wolfb - feeds and RSS

This is a continuation of my post: Big Publishing Group demands my domain.
I have been exchanging emails with the WIPO regarding the complaint from Planeta Agostini demanding my domain deusto.com. They presented the complaint in Spanish, which I challenged. The WIPO, in principle, decided that because the Registration Agreement I had was in English (I registered the domain while I was living in Belgium in 1997 via a US based registrar), the language to be used would have to be in English, as stated in their own rules and regulations.

But, for some reason, they reverted that decision. Planeta Agostini argued that the reason for me to ask for the complaint in Spanish was to delay the whole process. Also, that I am living in Spain, and that previous communications had been in Spanish. After these argumentations, the WIPO decided to accept them the complaint in Spanish !!! They also added that I could reply in English if I wanted to do so, and that later on, the Panel would decide the language of the proceedings.

I replied over the weekend again to the WIPO, absolutely confused with their decision. First, the language of the proceedings has nothing to do with the place where I am living now, according to their own rules, unless both parties agree to it, or to the language or previous communications, which never existed, since I never talked to them (although I had a lawyer for a while that talked to them in Spanish, and that I cannot afford to use anymore). And secondly, the delay would only affect me, because I am the only one with the domain suspended !!.

I feel defenseless if the claim is accepted in Spanish, as I told them. If the claim is accepted in English, I know I can resort to thousands of net users and fellow webmasters to help me write a response in a wiki that I have ready to start. And I've already got several lawyers offering their services free if the wiki doesn't work. But if the complaint is accepted only in Spanish, I know the number of people willing to help will be much less. I have had only one Spanish lawyer offering his help for free, and with the condition of remaining anonymous (you know who you are and I thank you). I guess people in Spain are concerned about helping me in this matter because the other party is a big company, very influential in Spain. They control a dozen publishing houses, a couple of newspapers and one of the country's biggest TV channel.

I am waiting for the response from the WIPO on my request to only accept the complaint in English. I guess they have to do it, as per their own rules. I will let you know what happens. And once I have the official complaint and it is accepted, I will posted in my page so we can all prepared the response jointly.

Thank you very much to all of you for your support. This is becoming an amazing ride.

To be continued ....... :)

(I keep explaining this fight in English in http://wolfb.com
and in Spanish in http://minilobo.com, and I have to do it after my day job)

Labels: deusto, domain, planeta

Dear Digg Army, Armada Barrapunto, Meneados and lobeznos, I have an idea.
I have asked the WIPO to change the language of the claim to English (they agreed).
Once I get the complaint from PlanetaAgostini in that language, I will post it, and will create a wiki where all of you can help me to answer the claim. What do you think ? Can you help with one or two lines each ?
That way, the resulting page can be of help for a lot of people that face the same problem in the future. I am moving my site http://wolfb.com to drupal to make the wiki. Hope to have it ready in a few hours.

Labels: planeta

I registered deusto.com in 1997. Now, eight years later, Planeta Agostini, one of the biggest publishing groups in Spain and owner of Ediciones Deusto, sends me letters via its lawyers demanding me to transfer them the domain, because they registered the trademark "deusto" in 2002 (I repeat, I registered the domain in 1997).
Now, after I refused to transfer them the domain, they have presented a complaint to the WIPO and the domain has been suspended.
The website (a website for Spanish writers to publish their stories and now moved to http://literatura-digital.com), has, over 8 long and difficult years, reached 80,000 visitors a month, 1250 stories have been published and has 3300 subscribers to the newsletter.
Deusto is the name of a neighborhood in Bilbao, Spain, where there is a University of Deusto (http://deusto.es), a bakery called Panaderia Deusto, a consulting group called IT Deusto, etc.
Planeta Agostini has a big law firm in Spain working on the case, and I cannot afford a lawyer. Is this fair ? Are they going to get the domain because they are bigger ?
By the way, Planeta Agostini doesn't have neither deusto.es, deusto.net, nor deusto.org. And deusto.biz and deusto.info are not even registered ! Wouldn't it be that they are after my visitors and they want them for free ? No, of course not, they only want to protect their brand !

If you want to give me your opinion or you can offer help, please visit and leave a comment in http://wolfb.com

Eduardo Perez Orue
htttp://wolfb.com
minilobo@gmail.com

Labels: deusto, domain, planeta

The eyeOS miniserver is here ! The miniserver is a stand-alone application that allows you to run eyeOS from a USB stick.

Try it ! A complete web based system in your USB stick !!

