Apple Music subscriptions stop working when I changed my Media & Purchases Apple ID

Apple digital rights management (DRM, FairPlay in this case) is very complex, particularly when one adds Family Sharing or has an atypical Apple ID setup.

In our case, for reasons that made sense 10-15y ago, my iCloud Apple ID is different from my Media & Purchases Apple ID. My iCloud Apple ID is the family organizer and my Media Apple ID is a family member.

Over the past few years I've been trying to migrate to using a single Apple ID on my phone. I have migrated all but one family member.

Migration has been difficult. I don't think Apple has published a transition guide. You can't, of course, transfer purchases or media or subscriptions. There's a risk of losing a lot purchases and Apple is unlikely to help.

I looked at doing a test migration on a macOS Monterey account of mine but it seemed Monterey did not a user to change only their Media Apple ID. [Later I found you can. In Monterey, unlike iOS, it's obscure how you do this; it doesn't show up in an Apple ID. You change the Media Apple ID through the App Store (Sign Out, Sign In).]

Since it seemed couldn't test on Monterey without trying a full Apple ID transition I made the changes on my iPhone.  Let's say my iCloud Apple ID was "Sam" and my Media Apple ID was "Linda". So my device Apple ID configuration was Sam/Linda.  After the change it was Sam/Sam. Sam is the Family Organizer, Linda is a family member. Linda owns our app and media purchases -- at least that's where they show up when I look.

I was particularly curious how Apple Music would work including test playlist sharing. Unfortunately I couldn't test the playlist sharing because Apple Music didn't work at all! As far as iOS was concerned I didn't have an Apple Music subscription. It offered to give me 6 months free. I also didn't have any Playlists or other configuration. Music (iTunes) configuration is tied to the Media Apple ID, not the iCloud Apple ID.

To recap, Sam is family organizer and Sam/Linda purchased the family plan Apple Music subscription. Linda shows up in Family Sharing as a family member. Once I became Sam/Sam I had no access to Apple Music. Reviewing Family Sharing it appeared that Sam should have access to Linda's Apple Music subscription. That doesn't work.

Apple's Family Sharing problem support page says:

... Make sure that you're using the same Apple ID for Family Sharing and Media & Purchases... 

They don't say how to migrate to that idea of course! Obviously it was possible to use a different Apple ID for Family Sharing and Media (Apple Music worked before). I don't know if the changes made to my device impacted any other family members (wish I'd checked!), but it appears for a Family Organizer device to see Apple Music they have to use the same Apple ID used at time of purchase.

Somewhat surprisingly Apple let me revert back to Sam/Linda on my iPhone. (I think there was some time limit/change limit on Apple ID media changes.) After a period of sync I had my old playlist and Apple Music access.

My guess is that to make the change to Sam/Sam and keep Apple Music I'll have to end my current subscription (tied to Linda) then change the Media Apple ID then resubscribe for the family. (In practice I'll end all subscriptions for Linda before the change.)

Things I learned switching from Spotify to Apple Music

I'll keep adding to this list. For historic reasons going back over 10 years all my owned music is under one Apple ID and my iCloud services are under another. 3/5 family members use the same Store Apple ID. Because of the way family sharing works that legacy Apple ID is a six family member.

• On the individual plan you can stream to one device at a time. On the family plan you can stream to up to 6 devices at one time. On the individual plan if two devices share the same Store Apple ID only one can stream at a time. (I think you can play Music you own on more than one device.)
• If you are on a free plan and upgrade to family plan you don't get any special credit, just go to full price.
• When you do upgrade from the Music app (good luck figuring this out) you get the monthly $15 renewal. There's no yearly discount.
• I think music that you have in legacy iTunes that is not part of Apple's library is uploaded and available. For example (from 2003!). I don't know if I play from streaming if I get this one or a newer version.

• In addition to iTunes you can use music.apple.com to access your library on a Mac.
• FreeYourMusic.app on iOS $10 works pretty well to transfer Spotify playlists to Apple Music. The $10 is a lifelong subscription but it is not family shared.
• When you cancel Spotify you revert to ad-supported Spotify, your playlists don't go away.
• To Share Playlists you need to create a Profile.
• Apple Music includes iTunes Match

Additional notes on results of moving Emily from using a shared Store Apple ID to her iCloud Apple ID for media and purchases given family sharing:

• Playlists that were on her phone seemed to stay on her phone
• Downloads on her phone are still there and they synced to the Cloud
• Still TBD how this will impact movies, apps, etc given family sharing (our legacy shared Store Apple ID is a 'family member').

Google's mysterious new blogging platform

Google Blogger has been largely forgotten, but over the past 1-2 years it's been receiving regular updates.

