onfocus

A few years ago I put together a little tool to help assemble RSS feeds of Amazon products called the Amazon RSS Feed-Builder. I've been using feeds generated with this tool for about three years, tracking the latest books, music, and DVDs across series and artists that I like. Because publishers often announce books to Amazon well in advance, I know about new books in the Hacks Series well before O'Reilly announces the books on their own website. Amazon also offers pre-built feeds on their Amazon Syndication page.

These old-style Amazon feeds have worked well at alerting me about new products, but they are fairly limited. I just see the title, the author, and a price in my newsreader. I decided to upgrade my Amazon feeds so each item includes a product image (if available), a product description, and product details. And I figured if I was going to go through the trouble of upgrading my feeds, why not just upgrade the Amazon RSS Feed-Builder? So here's the new thing:

Amazon Feed Generator

It's hot off the assembly line today, and I'm sure there are bugs to be worked out. (It's also powered by orange gradients.) If you want to give it a shot, feel free to try it out and post any comments/problems on this post. As an example, here are the latest books in a Polar Exploration Feed. I subscribe to this feed, and I'm notified whenever new books about polar exploration show up in Amazon's catalog.

This uses the latest version of Amazon Web Services, with a custom stylesheet and Amazon's server-side XSLT service. And I want to say thanks to Alan Taylor for his recent article subtitled, AMZN-XSLT-JSON-AJAX (AXJA?). His stylesheet is a perfect example of consuming the new, more-complex AWS responses with XSL.

In January I posted about a peculiar problem between this site and Bloglines: Bloglines filtering. Basically, Bloglines filters out the word "onfocus" from links to avoid cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks. The filter isn't smart enough to realize that "onfocus.com" is perfectly ok, and not a threat. This means that anytime someone links to my site, or I link to images on my site, the Bloglines filter changes the domain from onfocus.com to nofocus.com. When people click on a link to my site within Bloglines, they get a 404 error page at nofocus.com. (System administrators over at nofocus.com must wonder why they get some strange 404 errors showing up in their logs.)

Anyway, I've emailed Bloglines about the problem several times and now I'm getting silence. I don't blame them, this is an obscure issue that only affects one of the millions of sites that flow through their system. But it still bugs me, so I wrote a quick Greasemonkey script to solve the problem. If you use Bloglines and Firefox and Greasemonkey, I encourage you to install this script: fix-bloglines-onfocus.user.js. (Of course, if you're reading this from within Bloglines, you'll need to visit onfocus.com directly to get the script.) The script changes any instance of "nofocus.com" to "onfocus.com". This script is as blunt as Bloglines' XSS filter, but it's my attempt to fix the issue from this end.

Many thanks to Mark Pilgrim for his Greasemonkey Patterns—it's a great resource for building scripts.

Update: Bloglines fixed their XSS filter.

Matt was looking over my shoulder while I was reading feeds at the airport yesterday, and he noticed that I have a feed for Google-related posts at Slashdot. I told him I was scraping it together because Slashdot doesn't offer topic feeds (and I don't want to see everything at Slashdot), and Matt thought I should share the rss-generating love with the world. I agreed, and here we are.

Here's the script I'm using to scrape Slashdot. It's in Perl, and you'll need a couple modules: LWP::Simple and XML::RSS::SimpleGen. Once installed, grab the code: slashfeed.pl.

You'll also need the numeric topic ID for any Slashdot topic you want to track. They're easy to find. Those big icons in any Slashdot post link to a topic page. Click on one of those, and look for a number in the URL. For example, the Slashdot Google Topic Page is here:

http://slashdot.org/search.pl?tid=217

Note the tid=217 in the URL. That's your Slashdot topic ID for posts about Google. You can browse the directory of all available Slashdot topics at the top of the Slashdot Search page.

