No more tools

At the last meeting of the Heads of e-Learning Forum (HeLF), members discussed what strategic aims future funding should be directed towards. There was a general consensus that no new tools were required for the moment and that technical development should give way to more effective use of existing tools.

The turnover of applications and bolt-on tools has spiralled out of control in such a way that it did not allow institutions to effectively implement them. New tools usually require training and sometimes come with migration issues, e.g. CMS. Additionally, the technology needs to be embedded into the existing architecture. All of this needs time.

UKOLN RSS channel parser and catalogue

The UKOLN site offers RSS-xpress lite, a channel parser and a catalogue of UK educational feeds.

Online parsing of Blogger atom feeds

After much experimenting, I found three Websites which allowed parsing of the Blogger feeds:

1) www.feedburner.com

2) www.2rss.com – the free version has supporting ads

3) feedsweep

With feedburner I found that it does not seem to be reliable, integrating it into my Javascript code worked only sometimes.

atom2rss was pretty fast and worked well, but added these ads to my blog. The no-ads version costs $14.95.

feedsweep has some advanced customisation, but takes some fiddling to get it blend in, and it does not have all options referred to (e.g. background colour for the blog title).

Online RSS parser

There is the UKOLN Javascript parser, but it does not support German umlaut.

A better and faster service is at http://p3k.org/rss.