It's been under development and testing for a while (it even tried
to sneak out recently) and is now ready for you to play with. Now you
can add nearly any RSS feed to your My Yahoo page. That includes news
sites, weblogs, searches, and more. Think of this as the natural
evolution of one of the oldest web-based news aggregators.
Why?
Three simple reasons...
- RSS makes it easier to track and share dynamic information and has been growing in popularity over the last years. It is becoming an increasingly important technology for anyone who spends time online gathering news or keeping track of friends and family (via weblogs). It's not just for geeks anymore.
- It makes My Yahoo better. No longer are you restricted to the content that Yahoo has traditionally provided. It's the next logical step.
- And, well, it's just cool. That counts for something too. :-)
The bottom line is this: RSS is big at Yahoo. We have a lot of RSS fans here. We already have RSS feeds for Yahoo News, for the Yahoo Buzz Index, for Ask Yahoo, and so on. And there's more to come after this, I hope.
Some of you may now realize that I cheated. My talk of RSS and Open Syndication in 2004 was really foreshadowing, not just guesswork. Sue me.
Try It
To start, go to add.my.yahoo.com/rss and follow the directions. But before you do, here's some stuff to keep in mind:
- This is a beta. There will be bugs. It's not done yet. Really. I can tell you for a fact that there are a few problems with the OPML import. (Yes, you CAN import OPML either via HTTP upload or by providing a URL to a publicly hosted OPML file). It works quite well in some cases but not others. We're working on it. If you report a bug with it, having a copy of (or link to) your OPML file would help a lot.
- We're looking for feedback. Of course, you're free to blog it or discuss here too, but if you use the form I linked you'll know that someone at Yahoo is reading it.
- There are some docs on-line about the RSS module and for publishers, including notes about the crawler and opt-out.
Since some of you are certain to be too lazy to read anything else about it, I'll make a few more quick points.
The Crawler
The user agent is YahooFeedSeeker/1.0 (compatible; Mozilla 4.0; MSIE 5.5;) and it respects robots.txt as described here. If, for some strange reason, you don't want your content on My Yahoo, block the crawler. It's that easy.
The crawler will not eat up all your bandwidth. It uses an adaptive polling algorithm that attempts to match the typical update cycle for your feed. If it seems to be doing bad things, please say something. If you've been watching your referer logs, you may now that it's been in testing for a while now.
Ping It
Like weblogs.com, Technorati, and blo.gs, and other services, Yahoo's RSS database can be pinged when your blog updates. This ensures that it will be crawled in a very timely manner. The entry point you need to use is: http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2. It's just like the weblogs.com ping API.
If you'd prefer a REST API, it has that too. For example, to register an update for my blog, I'd fetch this URL:
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping?u=http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog
So you can even to it with a simple bookmark if your weblog software doesn't allow you to add more ping targets. Just create that link and drag it to your button bar, bookmarks, favorites, or whatnot. (I'm working on a quick HOWTO for adding My Yahoo pings to MovableType. It's quite easy, really.)
This is also documented.
Feedback
To repeat something I said earlier, this is a beta. Expect bugs. Don't tell all your friends and grandmothers unless you think they're willing to deal with a few rough edges.
Having said that, the folks who have been building the RSS module would really like to know what you do and don't like about it. For example, if you'd like to subscribe to more than 25 feeds per My Yahoo page, say so. If you think we should publish a "top 100 subscribed to feeds" page, say so. (They're all the rage this month, it seems.) Use the form or leave a comment here. I'll do my best to relay any feedback posted here or on other weblogs.
And finally, have fun with it.
[As I've said before in case it's not abundantly clear, I don't speak for my employer on my weblog. Anyone who thinks otherwise needs some serious medication.]
See Also: Configuring MovableType to Ping Yahoo: Three Easy Steps.
Posted by jzawodn at January 22, 2004 08:10 PM
Sweet! 60 seconds ago I didn't really get what RSS is, now I'm already a convert.
Jeremy,
It works great but I just can't subscribe to your blog using: http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/index.rdf.
Bizarre...
Charles
hi,
This will be really great..
The initiative taken by my.yahoo is really apreciable.
Now i can read my favourates through my.yahoo.com
No need 4 me to maintain a big blogroll.
Thanx.
This is exactly what I was going to build at my new domain journster.com :)
I'm very excited to see this. I was really hoping that Google would implement RSS search for personal weblogs (in addition to their 4,000 odd news feeds). I've been living Feedster and Bloglines for now.
I'm excited because it's Yahoo. I expect some quality stuff coming from there.
So here I go...
Hmm I can't get it to grok my Ampheta desk OPML file. I can send you the URL if you want.
This is a great development. I think there is a lot of potential here. Is it going to be possible to have the aggregator hide storied I have already read (clicked on)?
This is pretty darn cool. But I'm seeing a problem with the feeds I generate for users of dodgeit.com...
The problem is, I create a personalized feed for every mailbox (users can pick the mailbox name). Now I know I can probably use robots.txt to prevent Yahoo's service from indexing these mailboxes for comsumption by the general public. But I'm not sure I want to do that.
Is there any way to allow the Yahoo spider to validate the RSS and let the user add to My Yahoo, BUT not include the URL for future visitors by default?
Puzzled, but would love to see this work for my site!
ps. I could see this becoming a problem with other sites that use "personal" RSS feeds.
Jeremy,
The Yahoo! pages mention that visitors can click on a "Add to My Yahoo" link, but the rest of the documentation goes on to mention cutting and pasting the url for the RSS feed.
