Simon Brown - atom tag

Subscribe by e-mail

Tue, 31 Jul 2007 21:44:00 GMT

I've been putting a few new features into Pebble recently, one of which is the ability to subscribe to blog entry updates via e-mail. With web-based newsreaders such as Bloglines and Google Reader, I thought that the use of RSS/Atom feeds was more or less ubiquitous for subscribing to blogs, etc. However, a few people have recently mentioned that they still don't use a newsreader and that they do actually subscribe to some sites via e-mail. In response to this, I've added the ability to subscribe to Pebble powered blogs by e-mail.

You can subscribe here and I'd be really interested to hear from anybody that prefers this mechanism over newsfeeds.

Include RSS feeds on your Pebble blog

Mon, 02 Apr 2007 21:39:00 GMT

One of the new features that will be making an appearance in Pebble 2.1 is a generic feed reader component that you can use to pull feeds into your sidebar. You can use it like this.

<jsp:include page="/WEB-INF/fragments/sidebar/feed.jsp">
  <jsp:param name="name" value="del.icio.us"/>
  <jsp:param name="url" value="http://del.icio.us/rss/simongbrown"/>
  <jsp:param name="maxEntries" value="3"/>
  <jsp:param name="showBody" value="true"/>
  <jsp:param name="truncateBody" value="true"/>
</jsp:include>

This component uses ROME under the covers and thanks to its ability to deal with any type of RSS/RDF/Atom feed, you can pretty much pull in anything you want, providing it exposes a feed of some description. Couple this with some flexibility in the way that the entries within that feed are displayed and you have quite a useful little component. If you're reading this on my blog, scroll down a bit and you'll see that I'm using it for displaying my del.icio.us bookmarks, my Twitters and a handful of sites that are currently linking here (courtesy of a Technorati search). Other uses include aggregating another blog/news site and stuff you're selling on eBay into your sidebar. The possibilities are endless.

Simple but very effective.

Valid Atom 1.0

Thu, 21 Jul 2005 19:31:26 GMT

A few changes here and there and my atom feed is valid. Although it's valid, I just need to sort out a few minor things but the new template will ship with the next version of Pebble and also as a separate download so that you can patch an older Pebble install without upgrading.