This is a new script that I have created just to provide easy Amazon RSS feeds on different subjects. You can try the script here. Simply enter a word or a few words and the script will return an Amazon RSS feeds with books related to the search terms.

The whole script is here:

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<?php
/*
Project: AmazonRSSwriter: Amazon URL RSS writer
File: amazonRSSwriter.php
Author: hombrelobo <minilobo@gmail.com>
Version: 0.50

For the latest version of the writer, questions, help, comments,
etc., please visit:
http://wolfb.com/2006/01/amazonrsswriter-create-amazon-rss.html
http://wolfb.com/

What is AmazonRSSwriter ?
Sometimes is convenient to have RSS feeds of Amazon products, to
keep track of new books in a certain topic. This script uses Amazon
services to create a simple one.

You can see it in action in:
http://wolfb.com/rss/amazonrsswriter.php

Enjoy it !!

******************************************************************************
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY
or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
This work is hereby released into the Public Domain. To view a copy of
the public domain dedication, visit
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/publicdomain/ or send a letter to
Creative Commons, 559 Nathan Abbott Way, Stanford, California 94305, USA.
******************************************************************************
*/
?>

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
<title>Amazon RSS writer</title>
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
<META NAME="KEYWORDS" CONTENT="Amazon, RSS, writer">
<META NAME="DESCRIPTION" CONTENT="Amazon RSS writer, create your own feeds">
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="INDEX, FOLLOW">

</head>

<body><br>

<?php

// Sends an email if the form has been submitted
if ($_POST['send'])
{

//Affiliate link code
//http://xml.amazon.com/onca/xml3?t=deustocom&dev-t=amznRss&KeywordSearch=rss&mode=books&sort=+daterank&offer=All&type=lite&page=1&f=http://xml.amazon.com/xsl/xml-rss091.xsl

$basic_link= "http://xml.amazon.com/onca/xml3?t=deustocom&dev-t=amznRss&KeywordSearch=SEARCHWORD&mode=books&sort=+daterank&amp;offer=All&type=lite&page=1&f=http://xml.amazon.com/xsl/xml-rss091.xsl";

$term=$_POST[texto];

// First we replace all the spaces with %20
$term = preg_replace('/\ \b/i', '%20',$term);

$find = '/\SEARCHWORD\b/i';

$replacement = $term;

// Now we replace the search terms in the feed.

$content = preg_replace($find, $replacement,$basic_link);

// And now we output the feed and the subscription links:


ECHO <<<END
This is the URL of your feed:<br><br>
$content<br><br>

And you can subscribe to it here:<br><br>
<a href="$content" title="Subscribe to my feed"><img src="http://www.feedburner.com/fb/images/pub/feed-icon16x16.png" alt="" style="border:0"/></a>
<a href="http://add.my.yahoo.com/rss?url=$content" title="RSS books in Amazon"><img src="http://us.i1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/i/us/my/addtomyyahoo4.gif" alt="" style="border:0"/></a>
<a href="http://www.newsgator.com/ngs/subscriber/subext.aspx?url=$content" title=""><img src="http://www.newsgator.com/images/ngsub1.gif" alt="Subscribe in NewsGator Online" style="border:0"/></a><br><br>
<a href="http://fusion.google.com/add?feedurl=$content"><img src="http://buttons.googlesyndication.com/fusion/add.gif" width="104" height="17" style="border:0" alt="Add to Google"/></a><br><br>
<a href="http://client.pluck.com/pluckit/prompt.aspx?GCID=C12286x053&a=$content"><img src="http://www.pluck.com/images/pluck/pluspluck.png"/></a><br><br>
<a href="http://www.bloglines.com/sub/$content" title="" type="application/rss+xml"><img src="http://www.bloglines.com/images/sub_modern1.gif" alt="Subscribe in Bloglines" style="border:0"/></a><br><br>
END;



}
else
{
?>



<table>
<td width="60%"align="left" valign="top">
<?php echo "Amazon RSS writer script" ?> <br><br>
<?php echo "Create your own Amazon RSS feeds easily with this script" ?> <br><br>
<?php echo "Type the search terms for the feed:" ?>
<br>

<form method="POST" action="<?php echo $_SERVER['PHP_SELF'] ?>">
<p><?php echo "Term:" ?><br>
<textarea rows="1" name="texto" cols="56"></textarea></p>
<p><input type="submit" name="send" value="send"></p>
</form>

</td>
</table>

<a href="http://wolfb.com">hombrelobo</a>

<?php

} //end else

?>
</body></html>



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Labels: php, rss, rsswriter

I am terribly excited about eyeOS. I have been following their work for a few weeks now, and last week we set a meeting in Barcelona (home town of the core group) and after a business lunch (in the best latin style) we decided to join forces. So I will be part of the team from now on.