To generate an RSS feed full of Slashdot Google goodness, run the script from a command prompt, passing in a topic ID like this:

% perl slashfeed.pl 217

The script will spit out a file called slashdot_217.xml that contains the latest Google-related posts, RSS style. Just make sure the script saves this file to a publicly addressable web folder (you might need to tweak the output file path on line 55). The final URL should look something like:

http://example.com/feeds/slashfeed_217.xml

Throw your new URL in your feed reader, and run the script on a regular basis with cron or Windows Task Scheduler. That's all there is to building a topic-specific Slashdot feed.

Scaping is notoriously brittle, so if Slashdot changes their HTML this script will break. If that happens, view source on the Slashdot topic page and rewrite the regular expressions on line 39 or so of the script. That's the only labor-intensive bit in this script.

If you subscribe to any of my RSS feeds in Bloglines you might be wondering why images aren't appearing in my posts there. Well, onfocus is a common JavaScript function and Bloglines changes any instances of onfocus appearing in a link tag to nofocus to prevent cross-site scripting attacks. Unfortunately, that means all of my image URLs are pointing to nofocus.com at Bloglines, and of course my images aren't at that domain. I knew choosing a geeky domain name would eventually come back to haunt me. ;)

I sent an email to Bloglines support explaining the issue, and hopefully they'll be able to make an exception for my feeds.

Update: Bloglines asked me to find a workaround, and they say they're still looking into it. I guess I could host all of my images at another domain, but that kind of defeats the purpose of having a domain. oh well, I suppose this is an odd problem for them.

My mini-rant turned extended-rant about RSS ads was very cathartic for me personally, but it probably wasn't the most constructive way to get my point across. I unleashed some negative energy on Wednesday, so I'd like to start this post with a picture of my cat.



Now that some balance has been restored to the universe, perhaps a more constructive way to talk about ads in RSS is to think about alternative models for revenue. People aren't putting ads in RSS with the intention of inconveniencing their readers. I assume many are advertising in RSS because they're loosing web readers to RSS readers, and they need to find a way to pay their bandwidth bills and keep their business/site running. I further assume that they assume any loss in readership because of ads is a necessary price for the revenue it brings, and many of their readers won't blink.

Advertising on the web isn't going to go way (no matter how much I complain). It has become the business model for web publishing. Google is building their empire on the long tail of would-be advertisers and ad-hosters. And ads are becoming ubiquitous across both personal sites run by individuals and business sites. If you publish on the web (and via rss), what else is there?

I don't know. But I believe there has to be creative, alternative ways to fund web publishing. I like Jason's turn of the term donation to micropatronage, and I hope his experiment is a huge success. I generally like the idea of patronage, and I think it should be more widely practiced—and not just at the micro level. For example, I bet people at Sony, Nokia, Danger, and other gadget makers read Engadget and Gizmodo (and a bunch of similar sites) religiously. I bet they're also reading private gadget and hacking message boards. They're not reading these sites because they're advertising venues. (Though some probably are.) They're reading them to stay on top of their industry, see how customers are interacting with their products, and find out what people want to happen next. They're reading them to connect with a community of potential customers. This is an incredible value for these big companies, and they should be willing to support it. (Perhaps even anonymously to avoid putting the authors into a conflict of interest.) I bet a tiny sliver of Sony's R&D budget could keep ten Gizmodos running well into the future.

Another potential source of revenue is patronage via aggregation. When I pay my cable bill each month, I'm not only supporting Comedy Central and the handful of channels I watch. I'm also supporting Disney, Lifetime, A&E and everything else in the lineup. I could see a similar strategy for websites that want to group together to find patrons. Say a group of 20 sites puts together the "gadget network", and encourages donations to a single fund. Each site is paid out of that fund, and the 20 sites are working together to promote and encourage people to support their site through the "gadget network" fund. While not as good as a one to one direct donation, I think this could be a way for sites to pool their audiences toward a common goal.

And in general, I think the idea of paying for what's valuable to you on the web needs to be promoted.

