ACS PUBS Redesign Brings Chaos To the RSS Masses
by mitch on Nov 19 2008 (5509 Views)The new ACS PUBS redesign is a great step forward for ACS. Unfortunately, it is causing havoc across the RSS landscape from looking at the recent blog postings at The Sceptical Chymist and Everyday Scientist. The root of the image problem seems to be the RSS feeds are calling .tif files even though they exist as .gif files in their respective folders (someone probably mistyped a 't' for a 'g'). Alas don't fret, ChemFeeds is working just fine. So if you want your graphical abstracts fix, head on over:
Edit 1: Actually the new ACS feeds seems to be causing greater than normal lag at ChemFeeds. Also, for some journals they are actually calling journal images from folders that have no images in them. So, although I've fixed them up as much as I can, I can't create images in folders, but its better than nothing.
Edit 2: I've been going crazy looking over and pruning through their feeds that I generated this cool error shown below.
Edit 3: I just realized it says I'm from the University of Washington, I have no clue what is going wrong with their website now. As I'm connecting through Berkeley's access.
Edit 4: Rachel has an update: About Those Feeds
Mitch
RSS feeds are really great because you are always updated with the latest news or blog posts.:~,
Mitch, ChemFeeds looks very nice.
But I'm curious - you're running Google ads, and so have the potential to generate money, on a site that replicates copyrighted material (and you're not Google
. What has the ACS (or other publishers) said about this to you?
Thanks.
I think it has been beneath their radar. But frankly, if it is in the RSS you are giving it to the masses as syndication material by definition (RSS = Really Simple Syndication). It's not like I'm parsing up their webpages.
Perhaps the feed itself - the actual XML. But what about the images, which are being hosted on chemfeeds.com and appear to be copied from the corresponding journal's site?
The images are in the feed too. I'm just reformatting them on the fly to display properly. I could just remove the ad if asked, it really isn't the biggest deal.
Hey Mitch, I just got the word that the images are back.
Graphics are back up but they are extremely small. Any chance at getting larger graphics. Also, I feel that the schemes and pictures in the new abstracts are also very small.
Stan: Creating a feed that uses the larger images is well within my abilities, but far outside my job description.
New ACS Journals website: This appears to be the only blog dealing with the new website, and since users cannot start new blogs--not without invitation--I guess this is the best place to comment on the website upgrade.
Does anyone else find it strange, in the "Recommend & Share" section, that there are Digg and Facebook links? In my opinion, more relevant websites for dissemination of scientific information and for social networking are Slashdot and LinkedIn, respectively.
JACS beta took a poll and facebook by far was the social network that most people voted for:
http://pubs.acs.org/JACSbeta/
I've never used Slashdot or LinkedIn, I prefer Reddit and Facebook.
Mitch: Thanks for the link. Interesting that ACS is concerned with social networking as well as social news sites.
John: RSC started having their articles link to social news sites a while ago, ACS had to respond in kind. The next step will be the ability to comment on articles, hopefully I'll get around to coding that feature at ChemFeeds and HotCites before they do.
Hey Mitch,
Thanks for letting us know about this!!
You saved my graduate career!! Thank you thank you thank you.