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New features announced today.

# Posted by Dave Winer on 4/29/07; 8:57:45 AM - --

New release of flickrRivr.root

How to install the new flickrRivr.root

To install, download the root into Guest Databases/Apps/Tools.

Quit the OPML Editor, and re-launch.

Movie demo of flickrRivr.

Original release

Here are the docs from the original release of flickrRivr.root, in early 2006. Don't download that version of flickrRivr.root, download this one. Please.

A new OPML Editor command

To update the root, there's a new command in the OPML Editor Tools menu which will update any root. To get the new command, choose Update opml.root from the File menu. Quit and re-launch the app. To update flickrRiver.root, bring it to the front (choose it from the Window menu), and choose Update Front Tool from the Tools menu.

If you have any questions, post a comment on Scripting News, or on one of the support mail lists.

# Posted by Dave Winer on 4/13/07; 10:52:12 PM - --

New updating method

How to

How to convert your copy of the OPML Editor to the new method of updating:

1. Download the following script to your computer.

http://tinyurl.com/2ymjvp

2. Launch the OPML Editor.

3. Choose Open from the File menu, select the file downloaded in step 1.

4. Click on OK to all confirmation prompts.

5. A window should open with a script called workspace.installer.

6. Click Run.

Next steps

Choose Update opml.root from the File menu. Click OK. You may get some new parts this way.

In general, when you want to update, that's how you do it.

Note that it's no longer necessary to update from the Community menu too, updates of both roots are done from the File menu command.

Why the change?

The change was made necessary because I shut down four of my seven servers on March 31. I had built out a lot of capacity because at one time, in 2004, I planned on starting a podcasting venture, and bought extra hardware, and actually deployed apps on it.

It took a few months to unwind the ball of twine and get everything consolidated onto three servers. In the process I made the updating code work with RSS instead of XML-RPC. Much lighter-weight and less expensive to operate, and more reliable. All-around a good thing, but it involves a bit of effort to make the change.

# Posted by Dave Winer on 4/3/07; 8:54:37 AM - --

Fresh Mac and Windows builds

Nothing earth-shattering, it was time to update the downloads so that they have all the current updates for opml.root, dotOpml.root and newsRiver.root.

You can access the fresh downloads from the Download page, of course.

http://support.opml.org/download

# Posted by Dave Winer on 9/1/06; 9:43:34 AM - --

Portable rivers

Your river to go.

Now you can take your river with you to read on a mobile device like a Blackberry, Treo or web-enabled cell phone. To do so, enable the feature below, and choose a directory to save your river in. If you accept the default, it will automatically stream to the public server, where you can access it from your mobile device.

If you want to create a river of the BBC, the Economist and Business Week, no problem. It's also a corporate resource, keep your sales organization armed with the latest market intelligence.

Also, with a small amount of programming you can do as many portable rivers as you like.

How To

1. Choose Get Latest Code from the NewsRiver menu in the OPML Editor.

2. Choose Preferences from the NewsRiver menu. Navigate to the Portable river panel.

3. Enable the feature and change the folder it saves to.

4. Wait for the hourly scan or choose Do Scan Now from the NewsRiver menu.

5. Chose Open Log Outline from the NewsRiver menu and double-click on the main portableRiver index file. Screen shot.

6. You may want to bookmark this file. It will be automatically updated every time NewsRiver does a scan.

Example

Here's the portable river published by my desktop computer, every night at 1AM.

Programming

For people who are familiar with the OPML Editor's scripting environment, you can add as many rivers as you like, by adding pages to the static website that is rebuilt after every scan. The website is located in aggregatordata.root at aggregatorData.newsRiver.portableRivers.site. Here's a code example that shows how to select only stories that come from the New York Times. (This code is used in generating NYTimesRiver.com.)

# Posted by Dave Winer on 8/27/06; 12:04:43 PM - --

Eliminate duplicate stories?

Suppose you subscribe to two or more feeds from the same news source. Sometimes a story appears in two or three of those feeds. For example, often the NY Times includes a story in both the Business and Technology feeds.

With this new feature, NewsRiver keeps track of the story titles; if a title appears again, the story won't be included on the News page. However, if two (different) stories have exactly the same title, you will only see one, the one it discovered most recently.

It's not perfect, but it's a pretty good way of keeping the duplication down.

