Too Many Casts Again - Suggestion

[cwight]

Although it's good to have all the new people around here, if the potential of Riffworld becomes a reality it's going to be impossible to keep up. I was away for 2 days last week and when I got back to a computer 3 pages of casts had been added. This means I might miss stuff as I rarely go back over more than 2 or 3 pages (I would have had no idea Mickey had completed the Lonesome Junkies collab if he had not emailed me).


How about adding a feature that simply lists 'New Casts' this week, or maybe even a streaming feature that has them running constantly across a part of the screen.

I'm drowning guys.....!!!! Sure it's a good way to go......but.......help, even junkies only have so many hours in a day......

[gatorjj]

One thing I've been playing around with is using the RSS feeds to get visibility to some specific riffcasters. You can use igoogle or my.yahoo to capture the feeds of specific members so you'll know when they post a new RiffCast to RiffWorld. It's probably worth putting some instructions together for this, which I can do over the next little bit.

As a side note I'm playing around with some Content Management stuff on my website, and it too has the ability to capture feeds but also can consolidate them into a single list...basically a filtered RiffCaster list. Check out the right column here to see what I mean!

[bluesydude]

JJ - the site is looking very good. Are you pleased with drupal? I've looked at it briefly. Looks pretty straight forward, but then they all do, initially.

[mickeymix]

Cool forums Gator.....and Wedge is once again .....the "new" guy! ..........good to see ole GatorFred is making an appearance as well...........

[gatorjj]

GatorFred is my crash test dummy

[gatorjj]

JJ - the site is looking very good. Are you pleased with drupal? I've looked at it briefly. Looks pretty straight forward, but then they all do, initially.

I'm an old programmer from days gone by, but if I can't find my way through the basics in a short amount of time then I move on. I don't want to write code, but I'm okay with tweaking code here and there to get where I want to be.

I tried Joomla first and honestly couldn't make sense of it. So I dumped it and tried Drupal, which though not super intuitive was pretty easy to make sense of, and the further I dig the more functionality I find. It appears you can give some ability to users to control what content they want to see, though I'm only about a day into it so I haven't had time to explore that. It also has built in blog and forum capabilities which I've not tried.

All in all it's easy enough to get the hang of and has lots of possibilities to think through!

[gatorjj]

You can use igoogle or my.yahoo to capture the feeds of specific members so you'll know when they post a new RiffCast to RiffWorld. It's probably worth putting some instructions together for this, which I can do over the next little bit.

Some of you more 'techie' guys probably know of cool sites or programs somewhere that will allow you to define and aggregate feeds, which would in a sense let a person define their own personal RiffCaster list. If you know of something that will do this, can you share it here?

[bluesydude]

Thanks, JJ. I agree with you about Joomla - I found it very confusing.

[bluesydude]

I've been using RSS feeds for quite some time. It is much faster for me to look for some of my favorite casters. The problem now is the list of favorites keeps growing. But, that is a good thing. So much talent out there - so little time to listen to it. In the pre-RiffWorld days I would download an entire page of tunes at one time and listen off line. I haven't found an easy way to do that in RiffWorld.

[bluesydude]

This works by user http://www.riffworld.com/Members/bluesydude/riffcasts/RSS

Is that what you are doing, JJ? Of course this would be a different feed for each user. Not what I am looking for, but it helps.

[gatorjj]

Dolan, if you look at the right column of this site, at the top is a consolidated feed of the separate riffcasters (which I have listed below them). It's my own personalized version of the RiffCaster feed, just the ones I've specified show up by most recent (as far as I can tell anyway).

What I'm wondering is if there's some tool / page out there (I bet there is) that will let a user define the feeds and consolidate them into one, so others can get their own personal RiffCaster list (without a web site and Drupal!). Some of the IT-centric guys around here probably know of something!

[davenz]

Sorry Gator, I can't help at all; you know way more about this stuff than I do.

Dave

[gatorjj]

I did a little digging and as expected there's a bunch of ways to tackle this from basic web-based stuff to integration with email programs and standalone stuff. Our friends at Sonoma have once again given us the license, we kind of need to figure out for ourselves what's the best car to drive I guess!

I'm certainly no expert in this space, just been digging around a bit. I'll throw it out one more time to see if anybody is good at this technology before I put together a couple ways to tackle this!

[bluesydude]

I was looking at FeedRinse and it would do what I want if Sonoma added the caster's name to the feed. I set up a filter for 'departure' and it only returned BigMetalAndy's song. Exactly what I am looking for except I want to filter on caster's name.

[gatorjj]

I tried Google Reader and think that works well. The feeds don't have the artist but they are listed as the author in the feed. I am able to rename the feed and put them all into a RiffCaster folder for viewing as one, or look at each feed to view a particular artist.