These ideas aren't going to solve my frustrations with advertising on web, because ads work. But I think there is still room for experimentation, and there are ways to make money by serving readers directly and without diminishing their experience.

I've been thinking about my mini-rant against RSS advertising that I posted last night, trying to pinpoint why it bothers me so much, exactly. There's advertising everywhere else, right? It's just a reality of our culture that I should be used to.

I spend time and effort to avoid ads. On the web I block ad image servers and popups via firefox and I add advertising service IP addresses to my hosts file. I opt-out wherever I can. I own a TiVo and fast-forward through any commercials. I listen almost exclusively to listener-funded stations on the radio, and put up with minimal advertising there. Why? It's a simple matter of signal to noise ratio. I want the content without having to tune out noise.

Why do we fight comment spam? Why did Google implement "nofollow"? Why do we install blacklist extensions? Because the extra noise makes comments useless. Likewise, advertising has made some of my favorite sites less useful to me. I can't visit boingboing via the web anymore. The ads make it look like a w4rez site circa 1998—there's more noise than content, and I don't want to manually filter it out.

Hello RSS, my last sanctuary. A place that I have also put much time and effort into by subscribing to those feeds I find valuable. My list of feeds feels like it's my space. Even though it's others' words, it's configured in a way that's uniquely mine. I save time with RSS because this place strips away the extraneous and gets down to business: the content. I can read boingboing there because there is no onslaught of sexy, flashing banners to filter out. It's the content and nothing but the content—highly efficient.

But now ads are starting to appear like graffiti in my RSS neighborhood. I feel like the authors of these feeds don't respect my time or space if they're increasing the amount of filtering I have to do. So it's my choice to tune them out. I can't stop people from putting ads in their feeds, and most likely the trend will continue. But I'm going to try to keep my sanctuary free from advertising as long as I can. I currently subscribe to hundreds of feeds, and it's not always easy to keep up with them. I may loose a few feeds with this new rule, but good information has a way of making the rounds and bubbling up to the top. And I'll have plenty of feeds without ads to keep me in the loop.

Update: I added some less ranty thoughts about this: RSS Ads Continued.

My new policy: I immediately unsubscribe from any XML feed with ads in it. Unless it's a feed about ads, then I might consider it. But then the post excerpts wouldn't necessarily be ads themsleves, would they? That might be unreasonable, but enough is enough. Buy nike.

oh lazyweb, why do you mock me? I'm trying to comment on a post at lazyweb, but it says:

Your comment was denied. It contains content currently banned by my blacklist.

oh yeah? Well now you're on my blacklist, lazyweb! fwiw, here's what I was trying to say—

It's not easy. I hacked my Amazon RSS tool to do UK feeds: Amazon UK RSS. A better way would be to write your own Amazon UK XSL stylesheet. People have been asking Amazon to add UK feeds for a while now. Alan Taylor put together the RSS for Amazon.com, but he has moved on, so this feature may be on the back burner for Amazon UK.

That doesn't look like comment spam to me.

Just to cause trouble, I moved all of the RSS feeds at this site to new locations. So if you're reading this post through an RSS reader, this may be the last post you get. ok, I didn't just do it to cause trouble. I'm trying to squeeze all of the performance I can out of the server, so I'm rearranging things to be more efficient. I'm trying to do more page-generating rather than dynamic-serving, and I'd like the feeds to have cool URIs. I'll set up redirects for all of the old feeds, but I'm not sure how feed readers normally handle HTTP redirects.

Here's a list of the feeds available at their new locations—

onfocus weblog

• Full Posts (with HTML)
• Post Excerpts (no HTML)
• Photolog

weblog bookwatch

• Top 10 (books)
• Top 50 (books)
• Media (not-books)

snapGallery Directory

• Recent Galleries

Let me know if you have any problems with the feeds. I ran each of these through the Feed Validator, and they all checked out so I'm hoping they're set.