How To

1. Choose Get Latest Code from the NewsRiver menu to get the latest features and fixes.

2. Choose Preferences from the NewsRiver menu, and then choose the Eliminate duplicate stories? option. It's turned off by default. Screen shot.

3. Check the box if you want duplicates to be eliminated, unchecked if you want to see all the stories, even duplicates.

# Posted by Dave Winer on 8/26/06; 10:46:52 PM - --

Goodbye annoying "web bugs!"

I'm getting a new release of NewsRiver ready to go. It includes some of the features I added in order to get the NY Times and BBC rivers going. So this is the first of several notes I'll write in the coming days.

First the story of how this feature came to be. At last year's Gnomedex, I met Brad Feld, who is the lead investor in Feedburner and NewsGator, two companies that are building on RSS technology. I suggested they offer a service where we could pay them to provide feeds without the web bugs they use to gather statistics. I find them intrusive and distracting. He asked a strange question -- why don't I strip them out? I offered: Why should I have to do work to undo the work you did to put them in, when they weren't there in the first place?

A year later, the bugs are still there, and they are still annoying. When I found myself hosting Steve Rubel's mobile page, I thought this is over the line, I am now paying to promote Feedburner. I feel I've already given them enough, so I wrote the code that Feld suggested, it strips out the bugs, and now you have it too.

How To

Choose Preferences from the NewsRiver menu, and then choose the Annoying "web bugs" option. The option is off by default. Screen shot. Check the box and click Submit and the bugs are history.

Comments are turned off

I had to turn off comments on all my Manila sites, they were getting hammered by spammers. Fighting them had turned into a full-time job (and severely hurt performance on a bunch of the sites I host for other people). For now, use my WordPress "annex" site for comments, the link is on Scripting News in the right margin. Sorry for the inconvenience, but we're still diggin!

# Posted by Dave Winer on 8/26/06; 3:43:26 PM - --

Hardware upgrade coming tonight

Later today I'm going to upgrade the hardware that the OPML community server is running on, basically splitting it into two machine, one for the blog hosting and directory hosting, and another for everything else. I happen to have the extra server capacity, unused, so it won't actually add anything to my monthly bill.

However, it will not be a transparent change if you're using the server to host directories with your own domain name (using the Map A Domain feature).

If you read the docs for Map A Domain, you'll see that it calls for you to map your domain to 70.85.10.34.

That will change to 67.18.151.44, when the upgrade is done, probably sometime tonight (I'll post a note on Scripting News).

I'm not posting this on support.opml.org because the server is so slow I'm concerned no one will be able to read it.

Sorry for the difficulty in this transition, however, the good news is that we should get better performance. (Fingers crossed, praise Murphy.)

# Posted by Dave Winer on 8/17/06; 4:40:50 PM - --

How to edit an outline for the podcast directory

0. Download and install the OPML Editor.

1. Choose the New command from the File menu to create an outline.

2. Enter a headline, something like A Coool Podcast.

3. Right click on the headline, choose Add Feed.

4. Enter the URL of the podcast's feed in the dialog, click OK.

5. Choose Save from the File menu. Save it to your desktop, call it podcasts.opml.

6. Choose the "Open www folder" command from the Community menu.

7. From the desktop, move the file, podcasts.opml, into the www folder.

If your user name is "murphy" the URL would likely be:

http://hosting.opml.org/murphy/podcasts.opml

At this point, you may want to close the file, and open the file in its location in the www folder. Then when you save, the changes will automatically flow up to the server, and any directories its included in will reflect the changes you've made, usually within an hour.

If you have questions, post them on the podcast-directory mail list.

# Posted by Dave Winer on 7/25/06; 4:52:21 PM - --

Simplified updating

I'm getting ready for another full build of the Mac and Windows installers, and wanted to unify the udpating for opml.root and dotOpml.root behind the Update command in the File menu.

This means that instead of differentiating between the two user interfaces, which is confusing to everyone all the time, there should be just one thing you have to do to get updated.

How to

1. Choose Get Latest Code from the Community menu (this updates dotOpml.root). This should be the last time you need to do this.

2. Choose Update opml.root from the File menu.

You should get some new parts.

# Posted by Dave Winer on 7/12/06; 1:59:32 PM - --