xFruits aren't ripe yet

Just a quick update on my weekend experiment with xFruits: Though I did successfully mash the feeds and republish content from other feeds to my personal blog, it did not turn out to be an automated result. I still needed to manually update my xFruits settings to get things to flow from feed to blog. The API that facilitates the republication does not appear to be "always on" -- at least not the way xFruits interacts with it.

Witness my post on CommuterDaddy, which I have purposefully not pushed through manually to see how long it takes to jump automatically from the feed through the API, if it does at all. Some of the comments on the xFruits blog seem to indicate it happened weekly for some early adopters. Of course, that would not be nearly frequent enough for our purposes.

More to come....

Tossing an xFruits salad

Please pardon this interruption in content- and marketing-focused blog posts as I dabble in technology a bit and test the feed republishing from the Ottaway Online Editors blog to my personal spolay 2.0 playground.

If successful, this was accomplished using xFruits, something Yoni discovered earlier this week that I've now had enough time to dive deeply into this morning. If not successful, well, it's back to the drawing board....

The idea behind xFruits is to mash up feeds for almost any purpose you can dream up. It's basically another flavor of something like FeedDigest, which we used to combine our football feeds for NewYorkVersusNewEngland.com.

So far, FeedDigest was easier to manipulate in terms of mashing feeds dynamically into an html page with other elements.

xFruits has proven quite capable, though, of mixing multiple RSS feeds into a single feed, and essentially walked me though how I could use the Blogger API to pull feeds from this blog and my CommuterDaddy one into spolay 2.0. For blog aggregation, it seems to be ideal.

The only drawback so far has been that when I first set up the feeds, it republished everything that was available in the feed, and Blogger republished everyting using the time stamp at which the items were received. So I had to go back and reset time stamps -- and weed out older posts when I got tired of redoing timestamps one by one. Not xFruit's fault, I don't think. The bugs seem simply to be Blogger functionality drawbacks.

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Now playing: KT Tunstall - Suddenly I See
via FoxyTunes

Twitter your br(e)aking news

Some may recall the idea I've floated in various conversations about how Twitter could be an effective tool for commuter traffic updates online?

Steve Outing expands on the idea in his latest E-Media Tidbits post: The Twitter Disaster

Amen, Steve. The end game, in my mind, is placing our content on the platforms where our current and potential audience prefer to consume us. This is something I've been advocating since 2005, by the way, but is all the more true in the social networking, Web 2.0 world in which we're operating as we head into 2008.

This will seem like sacrilege, coming from a person whose success is measured by the audience metrics of our Web sites, but when it comes to content distribution, driving traffic back to our core newspaper.com sites is a secondary benefit (not that there's anything wrong with that benefit, mind you). The more important result is that by pushing our content in ways that makes it easiest for many different audience segments to consume it, we've performed the ultimate "job-to-be-done."

If I put on my user hat for a second, I'll repeat my point from an earlier post that Twitter has become my primary means of following news updates from New York Times and ESPN, not to mention our own Pocono Record. I wish more sites were on the bandwagon.

Technorati Mini

Here's a handy popup window (finally... a popup that's handy!) in which you can plug in your domain, and keep track of what bloggers are commenting and linking to on your site.