One of the reasons I started blogging was to participate in the RSS revolution. At least one of my feed providers has pointed at Yahoo as a server based RSS delivery/agregation solution, and I had to return to My Yahoo last week and discovered that they’ve upgraded the services available via this Yahoo feature. The picture immediately below, shows my new My Yahoo! news page.

my yahoo

 

This has an open BBC & Yahoo News (Reuters?), a minimised FT news feed and a yahoo aggregated photo stream. The cute thing is that while Yahoo offer an Add Service function for their own and the BBC services, I had to use the generic function to add the FT’s feed and provide the applet with the RSS feed URL. The ability to customise the add feed dialogue is awesome (well, maybe not, but quite good! 😕 ) as it allows you to add any RSS feed. On another page, for instance, I have added my del.icio.us feed. This isn’t as useful as it might be since the update frequency seems a bit flaky, and I know what I have put there recently, but it does add to the utility of the page and may make the my.yahoo portal a compelling alternative to my del.icio.us page which is currently my browsers’ home page. Furthermore I may need to wait for further technical integration as the Flickr feeds show the picture title, but not the picture, so creating a portal page with all my blog posting, my bookmarks and my photos remains a little way of, but its close.

A second use is to create a customised news page, with serious and less serious news which can be checked as part of the start the day process. At the moment, I am using RSSowl as my RSS reader. This is written in Java and I run it on my desktop platfrom[s] but placing my blog feeds into the Yahoo page means that I can use any browser to check my news. Its my small personal contribution to the migration from the client to the server.

My Yahoo is behind a password so its not yet available to act as publication solution; it seems hard to create a My Public Content page which pulls together various RSS/RDF sources as Simon Phipps seems to have done at Webmink, although if I want to start a Grumpy Old Git blog, perhaps I don’t want the world to easily associate my grumpiness with this blog. There are also some obvious weaknesses in the channels available to the portal. As I said, the photo’s are not yet easily integrated, and importantly for me neither are the Yahoo groups. I’m using the Yahoo bookmark manager to link to del.icio.us and the Yahoo Groups home/summary page, but hopefully they’ll get there soon.

This is a lot better than when I first used it, and my be getting better as Yahoo builds its competitive offering. Its a great step towards personal server based computing. The add service function is incredibly easy to use and definitely passes Dominic Kay’s I have 15 years UNIX sys admin experience and I don’t want to use any of it to write a report!

ooOOOoo

Originally posted on my sun/oracle blog, republished here in Feb 2016.

The RSS Revolution
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One thought on “The RSS Revolution

  • 15th February 2016 at 10:05 am
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    This shows what I was thinking at the time; Simon Phipps recommended Bloglines at the time and I moved to planet, google reader and then feedly. Mind you Yahoo has been there all the time.

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