Hi James, with the cold,
You are not alone .... I tried a couple of years ago to use the BBC
RSS, and just found it had little order. That does not just apply to
the BBC, I don't use RSS for anything apart from Wired.
At about the same time Mario produced a bot in iChat that could help
to "push" information, (TV stuff). Although I do not want a news
ticker, and don't want to continually update an open browser page, it
would be cool to be able to select certain pages from the news site,
and then be automatically updated in a desktop widget when things
change, which could happen as a stream in iChat.... but,
As an example, everyday I open the News page, read current stories,
then go to the England page..... and select "Herts", "Essex" and
"London"..... normally there are very few completely new stories.....
but if I don't look then I have no idea.
Quite a lot of the time, stories that I have already read are
editorially changed, yet it is impossible to keep up.
As a result, I would love a little more "feeding" it would definitely
save me a lot of clicks everyday, and in the case of something really
interesting happening, I would love to "clear", F1 on my Expose, my
screen to reveal a desktop window that shows regularly updated news
info from the whole of the BBC...... I saw a hack that changes a
Widget from Dashboard to the desktop the other day, so that part is
possible.
http://www.mac-help.com/forums/showthread.php?t=363
If the screen could display a mini News page, then it could also
include some of the design elements of the original page...... a bit
like putting the mobile phone web browser screen on your desktop, but
with live updates..... that would be cool.
ATB
RichE
On 21 May 2007, at 12:46, James Cridland wrote:
Since I'm at home tending a cold, I thought I'd do some
reconfiguring of my "iGoogle" page (that's what they insist on
calling the Google personalised homepage these days - Steve Jobs
has a lot to answer for).
I thought I might look at the current BBC News gadgets, and write a
nicer one (which gives the text as well as just the headline).
But - am I alone in finding the BBC News RSS feeds slightly wanting?
The three big items on the BBC News (UK) front page right now are:
- Blaze ravages Cutty Sark
- Fresh clashes in Northern Lebanon
- No 10 defends Hodge housing call
However, the top three items on the BBC News UK front page RSS feed
right now are:
- Lebanon clashes 'kill civilians'
- Cameron attacks grammar 'fantasy'
- Jail term for Khaleda Zia adviser
Essentially, that RSS feed is useless as a feed for "the top three
stories right now".
Is there a way I can get an RSS feed sorted in editorial order,
rather than just time-added order? The top three stories exist on
http://www.bbc.co.uk/fivelive/ and the top story lives on the Radio
4 website, so it's presumably possible. Indeed, http://
news.bbc.co.uk/nolpda/ukfs_news/hi/default.stm contains, with the
HRs, exactly what I'd like in my Google Gadget. So is this
available for mere mortals to use?
--
http://james.cridland.net/