Are there instructions for creating this Add to My Yahoo link that will be published soon? I'd like to make the step as easy as possible for our readers.
Hi Jeremy,
Looks great! A couple of problems I encountered;
The module isn't properly loading http://www.mnot.net/blog/index.rdf or http://www.mnot.net/photoblog/feed.rss - each of them is displaying VERY old entries (maybe something stuck in cache from earlier testing?)
Also, adding some feeds like http://test.mnot.net/channels/realestate.com.au brings up a long list of channels that include everything BUT the desired feed.
Cheers,
how about having the bot useragent include the number of active subscribers similar to what blogines does, e.g.
Bloglines/2.0 (http://www.bloglines.com; 9 subscribers)"
Ray:
Believe it or not, I made that exact suggestion about 2 weeks ago. I can fill you in on the details off-line.
I might have missed something, but is there a simple way of having a "Add to MyYahoo RSS feeds" button on a blog? I have looked at the web page, and looks it doesn't support REST-like interface, right?
Do you really try to follow every ping? There was once a service that tried something similar, and they didn't cope with it.
Dirk:
I'm not sure what you're getting at. The service should follow any ping from a site that it'd otherwise crawl.
I played around with it a bit, and it seems great. One thing I noticed though - it looks like dynamically generated rss feeds don't work (yet?), e.g.
http://webmri8.spssmr.co.uk/mario/rssdemo1.asp
... displays with the "asp" replaced by "htm" once selected, and won't work. I tried other examples (not mine, and not necessarily asp), and found similar issues.
Have sent Yahoo a mail on this, but wondered if someone else here has comments to this?
Does anyone know if the 'customized' Yahoo News RSS feeds still work? I just checked a few in my RSS reader and many show 0 results, which is strange because they're on relatively common topics...
Yes, I've also noticed that search result RSS feeds from Yahoo are returning errors on my reader. You are not alone :D
Hi,
I have seen that it is possible to have Yahoo Groups indexed in the RSS and then add to my yahoo.
Can you please tell me how I can add my yahoo group to this list?
Thanks.
Alex
Wow! Adding RSS to MyYahoo is fun. Thought people like might to read an unofficial beta-test of the Yahoo Button Bar.
A. Unofficial Beta-test on "Add to My Yahoo"-Button for the RSS feed
Ref
B. "Add to My Yahoo" button compatibility with IE and Firefox
Ref
Did the RSS feature get taken offline? Clicking on the http://add.my.yahoo.com/rss link brings up a Yahoo 404 style page...
I have a problem when trying to display European feeds in MyYahoo. I want to see Yahoo US news. But I also want some German and some Swedish feeds.
Both these languages use "umlauts" such as an "a" or "o" with one or two dots or even a "u" with two dots (see this page if you don't know what I mean http://presentreklam.blogspot.com) When adding feeds MyYahoo does not display "umlauts" correctly.
What am I doing wrong? Or am I just being difficult?
I hope this is the right place to post this question.
Just a guy in Panama wondering why no updates on My Yahoo in two days....
Just a guy in Panama wondering why no updates on My Yahoo in two days....
In My Yahoo, at me in the correct coding all is displayed.
The updating rss sometimes is late.
I also suffered from my favourite feeds not updating for a day or so. But today, March 2, everything is back to normal.
MyYahoo is becoming my best friend.
I keep on trying to add my weblog to the MyYAhoo page, ut it always says, "We couldn't find the RSS file you asked for".
If I type the URL is couldn't find, I see the RSS XML. I tried the wp-rss.php and the wp-rss2.php format in case Yahoo perferred a specific RSS version, but it doesn't make any difference.
Anyone else seen this?
hi,
This will be really great..
The initiative taken by my.yahoo is really apreciable.
Now i can read my favourates through my.yahoo.com
No need 4 me to maintain a big blogroll.
Thanx.
True, with few enhancements this would be great tool !
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I have a few RSS files which the encode is "gb-2312", the Yahoo can read some RSS files, but the others can not be readed right. I think Yahoo have some problem with Unicode text
I too get the message "We couldn't find the RSS file you asked for" when I point it at
http://www.whra.org.uk/rss-create.xml
Feedvalidator.org says it is valid RSS and web browsers imply its valid XML.
Any idea?
Phil.
Hi,
I managed to get to the bottom of the problem - it seems that Yahoo often has problems with feeds that are not in its directory. So, add the feed to the Yahoo directory and then use it. For me, this technique worked first time
Phil.
Hi Jeremy,
I created a RSS Feed using ASP.NET that generates RSS XML file. I tested it in most of the RSS readers and it works fine. When I added my RSS URL into My Yahoo successfully, all the today's feeds were listed correctly on the message page (http://e.my.yahoo.com/config/cstore?.opt=content&.url=http%3a//www.c-span.org/rss/cspanvideovs.aspx&.page=p2). But when I go to My Yahoo page, it only displays yesterday's feed. If I change the display option to display from today, it says 'no items today' which is not right.
I really need this to get fixed. Any suggesstion? Thank you.
My RSS files are valid but they don't consistently display correctly in MyYahoo! aggregator.
Sometimes the title will disappear but the articles are listed.
Sometimes the title is there but the articles will not display even when the arrow to the left of the title indicates they should be listed.
I've got several that I'm testing, and sometimes two of three will display correctly, sometimes one, but rarely will they all be perfect.
Help?
This is great stuff! I really like My Yahoo. RSS Beta is awesome!
