I finally broke down and registered NewsFire for my Mac. It’s always been a pretty nice RSS newsreader, but some of the changes have made in recent versions have been pretty nice, and i think it works pretty well for me (that and they managed to make the ‘unregistered’ pester-you-to-buy behavior pretty annoying 
I’ve been finding that i keep missing out on updates on many of my fave sites that tend to update regularly because i just don’t have much time to putz around on the net checking pages. I took a little time this morning to organize some feeds, add sine new ones, and set things up for me.
The Fredart feed is kinda lame, and we all know how problematic the Megatokyo feed is. i need to do something about that. For this feed, I suppose i just need to dig into Movable Type and figure out how to better integrate it all. I see that a lot of people are moving to Wordpress rather than Movable Type… of course, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right?
The most amusing thing i’m starting to see is that some feed are including google word ads in their feed. Oh come on… though i suppose, if it facilitates good feed content, i guess its ok. I really need to decide if i’m going to revise my approach to what i provide in the feeds for MT and for FredArt. I’ll have to mull this over.
Some new merchandise going online tonight… well, one new item. I just need to photograph it. Whee.
- pirotunes: Fektion Fekler - Diabolic Changes (Side Effect Mix) -
Optimally, the seperate components of the site(s) (FredartBlog, Rantspace, Strip Updates) should have seperately subscribable rss feeds.
What’s the word on the new site anyway?
Considering the fact that I only use Mozilla Firefox for RSS-reading (Live Bookmarks <3), I can’t really tell how bad the MegaTokyo or fredart feeds are ^^; Hey, the subject title works just fine for me.
I’ve been wondering about RSS feeds for awhile… anyone know of a good Windows 2k one? I’m not terribly good at finding programs online, much less good ones.
Just post the FULL message you post in the feed. That way, I can read in my Opera browser (which has a FREE newsfeed reader), and I won’t have to click here unless I wanna post something (like now).
Secondly you might wanna post the comic via RSS feeds. for example VGCats sends the whole comic to read via RSS an I don’t have to go to the site. Now this is where that google ad thing comes in. You don’t lose that ad revenue stuff as people figure out how to send the ads with the comic. Kay?
Keep up the good work.
yeah, but its not about ad revenue. I could care less about that. Its more of “i go to all this trouble to make the comic, don’t you think that the least you could do is visit the site?” I think the comic is more a part of the overall site, and i really dont like the idea of the majority of people reading the comic without ever visiting the site. I think the comic would loose something.
But then again, there is something convinient and easy about reading things via your newsreader. I wonder…
oh, and just so you know, i’d NEVER send an add with a newsfeed. Thats just wrong. That and i despise google adwords. You will never see any on my sites, thats for sure
That’s a good point, though I’m willing to accept a partial feed myself. What I really care about is a feed for the little status/update post. When something/someone
has crashed, it never gets into a rant. If a person has to load the page, say, 3 or 4 times over the course of a comic day until that post goes from “still working on it” to “fell asleep, will be up tomorrow”, that’s not saving any bandwidth. If the status post were syndicated (reliably), ideally with a “done” status including a link to the comic, it could stop all those page loads. Ideally, of course, we should all just wait patiently for the comic feed…but the fact that you have an update space shows that you know about reader willpower 
Yokosawa: There are many good options, but I personally use the Firefox browser (http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/), which has several free RSS “plugins” (extensionroom.mozdev.org). I’m currently using “Sage”, but for all I know one of the others may be better. I haven’t tested all of them.
I get a specific kind of error using both “Sage” and “Live Bookmarks”. HypoCerebral, Lotharjade and Yokosawa Ryoji could you take a look at what you are getting and check to see what’s going on?
“Sage” seems to be loading every link listed in the Megatokyo RSS feed. It loads the main page every time it was opened. (For each mention of it, I believe.) Darn automated refresh monkey.
