Starship Asterisk*

They really ought to have an official one. The Hurricane Center does.

I have found some RSs feeds for APOD. I don't know how good they are yet. I saw there is one on Microsoft's new Live.com site (could not determine the feed url). I just subscribed to a feed some random guy has out there: http://www.acme.com/jef/apod/rss.xml

I searched with newsgator and found about a dozen RSS feeds that seem to be the APOD from other onofficial sources. This is really sweet, now I will get my APOD deilverd to me each day...and all I have to do is check it out in my RSS reader. I guess I'll consider taking down my APOD blog if others are going to be posting the info.

It wasn't that long ago, that I was wondering what RSS was all about. After I "got it", I was amazed by how useful it is. Imagine if all of the news and other content sites that you were interested in would send you headlines for all their content as it was published. That would be a huge time saver, convenient and increase the amount of information I could review, while at the same time allowing me to filter out the un-interesting content. For example, if you subscribed to this test APOD RSS feed, you would get the picture of the day and commentary delivered to your news reader as soon as it was published(I'm testing, so don't count on me doing this every day).

RSS stands for "Really Simple Syndication". A web site or blog can provide and RSS feed that web readers can subscribe to. Readers install a "feed reader" on their PC or can use a web based feed reader service. When new content is published at the web site, a summary and a link are delivered to the reader's news reader program. The reader can look at the summary and click the link if they wan to read more.

I have a hard time explaining it clearly...my wife still looks at me glassy eyed when I talk about it. Here is some more info :

"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_(protocol)"

Not knowing what an RSS feed is, and fearing I may prevaricate, I hesitate to respond.

Norval

Makc,

Thanks for letting me know about the spam posts. I have deleted them. Also, I turned on "Word Verification" on the blog comments. Hopefully that will eliminate most of the problem. If not, I will have to turn off comments. BTW, I posted today's APOD to the blog.

[quote="drewskyjones"]...go check it out:

http://nasa-apod.blogspot.com/[/quote]on milky way post, 3 out of 4 comments are ads :(

Ok, I thought I would do a quick test, so I set up a blog that generates an RSS feed. I posted manually using the blogger web tools. This took about 2 minutes.

So, if anyone is listening, go check it out:

http://nasa-apod.blogspot.com/

Obviously this is not something I want to do manually, the point was to get the picture and description automatically sent to me each day. Surely someone has an idea on automating this...or more free time than I do.

I sent an email to someone at APOD a while ago inquiring if they might consider doing an RSS feed, but got no response(not sure if I even sent it to the right person). [b]They really should do an RSS feed. It would be extremely popular and it would probably get a lot more people interested in space.[/b] One would think that it would be relatively simple for APOD to do. Either they could start a blog and post to it or use something like ListGarden RSS feed generator (http://www.webreference.com/authoring/languages/xml/rss/listgarden/)

First, the blog option. They could set upa blog for free on blogger.com (or numerous others). The blog would automagically create the RSS feed for them. All they would need to do to make it available would be to enable it in the blog system and put a link to the feed. As for putting the "content" out there, I'm sure there are many cheap and easy ways to automate it. But simply copying and pasting the current APOD text and picture into a post would work. Blogger will even let you post via email.

Without a blog, a free tool like listgarden could be set up to create the feed. I've never used it, but the review I read indicated that it is free and relatively easy to set up and use.

Finally, the folks that run this are probably very busy. I know I'm very busy at work. So if someone has suggestions on a truly easy way to do this, post it up. Also, in the spirit of community, maybe someone could volunteer a little time and effort. The busy people who run this site might be willing to take a fully baked solution and put it out there.

Thoughts, Comments, criticisms? Let me know.

Drew

I see. Thanks for the info.

As I have said here many times regarding miscellaneous "feature requests" by others and myself, most of them end up nowhere. APOD is not paid service, so there's nothing to [i]made[/i] these guys do something. Take, for example, this forum last respawn after a hack. The [url=http://asterisk.apod.com/recentposts.php]Most Recent Posts[/url] link is there, but takes you nowhere. All themes are broken (and my guess is that they are simply missing). It's like: files moved, board shows up, case closed. Noone is bothered about broken features. And you expect they would add new ones? For your further reference, Dan's last post here was [url=http://asterisk.apod.com/search.php?search_author=Dan+Cordell]Tue Jul 12, 2005[/url].

Are there any plans in the works to update the APOD web-page to include an RSS feed? It might be a somewhat monumental task to move the archives over to a system like [url=http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/]Movable Type[/url] or [url=http://wordpress.org/]Word Press[/url], but in the long run, it would make updates much easier, and also make it more accessible to those of us who use RSS aggregators...

I would even guess that the companies behind these tools might even lend a hand in moving APOD to their platform, simply for the association with y'all...