- The Big Picture: Peering Into the Micro World – “For visualizing the scale, most measurements below are in microns – one micron is a millionth of a meter – human hair is approximately 100 microns thick. ” – Stunning pictures, don’t miss!
Category Archives: Feeds
Blog Map
If you scroll this page down a bit, you will see a rather cool “Blog Map” on the right side. This map is generated at feedmap.net, using the Microsoft MapPoint web service. I met with Chandu Thota, author of this cool tool, late last week. We are going to do some integration between feedmap and Syndic8 in the very near future.
If your feed is in Syndic8 and you have not yet marked it up with location metadata, now is the time to do so. There’s full information on the metadata help page.
Featured Feed System, PayPal IPN
I implemented the Syndic8 featured feed system almost a year ago in response to repeated request from feed owners for a way to get some extra attention for their feed. For a small fee, almost any feed can be featured on the front page of Syndic8 for a week or more. We don’t allow feeds which are about drugs, gambling, or porn to be featured. If the feed has an image, the image will be displayed.
Greg Knollenberg of Writers Write has been featuring his feeds on a regular basis, and he’s written about his experiences here. Here’s an excerpt:
Each time we received excellent results. Hundreds of new people looked at our feed each week on Syndic8.com with many of these translating into direct clicks over to our blogs and websites.
Writers Write is a rich resource for practicing or aspiring writers of all kinds, by the way. There’s also Readers Read, for, uh, readers.
Anyway, the featured feed system has worked out well for our advertisers, and it has been a learning experience for me. I used the PayPal IPN (Instant Payment Notification) API to integrate the payments into Syndic8. When a user makes a payment for a featured feed using PayPal, PayPal performs an HTTP GET on a URL that I have configured in to my PayPal account. Code on my site then calls PayPal to validate the payment, and it sends me an email with a “click to feature” URL inside. I check the feed to make sure that it is within the featured feed guidelines, and then click the URL. I then send a customized automated reply to the requester, and the feed is featured.
IPN works really well, and it was pretty easy to get going. The PayPal sandbox system could use some help, but I’m starting to ramble, so I’ll end it right here.
Feeds with Bit Torrent Enclosures
On the podcasters mailing list, someone asked for feeds where the enclosure was a torrent file (media type application/x-bittorrent). I have been tracking these on Syndic8, so it was easy for me to make a list. Here’s what I have so far:
Deal and Bargain Feeds
Jim Malmberg‘s new RSS Bargains list has already seen some good posts. It turns out that Bill Kearney has been collecting this type of feed here, using a Syndic8 personal list.