Technology: April 2008 Archives

Standards are great, aren't they? OPML rationalization

By Oren Sreebny on April 30, 2008 4:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Tony asked me yesterday what blogs and other news sources I read. I was going to point him to my list of "blogs I try to read regularly", which is a blogroll from Bloglines, when I realized that my Bloglines subscription list and my Google Reader subscription list (which was originally derived by exporting the OPML list of feeds from Bloglines) had drifted out of sync with each other.

Well, I thought, this should be simple! I'll just export the OPML lists from both readers and sort them and then compare using diff or something, and bring them back into sync, and clean them up a bit while I'm at it.

No such luck.

Bloglines' OPML file uses outline text= for specifying folder names, and outline title= for individual subscription names. Google's OPML file does the reverse.

Bloglines puts all the data for a single subscription on a single line. Google separates elements onto different lines.

Here's an example:

Bloglines:


<outline text="Blogs" > <outline title="Accidental Pedagogy" text="Accidental Pedagogy" htmlUrl="http://accidentalpedagogy.typepad.com/accidental_pedagogy/" type="rss" xmlUrl="http://accidentalpedagogy.typepad.com/accidental_pedagogy/atom.xml" />

Google:


<outline title="blogs" text="blogs">
   <outline text="apophenia" title="apophenia" type="rss"
   xmlUrl="http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/index.xml" htmlUrl="http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/"/>

Guess it's time to break out some Python.

Manually managing music on the iPhone

By Oren Sreebny on April 4, 2008 2:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'm down in California - had a good meeting yesterday with our colleagues from UC Berkeley about their organizational efforts, the Kuali Student project, and their collaboration tools strategy effort. Great stuff, and great folks!

Now I'm in Cupertino for a meeting of the higher-ed iPhone task force. Should be an interesting day.

At dinner last night I was complaining to Jason Ediger about not being able to manually manage my music on the iPhone by dragging and dropping songs from iTunes. He told me that I was wrong, and that with the iPhone update from January you could actually manually manage music and video on the phone.

And sure enough, he's right!

If you set your iPhone settings to enable this, which you do like so: