Library clips

We all know we can go to Feed Digest and make some spliced feeds, but what if we have lots of feeds we want to splice, it’s a bit of a manual process…tough luck.
But if your feeds are already in an OPML file then there is a service that can help. Just whack in the URL of your OPML file into OPML2RSS and it will spit out a spliced feed.

It would be great if Feed Digest release this type of functionality, as we all trust and like Feed Digest…if I recall they are due for some new features, I hope OPML is in the mix.

If you use an RSS reader like Rojo, every tag has an RSS feed, meaning whatever feeds are within the tag, will be included in the spliced feed, so this may be your first go.

NOTE: the items in the OPML file have to be feeds, they can’t be normal links or text.

This is a pity, as I’ve asked this question repeatedly, give me a feed for an outline, whether the items are feeds, links, or text.

If you outline your posts first in an outliner, then push the content to your blog, your blog doesn’t have to be the conventional date order, it can be whatever.

Does a blog have to be in date order, is a blog an online diary, or just a series of daily/weekly posts filed in some manner?

So if you make the outline and then republish to the blog, you can put an OPML file icon on your blog, and since it is a blog it can have an RSS feed, this kind of answers some earlier questions like, can an outline have an RSS feed?

So at the moment if your outline is replicated in a blog it can have an RSS feed, but what about the URL of the outline, can that have an RSS feed?…this is what I want to know.
(Does the outline have to be based on hyperlinks, or can it be a folder tree or both?)

Is the only way to get an RSS feed for an outline to re-publish it in a blog, if my outline is just a simple list of links, I don’t want to make a whole blog for this, what if I want to make several outlines, I don’t want to have to make several blogs?

If I use an outline to list links, when I add links to it people can be notified, I know there are other ways to do this, but outlines also have OPML files which can be manipulated, so this gives the outline an edge compared to other ways to make lists.

BlogFresh has the freshest stuff around of late, the latest is on Commentosphere, basically a place to collate all the comments you make in the blogosphere…more here.
As you can see this is a folksonomy for comments…all made with the power of Ning, great stuff!

Personally I just tag all the comments I make in a del.icio.us account under the tag “mycomments”, I also re-syndicate this to the sidebar of my blog.

Even if you don’t have a blog, this is a great way to collate all your blog interactions, you could also re-syndicate (RSS-to-HTML via Feed Digest) into a blog (see this example), or even easier into a tool like SuprGlu (although this is more designed to present re-mix feeds)…so you could have a blog after all but the posts are actually comments you make around the place, this type of information is as handy as a blogroll, it tells you a lot about the interests of a user and people they connect to.

The only thing about using del.icio.us is that there are no permalinks, so you can’t point people to a comment you have bookmarked, that’s why re-syndicating to a blog helps, but other folksonomies have permalinks, such as Clipmarks, this tool is perfect as you can just highlight your comment and paste it into an entry in your Clipmarks account, use the whole account for comments, or keep these entries in a folder, or a tag.

Actually Clipmarks automatically keeps track of all the comments you make within the Clipmarks folksonomy as well as comments made to you, so this concept is just broadening this to the whole web.

Anyway back to Commentosphere, for a starters it lets you import bookmarks from del.icio.us.

Every entry has:

- tag/s,
- who made the comment
- the post the comment was made on
- the permalink of the comment on the post the comment was made (although not all blogs have permalinks for every comment, or I think this is the URL of the parent comment)

From the developers blog post:

“Comments are semi-threaded on Commentosphere. It works like this: when adding a comment you can specify the permalink URLs of one or more comments that this comment is a reply to. When viewing that comment in the app these ‘parent’ comments are listed and linked to. A link to ‘child’ comments is presented and, if clicked, will bring up a page of all comments who have that comment set as their parent. Multiple parents is currently a tag buggy, but that should be fixed soon.”

- the blog home page the comment was made on
- the date
- a view button (this is your permalink in your commentosphere account)
- description so you can remember the essence of the comment without having to launch to it.

As usual there is a user and tag cloud, a bookmarklet, and some great URL filtering capabilities….so you can see comments for a tag, user, a blog URL, post URL (this is a direct way to see others who have left a comment on the same post you have), and more.

Since every page, search has an RSS feed you can also follow the latest in your RSS reader.
There is even a built in inbox or aggregator, where you can track users, blogs, posts, tag/s, add from RSS (I think this means you can enter an RSS feed generated from within Commentosphere (this way you can track search feeds or tags at the user level, etc…(not sure if this is correct as it kept timing out), here’s the explanation:

“For off-Commentosphere comments you have the option of adding an RSS comments feed that will also have its content mixed into the page. The page may itself be syndicated via RSS to allow you to monitor comments from blogs across the web without cluttering your reader with all the innumerable feeds”

Also has the RSS-to-Java trick to showcase an RSS feed from the Commentosphere onto your blog sidebar, note this has amazing choices of re-syndication, you can re-syndicate even a search string, and combine it with all the other optional fields.