Joomlatools: "It's even more frustrating when I see a Joomla! 1.5 site that doesn't have proper feeds. J!1.5 makes it so easy, and still some people manage to mess it up."

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Few features are as essential to modern Web browsing as feeds. With the rise of social networking and file sharing sites, feeds have become the only way for many people to keep up-to-date with all the sites that interest them. Certainly feeds are more efficient than resolutely clicking dozens or hundreds of bookmarks one after another. To satisfy the need to feed, developers have written dozens of Firefox add-ons to help you view both classic feed formats and sites that lack a feed.

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I'm looking forward to evaluating the new FeedAPI module for Drupal. Though one feature I haven't seen in any of the aggregators I've seen so far for Drupal...a way to snip the original RSS feed. Some sites provide you the entire post in the RSS feed with no teaser. This may be great for the reader, but I'm not sure everyone is happy to see their entire post on someone else's site.

From time to time, I've hacked the core to get me closer to how I would like the content from an RSS feed to display at my site. There has to be another way and perhaps FeedAPI could by my solution...

Development Seed: FeedAPI 1.0 Released -

After being in development for about seven months, we released FeedAPI 1.0 nearly two weeks ago! This is really exciting for me and everyone else who has been craving a more flexible aggregator for Drupal.

"Get innovative with the well-known Really Simple Syndication format's
associative properties and emulate the functions of a simple relational
database. Use RSS elements and attributes such as items and guids to
create a neural-network-like mesh of related data, and use RSS channels
to store contact information and meeting information, much like a
personal address book and calendar."

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"Microsoft recently announced “FeedSync” (refer to the article cited
below), as the evolution of its previous work known as Simple Sharing
Extensions, or SSE. My initial reaction is that this announcement is
somewhat of a "one off". Microsoft has not articulated any coherent
vision on XML feeds and the end-to-end management of feeds in general
and this announcement does not clarify its strategy."

Complete Story at Collaboration Loop

"Most Web publishing systems on the market can automatically generate RSS feeds, but there are situations where you might want to have fine-grained control over your RSS feeds. For example, you might want to provide alternative RSS item descriptions, or to manually select which RSS items to publish. While you can code an RSS feed by hand, you'd be better off using a dedicated tool like ListGarden. It can help you to not only create and manage RSS feeds, but also to do more advanced tasks like publish the feeds on a remote server, back up the feeds, generate an HTML page, and much more."

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This post you are reading has been saved unpublished for a few days as I have feared it reads too much as a rant.  In this post, I'd like to discuss the difference between good and bad competition when it comes to similar "news sites" such as my own CMS Report.   I also want to touch on about how smack in the middle a CMS such as Drupal and Joomla brings both the good and the ugly online.  Unfortunately as with all technology, the modern CMS not only has been a blessing to sites dishing news for their writers and their users...but also a curse. 

"Many Web sites feature RSS feeds and newsletter subscriptions that let you know when they've updated their contents, but unfortunately, a significant number of sites still don't. How can you keep up with them? Let's build a shell script to automate that task."

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