I have finally upgraded inkBlots from WordPress 1.5 to 2.05. The main migration was painless, but the little details took a couple of hours to iron out.

From your perspective, gentle reader, you shouldn’t see any real changes, save for the comment form. I switched from using a CAPTCHA to trying the spam catcher by Akismet.

If you do spot something that is broken, however, please let me know. And, as always, thanks for dropping by.

November 3 Update:  More changes, including the theme of the site.  (Your feedback welcome!)  Akismet caught 248 spam in 48 hours, but also let through a half dozen spam messages.  I’ve moved back to a CAPTCHA to try to slow the spammers down.

I recently wrote about how you can use Google Reader’s “share” feature with FeedBurner to create a “Reading List” feed of items your audience might like to read.

One inkBlots reader asked if the same can be done with Bloglines. The answer is “sort of.” The difference with Bloglines is that you can’t provide the 3rd-party feed item itself, you can only provide a link (and your own commentary) to the item. If that’s not a problem, then here is how to do it:

Bloglines: Publish to Blog

If you want a Bloglines-managed Reading List, you will need to create a microblog within Bloglines itself. (Yes, they do that.) This microblog will then be the source of your Reading List.

1. Go to your Account settings and select “Blog Settings”. The “username” is going to be part of the URL for your blog. In my case, I chose “inkblots-reading” as an analog to the Google Reader example I wrote about a few days ago.Check the “Yes, publish my Blog” radio button and save the blog settings.

   After you save, return to the blog settings page to see the URL for your new blog. This is where your items of interest will be published. For example: http://www.bloglines.com/blog/inkblots-reading

2. Get the RSS feed URL your new blog. This part is really easy. Just add “/rss” to the URL of the blog itself. Like so: http://www.bloglines.com/blog/inkblots-reading/rss
3. Follow Step 3: Use FeedBurner to publish your Reading List from the Google Reader Example. This will help you get your Bloglines blog feed nicely polished.
4. When you are in Bloglines and spot an item that you want to put on your Reading List, use the “Clip/Blog This” link, then select “Publish to Blog”.)As I mentioned above, here is where we encounter a major departure from the Google Reader example. In Google Reader, sharing an item in the way I prescribed will include that actual feed item in your Reading List. In Bloglines, you’re providing a link and some optional commentary to that feed item. So your audience will need to follow the link in order to read it.The advantage, of course, is that you’re doing this as an integrated part of your own Feed Reader, rather than playing the cut-n-paste game with your main blog engine.

Splice The Reading List

Another interesting thing you might want to consider if you’re using Bloglines as your feed reader and FeedBurner as your blog feed host: Splice your Clip/Blog items directly into your main feed, rather than have a different Reading List feed. Since you’re technically not including the reading items, but rather a link+commentary to them, it may make sense just to include the Bloglines stuff in your main blog feed.

To do this, go over to your blog feed in FeedBurner and open the Optimize Tab. Use “Link Splicer“, select “Bloglines Clip Blog” as your link service, and enter your bloglines username. Once you activate Link Splicer, any new Clip Blog item you add in Bloglines will be spliced right in to your FeedBurner-hosted feed. Easy enough!

Hope this helps!

Jared Breland reports that Firefox 2 may be (un?)intentionally sending your RSS and Atom feed subscriptions to Google, thanks to a quirk in favicon retrieval. He goes into detail about the hows and whys this may be happening, but here’s the ultimate result:

… Google knows your browser version, the page you were visiting, the time you visited, and your IP address for correlation. Now let’s examine the cookie. Notice that it’s a root domain cookie (.google.com) and not something separate for fusion.google.com. Notice also that it doesn’t expire until 2038. Assuming you accept the cookie, which almost everyone will (explained below), Google can also correlate your feed views with all other Google services through the .google.com cookie. I cannot think of any technical need for this, either.

Jared does well to point out all the other things Google already knows. (A very big-brotherly list, I might add.) There is probably not a conspiracy here, but the very fact this issue is raised is a very healthy one for everyone involved.

Sometimes as a blogger you don’t want to create a new entry just to report an interesting article you found. (Some people use del.icio.us links for this purpose, but I find that to be less than user-friendly.) A much nicer solution is to provide a Reading List of sorts, similar to the point of a blogroll, but at an item level. The ideal Reading List would directly include the content to be read, rather than just a link to it, and be published in Atom or RSS for the convenience of your audience.

In this article I’ll show you how to use Google Reader and FeedBurner to manage a reading list for your audience.

Step 1: Sharing Items in Google Reader

Google Reader has a nice feature which allows you to share items you read via two mechanisms:

1. When you read an item from somebody’s feed that you think others will be interested in, just click the “share” icon at the bottom of the item’s display. This is easy enough if you will only ever have one shared reading list. If there’s a chance you might want to have more than one split out by topic, this isn’t the route to take.
2. Tag (or label) the item with a certain label you’ll use for shared items on a certain topic. I use “inkblots-reading” for just that purpose. If you go this route, go to Settings –> Tags and toggle “not shared” to “public” on that tag.

Now that you are sharing some items of interest, Reader will publish them for you in various formats. Some of these aren’t well documented, so you have to be ready for a bit of URL tweaking to get at the format you need.

Using option 1, you get an HTML page that anyone can view. Go to Reader’s homepage and click “Shared Items” in the left menu. You’ll get a link to the HTML page, like this one:

http://www.google.com/reader/shared/[userid]

Note that the long number in the URL above is my personal Google Reader id. When you’re doing the same thing, you’ll have a different number.

