Playing With Sharp Objects

In the latest SVN update (36) I’ve added the ability to expire feeds after a certain period. By default a feed remains in your feeds list until it is manually deleted. However, this is not always the ideal way to manage feeds that have a certain lifetime. Blogs now offer comment feeds and online stores like Buy.com offer feeds to product sales. Or Expedia flight info feeds. All of these may only interest you for a limited time.

Now, when you edit a feed, you can specify a certain amount of time for a feed subscription. After that time has passed, the feed will automatically be deleted. This can also be applied to feeds that you just want to try out for a week. Set it to 7 days and forget it. Say you like that feed - just edit the properties of the feed and set the 7 to a 0 and you can keep it as long as you like!

I still don’t have a way to automatically update the database in newer SVN versions, so to enable this, add the following column to your feeds table:

`expir` int(11) NOT NULL default ‘0’,

If anything in the database seems out of place, check the install.php file for the proper format. If you have any ideas about how this can be automated, please let me know. This is the type of thing you get for free in frameworks like Ruby on Rails (migrations), so I figure I’ll have to simulate something like that in PHP.

As promised earlier, Monkeychow now has the ability to filter feeds by the tag properties as of SVN revision 18. This is still a little rough since it is using SQL to do the query without any intervening logic, so asking for feeds tagged “car” would bring up feeds tagged “oscars” and “cardiac” as well as “car”, for example. A little tweaking will fix this, but for now its functional. The big gain in this feature is that now you can organize your feeds. I’ve found that I typically hover around 100 feeds; if I add more it feeds somehow more unorganized. By classifying my feeds with tagging I can concentrate on a certain area. Heck with the “work” tag I can keep the reader up and only see those things that are relevant at that moment.

Next, I’m going to add a link in the feeds list that generates OPML from this filtering so that you can pass the URL to someone. This means that URL can evolve in time as you add and remove feeds from those tag categories. Anyone know of tools that can make use of a dynamic OPML list? I understand that the wonderful Share Your OPML service does this.

Have any ideas for MonkeyChow? Leave a comment or email me. We’re working on quite a few features for the next release.

There are a number of serious tools for analyzing your site at AboutURL. This is good for checking out how compliant your site is to various things like CSS and XHTML compliance, which I just spent and evening fixing. Keeping your site compliant with the various technologies out there helps you with respect to search engines. The AboutURL turned out to be the funnier of the bunch.

Filed under humor, check out another silly meme. According to the The Web2.0 Validator, in order to succeed, your site must

• Be a public beta python RDF application using Nitro in the Semantic Web for podcasting Rocketboom on Technorati on the hunt for that healthy payout from VCs.
• Talk about how less is more for meta and micro mashups in the long tail under Creative Commons license.
• Discuss a Dave Legg VC startup dealing with the Web 2.0 Validator’s ruleset in an architecture of participation using Cool Words.
• Points to isometric.sixsided.org for information on Web 2.0 and the 30 Second Rule.
• Have this goofy link…

  
  My blog is worth $1,456,693.62.
  How much is your blog worth?

  

• Support Creative Commons
  
  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.
  
  
  
  
  
• Uses Google Maps API
  
  

All that and I was only able to eek out a 38 out of 50 rating for this article. This is lower than it should be because a few things like favicon detection and a few keywords they are looking for are not working, which should put me 5 points higher. =)
And yet so pathetic and lacking of content.

Pay a visit to the MonkeyChow Aggregator and take a look at something new that MonkeyChow can do. I’ve had aggregate RSS feed capability in there for some time now, but never as a user-readable page. This new feature lets you provide a web page with the 50 latest things you’ve seen today, whether you’ve read it or not. If there is interest, I could do the same for the “published” articles.

The next logical step is to provide a link in Monkeychow for publishing articles to other blogging systems like Typo or Wordpress that allows you to make comments and format the article before submission.

Note that this can leak secure feeds, so I will add the ability to prevent a feed from displaying publicly in the edit page some time in the near future.