Thursday 21 May 2009

I've Now Got Thumbnails!

No I'm not talking about the keratin based thumbnails that most of us have two of -- I'm talking about thumbnails for my blog posts.

Ever since I first saw my blog in a blog list on another blog I was annoyed by the fact that it was the only one in the list that didn't have thumbnails. Even though I publish this blog using Blogger, because I don't host on their server they don't generate thumbnails within the RSS feeds -- why I don't know. Anyway they add thumbnails to the feeds using the Yahoo! Media RSS Module specification.

As of the post on Coffee in Breakfast the feeds from this blog now have thumbnails. I wrote a small application, RSSThumbs, which updates an existing feed (RSS or Atom) with thumbnails generated from the first image in each new post. The software is currently limited to only adding thumbnails from the Media RSS specification but this may change in the future.

If you have a feed which doesn't include thumbnails then you can download RSSThumbs and update your own feeds.


v0.2.0 - 22/05/2009: Updated to ensure that we don't create invalid feeds if we try and update a feed that is also being updated by another process.

v0.1.0 - 21/05/2009: The first release.

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