Using option 2 that shares a specific label, you can click the “view public page” link by the tag to get a URL like this one:

http://www.google.com/reader/shared/user/[userid]/label/inkblots-reading

Step 2: Get the Atom feed of your shared items

Now that you have some items shared via Google Reader, you don’t have to settle for a HTML web page to read them. A much better mechanism for your audience will be to distribute them as a Reading List using Atom or RSS.

If you want to publish a Reading List of all shared items, then click “Shared Items” in Reader’s left menu and look for the feed icon and link at the top. That’s an Atom feed that is composed of your shared items, dated according to when you decided to share each one.

If you want to publish a Reading List of only a certain tag, that URL is a little harder to find. The easiest way is to go the HTML page (via the “view public page” link by the tag name under Settings–>Tags) and then view the source of the page. Look for a <link xhref=" ... " type="application/atom+xml" id="auto-discovery" rel="alternate"> tag in the source. It will have the URL for the Atom feed of just your shared items with that tag. For example, here is the URL for everything I have tagged “inkblots-reading”:

http://www.google.com/reader/public/atom/user/[userid]/label/inkblots-reading

Congratulations: You have a Reading List that others can subscribe to. Technically, you can stop here and just give out that URL. But if you do, you have several problems:

• You have no way to track statistics of how your Reading List is used.
• You have no way to invite traffic back to your own site.
• The feed isn’t browser-friendly.
• The feed title isn’t customizable.
• You have a URL that nobody (including you) will ever remember.

Time to do a little cosmetic surgery. This is where FeedBurner comes in handy.

Step 3: Use FeedBurner to publish your Reading List

If you don’t have a FeedBurner account yet, now is the time to get one.At the FeedBurner site, use the Atom URL taken from Google Reader to create a new FeedBurner feed.

Follow the steps of the wizard to complete the process, selecting a new URL for your Reading List. For example, the feed for inkBlots itself is http://feeds.feedburner.com/woodman/inkblots , so for my Reading List I selected the URL http://feeds.feedburner.com/woodman/inkblots-reading .Now for the cosmetic surgery to make your Reading List something you’re willing to share with the world:

• FeedBurner: Optimize Use the Optimize tab to tweak a ton of settings for your Reading List.Enable the “Title/Description Burner” so that you can provide a much nicer title than the automatic one generated by Google Reader. I replaced the default “‘inkblots-reading’ via mwoodman in Google Reader” with “The inkBlots Reading List”. You can also provide a description which shows the purpose of the feed. For example, I used: “Hand-picked items of interest in the realm of RSS, Atom, and technology in general. Courtesy of inkBlots (http://inkblots.markwoodman.com)”Activate the “Feed Image Burner” so that the Reading List feed’s image is one of your own, which can include a link to your site or to the HTML version generated by Google Reader.Use “Browser Friendly” to make it look great in a browser and give your audience multiple ways of subscribing directly from the feed itself. I also suggest taking advantage of the Personal Message option to tell viewers the purpose of the list.Activate “Smart Feed” so that FeedBurner can switch the format from Atom to RSS if the requesting feed reader doesn’t like Atom for some reason.

  Enable “Feed Flare” to add interactive links at the bottom of each item. Feed Flare units exist for Digg, technorati, comments, and tons of other uses. I created my own FeedFlare unit to include a “Read the latest on inkBlots” link at the bottom of each item. This is an easy way to invite traffic back to your site without mangling the integrity of the feed items you are sharing in your Reading List.

  
• FeedBurner: PublicizeThe Publicize tab in FeedBurner has a couple of options you’ll want to take advantage of.Turn on “PingShot” so that various feed search engines will be notified when your Reading List is updated. FeedBurner will check your shared items Atom feed for updates every 30 minutes. When new items are detected, FeedBurner will turn around and ping the various services on your behalf.“Email Subscriptions.” Yeah, I hate to mention this option, but you might as well turn it on. We need to be inclusive of our non-feedy friends.

Step 4: Tell the World, Share Your List

Congratulations! Now you have a Reading List that looks and smells like something created with some thought and consideration behind it. Here’s how mine looks:

The inkBlots Reading List
http://feeds.feedburner.com/woodman/inkblots-readingNow comes the easy part. Anytime you want to add to your fancy-schmancy Reading List, simply “share” any item (or tag it) in Google Reader. How’s that for one-click publishing? Best of all, you can now track subscription rates and item popularity via the Analyze tab in FeedBurner. (I can’t say enough how handy this information can be.)Happy feeding.

It never occurred to me that PDFs would be a digital medium ripe for pirating. But hey, everybody is stealing music and software, right?

I spotted a torrent last night of a very popular RSS book, in PDF form. I chatted with the author about it… stealing digital books isn’t something either of us have thought much about. It irritates me to know that the torrent is robbing him of royalties.

<insert rant about people who steal from somebody’s livelihood. />

Having not thought much about digital rights management (DRM) for PDF files, I did a little poking around…

• It would seem that the built-in security measures for PDF are easily cracked.
• One company, DocuRights, has addressed the problem by having a PDF prompt you to pay when it is opened. The site has a demonstration so you see how it works (using a fake credit card number). The downside for their system is you have to use them as the file host.
• FileOpen WebPublisher has a similar approach, but you can host the files and authentication app on your own server. Their site has lots of HTML errors, however, so I don’t know if the company is still viable.
• One wonders how many copies of O’Reilly Short Cuts out there were actually purchased.

(This concludes the age-old debate, at least in my book: ninjas are better than pirates after all. They don’t steal stuff, they just kill people.)