But ..... wait, you don't know what eyeOS is ? Well, eyeOS is no more and no less than a WebOS or a web based operating system. With only a browser, you can access all your data AND ALL YOUR APPLICATIONS in one place, no more troubles with installing new software. The revolution is here, and (surprisingly ?) comes from Barcelona !

I would like to invite you to try the beta version now. Still a lot to be done, but you will already get a good feeling at how great the system is: eyeOS demo

Some weeks ago we launched Say4, a bible and news mashup.

What do we mean with this ? Very simple, Say4 gets the latest news from a RSS feed of the BBC. That RSS feed is extracted with the help of Magpierss. Once we have all the information separated, we put the title of each one of the headlines into a variable and perform a search for that headline in a MySQL database that contains all the text of the Bible, each line being one record. What we do is searching for similarities or references to that specific headline in the whole of the Bible.

The results ? Sometimes surprising, sometimes deceiving, sometime intriguing. But we keep coming back to the page looking for what's new there.

And to finish it all, we built a RSS feed mixing up the headlines and the resulting verses from the Bible, with the help of RSSWriter.

Very soon we will release the PHP script that we used to create Say4 to the Public Domain. Stay tuned !

Let's start for the beginning: What is RSS ?

The easiest way to create a RSS feed for your site is using a program or script that creates them automatically, like Blogger, or a CMS like Drupal.

But if that is not possible I'd recommend using any if the free PHP RSS writers available. Among them, I like RSSWriter, which allows the creation of RSS 1.0 feeds (only text), or my own script playRSSwrite , which allows for the creation of RSS 2.0 feeds with images incorporated and that can accept data from a database or from static data.

Once we have that first basic RSS file, I'd recommend following these steps to optimise it:

• Use Feedburner to transform our feed into another feed, but readable by humans and optimiced. It also allows for statistics on the feed.
  
• Include the autodiscovery tag in the <head> of your pages. This way, some RSS aggregators will find it automatically. The code is as follows (you have to substitute the feed with yours, of course):
  

<link rel="alternate" type= "application/atom+xml" title="wolfb" href=" http://feeds.feedburner.com/wolfb" />

• Use rssfwd to put a code in your page for people to subscribe to your feeds via email. Remember that RSS technology is very recent, and most people still don't know what you are talking about. Email remains the communication method for a lot of people.
• Add chiklets, those little subscription buttons. You can use Feedburner for that or create your own chiklets with Buttom Maker.
  

This is it, good luck getting subscribers now.

Labels: php, rss

What is playRSSwriter ?
When working on creating a rss feed for our site Playlingerie.com, we realized that all the existing php writers were either for rss 1.0 or for rss 2.0 but without support for embeded images. So I created this code.

You can see it in action in:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/sexy-lingerie


Code:

------------------------------------------------------


<?php
/*
Project:     playRSSwriter: RSS 2.0 writer with images support
File:        playRSSwriter.php
Author:      hombrelobo <minilobo@gmail.com>
Version:     0.95

For the latest version of the writer, questions, help, comments,
etc., please visit:
http://wolfb.com/2006/01/playrsswriter-rss-20-feed-writer-with_01.html

What is playRSSwriter ?
When working on creating a rss feed for our site http://playlingerie.com,
we realized that all the existing php writers were either for rss 1.0 or for
rss 2.0 but without support for embeded images. So I created this code.
You can see it in action in:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/sexy-lingerie

Enjoy it !!

******************************************************************************
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY
or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

This work is hereby released into the Public Domain. To view a copy of
the public domain dedication, visit
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/publicdomain/ or send a letter to
Creative Commons, 559 Nathan Abbott Way, Stanford, California 94305, USA.
******************************************************************************
*/

// First we start defining all the variables that we will insert in the
// xml code.

