. Overall their tool is quite minimal but does the job really well and seems to work flawlessly with meteor. They're also a startup and were very responsive on other questions.
I created a small wrapper meteor package around Inspectlet and other a few other useful metrics toolkits, if anyone is interested I'll publish it to atmosphere (let me know here).
I'll prefix this with: I don't much about SCORM.
I'm the maintainer for a training video delivery platform. It shows videos but doesn't test users. Clients of the company can download SCORM modules (that is a zip) which contains a link to the video on our server.
Some clients are now asking for reporting so that they know their LMS users finish watching a video. At the moment, they just know if the user loads the module but nothing else.
As for working out if the current user has watched the film, I can do that. It's just a bit of javascript to interact with the video player. Fine.
But how do I communicate that event back to the LMS? Do I post it to their server? How do I know where it is? What if it's behind a firewall? Do they poll my server? In both cases how do I identify a user from the LMS in a way that when the results go back, they line up in the LMS?
What is the standard way of a learning management system finding out the completion status of an external module like ours?
The SCORM API is what you're looking for. It enables active communication of completion status (among many other things) between the SCO (your module) and the LMS.
At runtime, a discovery algorithm (written in JS) is used to locate the API handle, which is just a JS Object. You, as the content developer, work with that API handle, and it does all the client-server communication, so you don't have to. :-)
You can find a technical overview of how to locate and use the SCORM API here.
I'm more of the "learn by example" type, so I'd also recommend downloading one of Rustici's golf (pause) courses. Check out their Basic Run-Time Calls Course to see how they are accessing and interacting with the SCORM API. They'll be doing exactly what you're looking to do.
The official SCORM docs can be found on adlnet.gov, and they have an entire book dedicated to the RTE, but I doubt you'll need to dive that deep.
Good Luck!
Planning to start a small aggregator for a personal project, so far I have a few inquiries on gathering information for the site. I'm still clueless on where to begin. what kind of infrastructure do i need? where do i get the feeds and can I sort them out depending on the theme of the info requested?
any feedback is appreciated. thanks
This is a pretty open-ended question, but here's where I'd start:
Technology for handling feeds -- WCF Syndication. Also, read and understand the RSS and Atom specs.
Infrastructure -- depends on your situation. Is it just for you, or a few friends or are you talking about building the next Google Reader? If it's smaller-scale, then look at a hosting solutions like GoDaddy, DiscountASP.NET, etc. (There's hundreds of them.) If you're talking a larger-scale type of solution, look at hosting it in the cloud - Rackspace, Amazon, Windows Azure.
Where do you get feeds? Pretty much anywhere. Personally, if this site is for other users, let the users enter them in (why be in the business of trying to guess what feeds people would want to subscribe to?).
I think you need to provide more requirements in order to get more solid feedback. Start with looking at WCF Syndication and get a feel for that library in terms of how to programmatically handle RSS and ATOM feeds (both subscribing and publishing). Once you understand that, I think you'll have a better handle on your next steps.
Hope this helps.
I have a client interested in a real time chat application for a SharePoint intranet portal to enable online interview style chat sessions.
Has anyone got reccomendations for a product on the Microsoft Stack that does this? Something that is integrated into SharePoint would be prefferable, but any ASP.NET product would suffice.
The solution would need to be pretty robust as we would expect over 1000 users during a given session.
Microsoft Office Communication Server is the way Microsoft intended chat for SharePoint. I dont know if its just for 1 to 1 communcation or if there is a good multi-user support.
Another way to implement chat (or IM) in SharePoint is to use Windows Live Messanger and the green precense icon which shows up to the left of all names in SharePoint. But this is probably not the way you want to use chat.
We initially turned to handy Windows Live Messanger, However we dropped it because of security concerning.
We are using Groove, which look advisable so far.
FYI
There is ChatterBox. It's more of a demo app but the source code is available. The latest version is dated 2007 and is in beta with AJAX support.
As you have the source code, I'm sure you could take it and turn it into something nice.
I did a little work into this but dropped it because it take alot work to implete all needed features.
The easiest way looked to use IRC. IRC client software is available as asp.net, use via an iframe or make into a custom web part, there are also flash or java clients which could be imbedded.
You would need to setup a IRC server.
There is a third party product for SharePoint 2010 called GameTime that supports real-time web based chat integrated into SharePoint.
Do you know if it's possible to build an application for the LinkedIn platform?
Yes, they have API at http://developer.linkedin.com/index.jspa, allowing access to the profile, connections, messaging and more.
While LinkedIn has promised a public API for a very long time now, they have yet to deliver.
No, there is no public LinkedIn API yet.
IMO, their widgets (which there are only two of at the moment, which are very limited) don't count.
They say that they are open to being contacted with specific uses for their API and they may give access to parts as needed - but that is if they accept your ideas for integration. They have been very picky with this - and have not accepted my attempts to integrate with LinkedIn yet, they tell me I have to wait with everyone else, apparently my applications are not "high-profile" enough.
Sure, you'll find many Google results talking about their "promised" API, but they are empty promises and won't be of much help.
Yes, Linkedin has an API:
http://www.programmableweb.com/api/linkedin
http://blog.linkedin.com/blog/2007/12/the-intelligent.html
So you could build an application that uses it.
Update: (from second link)
We’ll be phasing all of this in over the coming months and to get involved with the Intelligent Application Platform either for APIs, widgets, or hosted applications, send us an e-mail to developers#linkedin.com telling us what you want to build and what you need to build it.
Since there are published Mashups using LinkedIn I would assume that means you can use the API even if the documentation isn't readily available.
As a tip, in the future include links to what you found that didn't work, so we know not to give it to you again.
I poked around a bit more and I found some more on their widgets which appears to be the main focus of their API.