Technology – Page 140

Way to rectify problem with Yahoo! Alerts for feeds

The problem with My Yahoo! is that although it allows you to add feeds easily, and indeed, is the most popular web-based feed reader around the world, yet, it does not give previews of content. So when I came across the new Yahoo! Alerts site which gave me the option to register for alerts whenever my fave feed is updated, I jumped for it. Already, using feeds was becoming a problem in Yahoo! Mail Beta because the new BlogSpot feeds which have a new ‘atom:updated’ field, which means that every time you make a post, the whole thing is republished and the new date gets added to each post. This is a big falw, because even if I’ve read something already, and then you make an update, it’ll come up as a new post. The workaround it to use something like FeedBurner to manage your post feed.

Coming back to Yahoo! Alerts, the problem I faced was that it wasn’t delivering me alerts whenever the feed URL for a BlogSpot blog was of the new style, as in http://blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default and that really sucked. I, for one, knew that some blogs were updated, still no alert.

I racked my brains, and came up with a workaround. I think the problem is cropping up since no specific filename is used in the new style. I found that the old style feed URL (of type http://blogname.blogspot.com/rss.xml) for Blogger.com blogs even on the new Blogger are still live. Subscribing to that solved my problem.

However, I did write to the Yahoo! Alerts team to do something about this, for comment feeds for BlogSpot blogs, which were not available earlier, and are of type http://blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default cannot be subscribed in any other way except the new URL. Correct me if I am wrong.

I may point out here, the problem only occurs with Blogger feeds, not others.

I never really liked any alternative like Bloglines or Google Reader. And with Yahoo! Alerts I’m happy. It also offers alerts via messenger and mobile.

Getting videos off the Net

I must warn you, this post is intended only for educational purposes, or for downloading videos without copyright.

Ever had times when you saw that cool video on Yahoo! Video, Google Video, or YouTube, and wanted to download that, and didn’t know the way? If you’re in luck, some videos directly have a download option in Google Video. But if not, here’s how you can get it. Do note that the picture quality of the video you rip will be probably be pretty poor. I’ll take the DPS VK Annual Day video we made as an example.

First off, switch to Mozilla Firefox for your browsing needs – you’ll be needing it.
After installing Firefox, get some download manager like FlashGet, or search for similar download helpers on Mozilla Add-ons Search. You’ll need to restart Firefox after installing the helper.
Go to the page of the video you want to download. Depending upon your helper, it’ll show up next to the location bar, or in the status bar. Wait for the page to load, and then click on the helper icon. It should show you a file ending with the extension ‘.flv’. Click on that to download.
Now you’ve downloaded your vid, but in a flash format. To play this, use an FLV player like Riva. Note that Google uses *.gvp, which needs the Google Video Player – you can download that from the Google Video site.
You’d probably want to convert this into some more commonly used format like MPEG or WMV. Use a video file format converter like the ones from Xilisoft. Do note that for full usage, you’ll be needing a serial for the software as it is paid.