foaf - Dave's Blog

Easy: Connect your RSS or Atom feed to Google Buzz

2010 Mar 12, 1:28

It was relatively easy, although still more difficult than I would have guessed, to hook my bespoke website's Atom feed up to Google Buzz. I already have a Google email account and associated profile so Buzz just showed up in my Gmail interface. Setting it up it offered to connect to my YouTube account or my Google Chat account but I didn't see an option to connect to an arbitrary RSS or Atom feed like I expected.

But of course hooking up an arbitrary Atom or RSS feed is documented. You hook it up in the same manner you claim a website as your own via the Google Profile (for some reason they want to ensure you own the feed connected to your Buzz account). You do this via Google's social graph API which uses XFN or FOAF. I used XFN by simply adding a link to my feed to my Google profile (And be sure to check the 'This is a profile page about me' which ensures that a rel="me" tag is added to the HTML on your profile. This is how XFN works.) And by adding a corresponding link in my feed back to my Google profile page with the following:

atom:link rel="me" href="http://www.google.com/profiles/david.risney"

I used this Google tool to check my XFN connections and when I checked back the next day my feed showed up in Google Buzz's configuration dialog.

So more difficult than I would have expected (more difficult than just an 'Add your feed' button and textbox) but not super difficult. And yet after reading this Buzz from DeWitt Clinton I feel better about opting-in to Google's Social API.

technical atom google buzz rss social

FoaF on my Homepage

2007 Oct 14, 3:12I've updated my homepage by moving stuff about me onto a separate About page. Creating the About page was the perfect opportunity to get FoaF, a machine readable way of describing yourself and your friends, off my to do list. I have a base FoaF file to which I add friends, projects, and accounts from delicious using an XSLT. This produces the FoaF XML resource on which I use another XSLT to convert into HTML and produce the About page.

I should also mention a few FoaF pages I found useful in doing this:

• FOAF Vocabulary Specification - The standard on which I based my XSLT to add in info from delicious.
• FoaF Explorer - Turns any RDF XML FOAF resource into a webpage with links to the other people, projects, etc mentioned in the FOAF file.
• FoaF-a-Matic - I used this to produce my base FoaF file.
• RDF Validator - This is the closest thing I could find for validation. It does RDF in general but unfortunately not FoaF specifically. I found two links to sites that are down or dead that claimed to do what I actually wanted.

technical xml foaf personal xslt xsl homepage