Mostly these have been improvements with a few odd regressions. Some of the regressions have been fixed.

It's kind of curious. Google still uses Blogger for some of their blogs on googleblog.com (ex: Scholar), but they also have a new platform - https://blog.google (Keynote, Data Centers). On the Keynote blog page the RSS feed is hidden (but exists), on Data Centers and Photos blog there's a familiar feed icon top right. Data Centers articles date to 2012, but the .google domain was only registered in 2014. So they've migrated some old content, probably from Blogger.

I looked a the source from a Data Center post and it's surprisingly old school readable. There are commented out tags for handling IE 7 (!) and metadata for Open Graph and Twitter Card. Style sheets refer to "/static/blogv2/css/blog.min.css?version=4.4" />. 

I wasn't able to find any articles on "Google's new blog platform". That doesn't surprise me, Google search is fairly useless these days. Clearly they are up to something internally.

If they do make this a public blogging platform I'm sure it still won't handle paragraph spacing correctly.

Blogger will republish old posts with new dates but keep old URL

So I learned something today about Google's ancient blogger platform.

You can republish old content with new dates without breaking the URL. Today I revised a post I'd written in 2008, but I set the publication date to today's date.

The post republished with today's date and is ordered correctly on my tech blog page, but it kept the old URL embedded date: tech.kateva.org/2008/09/os-x-major-version-updates-my-approach.html.

It's probably always been that way, I just never tried republishing before.

It's something I'll do more often now.

Migrating from Blogger to WordPress ... again ...

I’ve been contemplating migration to WordPress for almost a decade, but Google kept Blogger good enough to keep that headache at bay.

Alas, the days of good enough are ending. Google is removing their photo management API without recourse. They do support posts with images, but only by using their web interface. It’s a concrete and undeniable sign that Blogger is either dead or going to a bad place.

I though I’d migrate first to wordpress.com then to my Dreamhost open source wp install, but via Twitter Daniel Jalkut tells me he got better results using the open source importer directly.

I’ll do a dry run on one of my big blogs first. The URL won’t change but I’m sure feed subscriptions will have to be redone (ugh).

Update 2019/04/06 - results of the pipdig import process

I tested the Dreamhost free version of the pipdig importer from a Dreamhost wordpress (open source) blog. The results can be seen here for the moment, I’ll eventually delete them. I found:

• It doesn't remap internal links. This is a big disappointment. Links continue to direct to blogger, once that account is gone they will be invalid
• There’s no option to migrate images that I can see.
• It missed at least 4 posts from the source blog — specifically from early on. No idea why and it suggests more are missing.
• It does copy drafts over.
• It requires a LOT of access to your Google account! If you use this utility I suggest creating a new google account, give it access to your blog, then after the import destroy it. 
• The paragraph breaks are missing - line feeds vs <p>. This is an ancient Blogger problem with MarsEdit; a legacy of the original sin of English language text formatting end-of-line standards. I think Blogger is mostly to blame.
• Images were not relocated locally, they remain at their original locations.

Pipdig is better than nothing, but I’m going to try wordpress.com’s import tool next. I wonder if a better solution wouldn’t be a static site that I could archive on my personal web server, then do a web server redirect to handle the links. For now I’m still on Blogger. The porting experience reminds me of the impossibility of leaving Apple’s defunct Aperture photo management app.

(As I write this the wordpress import is processing - result should eventually show up at gordontest.tech.blog temporarily, but we’ll see if it works. It’s taking a long time.)

Update 2019/04/06b

Well, that wordpress migration didn’t go so well:

Your site has been suspended from WordPress.com for violating the Terms of Service. If you believe this was done in error, please contact us as soon as possible to have the suspension reviewed….

I sent a contact inquiry, nothing yet.

Apple's peculiar relationship to RSS (and blogs)

Apple “Newsroom” smells like a blog, but there’s no RSS feed. I assume it uses Apple’s RSS variant and works with Apple’s News.app, but it also renders in a browser. (Historically a dull PR site, Apple is starting to use Newsroom to promote Siri.)

On the other hand, Apple has RSS Feeds. They even have an iTunes Store query tool that generates custom RSS. They don’t have them for newsroom though.

News.app and Apple News is supposed to be able to work with RSS feeds, but I can’t get it to work with Wordpress or Blogger feeds.

Apple’s half-baked approach to subscription and notification is sadly typical for them.

The sensible way to subscribe to a calendar feed in Apple's screwed up calendar ecosystem.

I think I know how Apple screwed this up. It’s one of those evolutionary path-dependency things. Their iCloud calendar is the child of their old OS X Server calendar (via MobileMe). They bolted a web service atop a server side model. In the old model the client was where different calendar sources were assembled, not the server. iCloud/web is stuck with that model.