The Live Bookmark for Megatokyo does display the feed as a brief dropdown menu. However, picking #702 or #703 or #704 all gets you today’s comic. A glance at the XML makes it look as if the feed is being interpreted incorrectly. (It takes you to “http://www.megatokyo.com/” instead of “http://www.megatokyo.com/index.php?strip_id=702″)
The RSS for today’s looks like this: (curly braces used instead of carets)
{item}
{title}Comic [717] - “i have my reasons”{/title}
{link}http://www.megatokyo.com/{/link}
-{description}chapter 6, episode 69{br}
[{ahref="http://www.megatokyo.com/index.php?strip_id=717"}click to read{/a}]
{br}{br}
[{ahref="mailto:piro@megatokyo.com"}piro{/a}]{br}
posted: 06.01.2005 [3:14 am EST]
{/description}
I think what is happening is that the first {link}{/link} statement is being directly interpreted as a command to skip processing the rest of the xml and go to the site directly.
I think Piro may be monkeying with the feed right now. Comic feeds are displaying unpredictable behavior for me too, in all RSS clients.
Whoops. The Sage thing looks like a different problem, though. I’ve never heard of anything like that. I’d suggest either Sage’s or mozdev’s fora…
Fred - you probably already know but Mahoraba 16,17 are in the subbed wild. If you haven’t already taken a look there’s an interesting little ditty called Honey & Clover that seems to be all about “the inbetweens” as well… some nice characters in it.
…yay! Usable bandwidth returns! (for a few days, anyway…) Greetings from Hong Kong, all…it’s been a while!
Couple comments for ya…first, from the post: I agree with your opinions of NewsFire, I also gave in and registered my copy. The problem? I did so when I should have realized that I *wouldn’t be able to use it for six months* while I’m on deployment. (blah ^ inf). That being said, I grabbed a bunch of content from about three dozen newsfeeds before I had to pack up the Powerbook, so there’ll still be stuff for me to read for a while (well, those feeds that use full-text entries, anyway…)
Second comment, re: your MT rant…you commented on being frustrated about not being able to understand stuff around you. Well, I now understand fully what you were talking about. It’s a good thing a majority of the important signs here in HK have English translations on them; otherwise, I’d have no idea where I was going (not that I still have any idea, but at least I can recognize where I’ve already been…)
Fred, I find posting the comic via RSS a rather lengthy debate, and it depends highly on point of view. For example if you want to lower bandwidth usage of your site you would post via RSS because people would not be sitting there “watching” the site via reload button. On the other hand you may want lots of page hits, and people to come, stay, and look around. I think you will have to debate what YOU want.
As for the blog feed on your art site, I think you should DEFINITELY post the whole message via RSS. It seems to me this site is more for your fun than being the big focus business wise, and your blog is more about getting information out (what you wanna say). So from that perspective it seems that bringing people to the site (for BLOG reasons) should idealy be minimized to people like us who wanna talk back. I would think you would want people visiting the art site due to postings to the sketchbox and other art categories. A second RSS feed that only gave an update and a link would be ideal for ALL art updates (sketch, dump, etc). That would bring people to SEE the art.
Well, that is my two annoying cents.
I’m one of those people still in the stone age of browsing- I have a list of bookmarks I just drill down as the day goes on. I keep promising myself that I’ll get organized web-wise one of these days… yeah… I’ll probably keep loading the page by hand even when they just hardwire your brain to receive the internet.
Oh, and as for the Thursday rant graphic link–
They’re making a “Hitsuji no Uta” live action movie? o_O I’ve been enjoying that series and looking forward to the ending later this summer, but I never thought they’d make a live action movie of it. Hmm… I wonder if they can find a real human being who can play Chizuna well. Jeez, the fanboy expectations will be hard to meet.
Here’s hoping they catch the really cool creepy vibe of the artwork, though.
Fred, since you’re going to DPD today… here’s a request developed off the IRC channel:
Kimiko putting Piro’s shirt on the restroom. The shirt is on her arms covering her chest but just before she’s going to stick her head in. backshot of hair, back, skirt, legs and face profile … and in the mirror an image to match if you’re feeling industrious. Braless of course for that nice backless look..
There were several spontaneous nosebleeds and seizures on the channel about this idea…
Quite PG but quite cute…