This article titled “Alternatives to Bloglines” was written by Jack Schofield, for guardian.co.uk on Thursday 28th October 2010 18.37 Asia/Calcutta

As the Bloglines RSS aggregator is closing at the end of the month, could you recommended another web-based RSS reader? I don’t particularly want to use Google Reader if there is a suitable alternative.
David Dixon

In a blog post, Ask.com says it is closing Bloglines on 1 November, and that “being locked in an RSS reader makes less and less sense to people as Twitter and Facebook dominate real-time information flow. Today RSS is the enabling technology – the infrastructure, the delivery system. RSS is a means to an end, not a consumer experience in and of itself. As a result, RSS aggregator usage has slowed significantly, and Bloglines isn’t the only service to feel the impact. The writing is on the wall.”

This is true, but it’s not the whole story. First, in 2005, Ask.com bought Bloglines and Google launched Reader, and at that point, Bloglines was much better. Since then, Google Reader has been redesigned twice and got much better, while Bloglines hasn’t – the new Bloglines Beta went nowhere. Second, people have many other ways to consume RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds from websites. These range from powerful but complicated online services such as Netvibes (of which iGoogle is basically a knock-off) to simple email clients such as Microsoft’s Windows Live Hotmail (the desktop version).

The “line of least resistance” now leads from Bloglines to Google Reader, because most people already have a Google account. When you are logged into one Google service, Google Reader is just a pull-down menu option from the Google home page. And my warnings about putting too many eggs in the same basket – where you risk losing your data if your account is hacked or blocked – don’t apply to RSS feeds.

But although it looks as though the web-based reader market is closing down, leaving Google Reader with total market domination, there are still a few alternatives. If you like Bloglines’ relatively simplistic approach, for example, have a look at FastLadder, or possibly the beta version of FeedShow.

Nonetheless, the main market trends are to combine RSS webfeeds with feeds from social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, and to display the results in a more magazine-style format. If you fancy that kind of thing, try Activorus. (Feedly also takes that approach, but in a Firefox browser window.)

One of the benefits of reading RSS feeds is that they provide lightweight versions of stories without all the website’s furniture such as logos, widgets and navigation systems. Full RSS feeds mean you no longer have to go to the website and wait while your browser downloads JavaScript code, Flash and Java applets, large photos and other mostly-pointless rubbish. However, Feedlooks – which is still in beta – has now “reinvented” feed reading by letting you “read content in full visual glory without leaving the app”. Feedlooks looks like a basic feed reader (with a built-in Twitter client), but when you click on a link, it shows the original story from the web site. You can try it for an hour without creating an account.

Finally, for real geeks who think Bloglines was much too ponderous, there’s the open source Tiny Tiny RSS project. You can set it up on your own server (it requires PHP, MySQL, etc), which is the least transitory option. Unfortunately, the Tiny Tiny RSS demo site is no longer accepting new users, but you can hunt around for ones that people have set up on free servers.

As I’m sure you know, the key to trying different RSS readers is OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language), an XML format for outlines originally developed by Dave Winer for Radio UserLand. Before Bloglines closes, all users should click on Feeds, then choose “Export Subscriptions” and save the resulting OPML file. Your alternative RSS reader should be able to import it.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.

Tag Cloud – Defination – What is a tag cloud?

A tag cloud is a stylized way of visually representing occurrences of words used to described tags. The most popular words are normally highlighted in a larger, bolder font. Visitors to a blog or site using a tag cloud, are able to easily see the most popular topics within the website by clicking on the respective tags.

If you are using the Wordpress Tag Cloud widget, you will come to know that you are unable to style it the way you like. If you call it directly from PHP in your template there are a few options you can use to control the look. The widgetized version does not give you access to options to control the style
neither you can style it with CSS. Not a problem! Now, You can fix the Tag Cloud Widget with this php function without touching the Wordpress core code.

HTML code of the default Tag Cloud widget:

< a href="http://www.digitalpercept.com/?tag=wordpress" class='tag-link-1' title='3 topic' style='font-size: 8pt;'>wordpress< /a>

The CLASS attribute is unique per tag and does not include any weighting information. And the STYLE tag hard-codes the font size based on weight but would override any CSS font-sizing we might have been able apply with the CLASS. Lets use the font-size information from the STYLE to determine the weight and
write a small filter function to rewrite the CLASS and STYLE declarations so we can use CSS to style the tag cloud.

Copy this filter function code block to your functions.php file in your active template.


// filter tag clould output so that it can be styled by CSS
function style_my_tag_cloud($tags)
{
$tags = preg_replace_callback("|(class='tag-link-[0-9]+)('.*?)(style='font-size: )([0-9]+)(pt;')|",
create_function(
'$match',
'$low=1; $high=5; $sz=($match[4]-8.0)/(22-8)*($high-$low)+$low; return "{$match[1]} tagsize-{$sz}{$match[2]}";'
),
$tags);
return $tags;
}


Hook the created php function into the rendering of the tag cloud widget

add_action('wp_tag_cloud', 'style_my_tag_cloud');

The function rewrites the tag links to look like this:

< a href="http://www.digitalpercept.com/?tag=wordpress" class='tag-link-1 tagsize-1' title='3 topic'>wordpress< /a>

The default tag cloud uses font-sizes from 8 to 22 points. The filter function uses a regular expression to extract that size and remap the default range (8-16) to the range defined by the $low and $high variables, for this example I used 1 though 5. An additional CLASS is added ‘tagsize-n’ where ‘n’ is 1-5 and then the STYLE attribute is removed. With the additional class you can now add something like this to your style.css and make the Tag Cloud look any way you’d like!


a.tagsize-1 { font-size: 8px; }
a.tagsize-2 { font-size: 10px; }
a.tagsize-3 { font-size: 12px; }
a.tagsize-4 { font-size: 14px; }
a.tagsize-5 { font-size: 16px; }