// Insert here the the title of your feed
$rss_title= "Title of your feed";  
// Insert your site, in the format site.com
$rss_site= "site.com" ;
// Insert the description of your website
$rss_description= "Description of your website";
// Applicable language of the feed. For spanish, change to "es"
$rss_language="en";                     
// Address of the logo file. Only need to put the file name
$rss_logo="http://".$rss_site."logo.jpg";  
// the feed's author email
$emailadmin="email@site.com";   

// set the file's content type and character set
// this must be called before any output
header("Content-Type: text/xml;charset=iso-8859-1");

$phpversion = phpversion();

//set the beginning of the xml file
ECHO <<<END
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
<rss version="2.0" xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/mrss">
    <channel>
      <title>$rss_title</title>
      <link>http://www.$rss_site</link>
      <description>$rss_description</description>
      <language>$rss_language-$rss_language</language>
      <docs>http://backend.userland.com/rss</docs>
      <generator>PHP/$phpversion</generator>
    <image>
<url>$rss_logo</url>
<title>$rss_site</title>
<link>http://$rss_site/</link>
</image>
END;

// Now the variables about the individual items to appear in the feed. Here we
// take them from a MySQL database, but can also come from a included file

// Define database

$server = "localhost";                                  // Server
$rss_database = "name_of_the_database" ;            // Database name
$db_user ="user" ;                                          // Database user
$db_pass = "password" ;                                      // Database password

// Open the database

$db = mysql_connect($server,$db_user,$db_pass);        
mysql_select_db($rss_database,$db);

// Calculate the number of records in the table "Products"

$num_rows = mysql_num_rows(mysql_query("select * from Products"));  

// Select all the records from the table "Products". You can modify the
// query to only select some records, change the order, etc.

$query = "select * from Products" ;
$result = mysql_query($query) or die("Query failed") ;

//Make a loop to create the feed for all the items selected                                                

while ($results = mysql_fetch_array($result))
  {

// Pass the database field Photo_name to the variable $photo_name                                                
// The Photo_name has to include the relative path,
// for instance: $photo_name="images/photo1.jpg";

$photo_name = $results['Photo_name'] ;     

// Pass the record URL_product to the variable $url_product. It also
// has to include the relative path, like in: "path/product1.htm"

$url_product = $results['URL_product'] ;

// Pass the record Description to the variable $description

$description = $results['Description'] ;

// Clean the description

$description = str_replace ("&amp","",htmlspecialchars(stripslashes($description)));

// Pass tags to describe the product

$rss_tags = $results['Product_tags'] ;     
  
// If you don't have tags for the product, simply change to a fixed value,
// for instance put:
// $rss_tags="tag1 tag2";

// Make a short description for titles of only 75 characters

$short_description = substr($description,0,75) . "...";

$counter ++ ;

// Calculate the size of the image and resize it to a thumbnail

$photo_size= getimagesize($photo_name) ;
$photo_width = $photo_size[0] ;
$photo_height = $photo_size[1] ;
unset($height_limit,$width_limit) ;

if ($photo_height > $photo_width )
    $photo_height= "90" ;
else
    $photo_width = "80" ;

// Create the html for the description item. No need to modify this unless
// you want to change the look

$content="<p><a href=\"http://$rss_site/$url_product\">$description</a></p>
<p><a href=\"http://$rss_site/$url_product\" title=\"$description\"><img src=\"$photo_name\" width=\"$photo_width\" height=\"$photo_height\" alt=\"$short_description\" style=\"border: 1px solid #000000;\" /></a></p>
<p>$rss_site</p>" ;

// Escape all the descriptions

$content = preg_replace(array('/</', '/>/', '/"/'), array('&lt;', '&gt;', '&quot;'), $content);

// display an item

ECHO <<<END
    <item>
<title>$short_description</title>
    <link>
http://$rss_site/$url_product
</link>
    <description>
$content
</description>
<author>$emailadmin</author>
<media:content url="$photo_name" type="image/jpeg" height="$photo_height" width="$photo_width"/>
<media:title>$description</media:title>
    <media:text type="html">
<p><a href="http://$rss_site/$url_product">$description</a></p>
<p><a href="http://$rss_site/$url_product" title="$short_description"><img src="$photo_name" width="$photo_width" height="$photo_height" alt="$short_description" style="border: 1px solid #000000;" /></a></p>
<p>$rss_site</p>
</media:text>
<media:thumbnail url="$photo_name" height="$photo_height" width="$photo_width"/>
    <media:category scheme="urn:$rss_site:tags">
$rss_tags
</media:category>
</item>
END;

  }

// Close the database

mysql_close();

// And end the xml file

ECHO <<<END
   </channel>
</rss>
END;

// Done !!  Use http://feedvalidator.org to verify that it's correct.
?>




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Labels: php, rss, rsswriter