Sharing RSS feeds from the feed reader

I am following pretty many good web technology blogs in my Google Reader. Compiling this RSS feed list has taken few hours and I’d like to share the fruits of my hard work. Luckily in our beautiful world of Web 2.0 this is easy.

  1. Use Google Reader Manage subscriptions -> Export function to export your RSS feed list in OPML format
  2. Upload this file to your server
  3. Install OPML Blogroll widget, by fabulous Sterling Camden, to Wordpress
  4. That’s it!

You should see the results on the right —>

The next step is to get auto export URL (via Google API keys?) to Google Reader so that I don’t have to manually sync the OPML file on my server.

I also recommend sharing your RSS feed list in Share Your OPML service.

Gravatars = Globally recognized avatars

When travelling in Blogosphere you will be recognized, besides by your nick, by your avatar. Avatar is “user icon”, an user chosen image shown next to his/her comments. This little cheerful image brings a whole new dimension of feeling into otherwise so dull textual messages.

In the past, it has been a problem to register and upload your image to every site you visit. Not anymore. Gravatar is a service where one can register globally recognized avatar for himself/herself. An image is associated to an email address and every time you post somewhere with this email services, your avatar image is automatically fetched from gravatar.com. Simple and cool. The Gravatar images have even age limits!

Of course, this requires Gravatar support from the service you are posting into. But since the service is free and has received good community feedback, we can expect seeing more Gravatars in the future. To help the progress of the world, I added Gravatar support for blog.redinnovation.com. You are welcome to comment our blog with your Gravatar image to see whether this service works.

Also, I found a little bug from ZenPax’s Gravatar2 plug-in for Wordpress. Wordpress 2.2 rich text editor was sanitizing XML mark-up used in blog posts. Gravatar2 plug-in used misformed syntax in its “place your Gravatar to post” code. Gravatar2 was cleaned away. Here is required changes you need to do to make the plug-in work with Wordpress 2.2.

In function gravatars_in_post() change line (1055) beginning with preg_match_all to

preg_match_all("/<gravatar>([^<]+)</gravatar>/", $content, $matches);

Now you can place Gravatar images to the blog post. In the Wordpress rich-text editor, toggle Code view and use following tag:

<gravatar>youremailaddress@internet.com</gravatar>

Voilá!

Hello Internet

I am proud to present new Red Innovation Ltd. company blog. We are ditching our old and faithful Plone-based Quills blog in the favor of Wordpress. Now, when we have several people doing blogging, this change makes our life easier.

Though Plone is a wonderful CMS platform, it really lacks a finished blog product upon it. I had only seen Wordpress blogs before. When installing Wordpress, I must admit that I was impressed, something which is not easily achieved after all these years in Internet. It’s so easy. Hundreds of times easier than playing around with Plone/Zope. My natural skeptism towards PHP products just got hit hard. Though PHP might not be the sharpest sword in programming language armory, it doesn’t seem to prevent creating nice end user products.

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