So when it comes to Calendar feed subscription assembly happens on the Mac, or it happens on the iPhone. It doesn’t happen in iCloud/web. There’s no UI for adding a feed to iCloud/web because there’s no application model for that.

Which explains Apple’s bizarre instructions for getting a feed to iCloud to iPhone via the Mac. Whoever wrote that up was probably sobbing with despair. I suspect the resulting iCloud/web calendar only gets updated when the Mac updates itself. Let me know if I’m wrong.

I think there are really only two ways to do calendar feeds in the Apple world. One is to add the feed to the iOS device(s) (calendar.app) and the Mac (calendar.app) separately. Forget about seeing it in iCloud/web - that really doesn’t work.

The other is to do the subscription in a Google Calendar and subscribe to that on Mac or iPhone (and give up on iCloud/web). But then you’re going to have to deal with iOS failure to support Google’s CalDAV sync select. So this is a geek-only solution (It’s what my family does).

Here’s how to do it the simple way (iPhone and Mac only, not iCloud/web):

• iPhone: Calendars:Add Account:Other:Add Subscribed.
• Mac: I think you should ignore the iCloud option, but let me know if it updates without the Mac driving the update.

Calendar sharing between Google and iCloud is very confusing: webcal vs http vs. https

A book project forced me to dig into a perennially painful topic — Calendar sharing and subscription in iOS and OS X (MacOS Yosemite) for Google and Apple.

I discovered:

• iCloud uses Webcal protocol links to share public calendars among iCloud users. Google can parse these, but it in my tests no events appeared. Old web pages say Apple blocks Google access to public iCloud calendars (robots.txt).
• Google uses https links to an ICS file to share public calendars. Yosemite Calendar.app can use these links and iOS Calendar.app can use these URLs [1], but iCloud.com Calendar can’t. At least in my testing, with Yosemite, Calendar.app on MacOS and Calendar.app on iOS don’t share these calendar subscriptions.
• Safari.app on iOS will pass an iCloud webcal URL link to Calendar.app and this will trigger a calendar subscription. Google ICS file (https) links won’t work, renaming them to webcal doesn’t work either (I think it might have in the past).

This confusing situation is reminiscent of the complex hoops required to support CalDAV sync for multiple Google Calendars in iOS and MacOS. Apple and Google have very different models for calendaring and they also appear to have different approaches to implementing CalDAV (and they’re probably on different CalDAV versions too).

 

On balance I much prefer Google’s approach to managing Calendars. On the other hand, if one stays entirely within iCloud and ignores Google calendar sharing, then Apple’s Calendars are simpler to use and understand and are better documented.

 

Don’t bother trying to share a public iCloud Calendar to the world, when Apple says “public” they really mean “iCloud”. If you do want to subscribe to a Google Calendar on your iPhone or MacOS, you will have to do it separately on every device you use (it my testing these subscriptions do not sync, I do hope they are backed up).

 

If you are sharing a Google Calendar, you’ll want to provide directions for iOS and MacOS users and you’ll need to explain that they won’t be able to see the calendar using iCloud.com.

 

Sample links used in my testing:

iCloud Public Calendar Share link:

• webcal://p32-calendars.icloud.com/published/2/5ti02pRya1_rzpjcGlbr6DG8IOGsbgGKgWeeQsd6LJUi4Gck7Bqt8kyitXCNeVGJLFzY_0DshIikKkgevKPAffxkcAr_SBrL_63VWujM5I4 

Google Public Calendar Share link:

• https://www.google.com/calendar/ical/kateva.org_7fnk4q97156l5rqdgvd3mshpis%40group.calendar.google.com/public/basic.ics

- fn -

[1] Documentation: Subscribe to a calendar. Go to Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars, then tap Add Account. Tap Other, then tap Add Subscribed Calendar. Enter the server and filename of the .ics file to subscribe to. You can also subscribe to an iCalendar (.ics) calendar published on the web, by tapping a link to the calendar. The second part of this documentation is incorrect, you can only subscribe for a webcal URL and only iCloud seems to produce the “right” ones.

See also (references)

• Gordon’s Tech: Google’s Calendar Sync with Mountain Lion through Yosemite Calendar.app is a flaming mess 10/2013
• Use multiple calendars - iPhone - 12/2015
• Subscribe to calendar by link does not work in ... | Apple Support Communities
• Techniques to Share Apple and Google Calendars - Envato Tuts+ Computer Skills Tutorial
• iCalendar - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
• Webcal - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
• How to share or make iCloud calendars public on iPhone and iPad | iMore
• iCloud: Calendar sharing overview
• iCloud: Share a calendar with others
• iCloud Calendar sharing to iCal4 or CalDAV client | Physics Computing Services
• Gordon's Tech: MobileMe vs. Google Calendars 10/2010

Appigo ToDo task management suite: Archiving and Export of completed tasks and projects is non-negotiable requirement

Appigo has deferred work on archive and export of tasks and projects for at least two years and possibly longer. When I paid Toodledo to provide back end services I could live with ToDo.app’s missing features, but when I switched full time to ToDo for iOS and ToDo for Mac with ToDo Cloud support it became a real concern. I gradually realized Appigo wan’t showing any inclination to change.

I’ve tried one last ticket request:

[#85787] Archiving and Export of completed tasks and projects : Appigo Inc.

There are two closed discussions related to archiving of completed tasks and related request to export tasks and project data.

I know about setting sync to 1 year, I know ToDo web version will paginate completed tasks (up to 1 year?) and I know I can access tasks via SQLite (but dates are proprietary format).

I know I can sponge off Toodeldo and use them as an archive format without sending them any money (unethical).

I need more than that. I signed up for ToDo Cloud and I use both the iOS and Mac version intensively, including all Project features. I can't continue using ToDo Cloud if I can't have long term storage of project/task information as well as archive export.

It's just an essential requirement. If you can't tell us you're going to do this I need to find another product."

I have a feeling I know where this goes. So I’m looking again at Things an Omni, and it may be that I’ll reverse my shift and return to Toodledo.

Facebook still has RSS feed for Pages. For the moment.

Once upon a time Facebook had RSS support for personal Newsfeeds. That died years ago.

I don't know if Facebook ever had RSS support for Groups; Groups used to be pretty limited. They don't now.

Pages though, they've always had RSS feeds. It's just getting a lot harder to find.

I may be dreaming, but I thought there used to be an official RSS link somewhere. If so it quietly passed on, maybe in the last 6-12 months.

The old Feed URL format still works though:

https://www.facebook.com/feeds/page.php?id=121212

where the number is the Page ID.

The trick is finding the Page ID. Facebook keeps moving it around. As of June 2015 find it here:

1. Click About link beneath Page photo (Timeline, About, Photos, etc)
2. Find Facebook Page ID at bottom of the About Link.

Subscription to Facebook Events calendar now possible, including Google Calendar - for the moment

I just added a subscription to my Facebook calendar to my Google Calendar.

Is this new?

I can't say, but knowing how it works I found documentation updated in Sept 2014. So it might be new. I briefly scanned Facebook's marketing infested 'newsroom' and didn't see any notification there.

Parenthetically, this kind of discovery is a real Facebook issue. I've looked for this feature several times over the past few years. The last time I looked I found several old hacks that were either obsolete or insanely high risk.

Why is Facebook such a mystery? Partly it's lack of documentation and feature churn, but, more importantly, geeks ignore Facebook. So my usual notification systems fail.

Anyway, this is something I've really wanted. Look for the cryptic three dot icon next to a Facebook event:

Choose "Export Event". You can email a .ICS for the event, but, more importantly, you'll see webcal URL with an embedded unique identifier (token).

Copy that URL and paste it into Google Calendar "Add by URL".

Suddenly Facebook Calendar is useful.

App.net: Supporting account substreams with PourOver

[This one's for @duerig.]

The earliest mention of "channels" in my web archives dates to 1996 [1]. There's not much more than a word about them, but I remember what I was thinking. There were a lot of things I wanted to share [2], but I didn't enjoy harming unwilling bystanders. I wanted broadcast channels (now we call them streams) that could be carved from my global shares [3].

The problem, of course, is that my interests are probably not your interests. Emily is my most faithful reader, but she skips my tech shares. On app.net some like my diverse shares, but others favor dialog and social chat. Political opinions? Religion? Right. Limited scope.

So, in the interests of minimizing collateral damage, like a political post appearing in a stream of iOS comments, I'd like an easy way to do streams off my shares.

Happily Pinboard, which I use as a micro-blogging platform publishing to @johngordon  (PourOver) and kateva.org/sh (IFTTT), supports those kinds of streams. Every tag has a feed, and when posting to Pinboard I can enter single character tags corresponding to streams. It's not the most elegant UI, but it works.

At the moment though all of my shares stream into one app.net channel (mixing metaphors there, but it kind of works). If my app.net account supported sub-channels/streams (I know that work is in progress, might be done) it seems like either PourOver and/or Pinboard stream-feeds would be a good step towards reducing drive-by share damage.

Update: app.net thread. Hope to see these pieces come together over the next few months.

- fn-

[1] My web "posts" from the early 90s are now embarrassing. The web was new then, even Alta Vista was years away. There was so much I couldn't imagine. More subtly, we live in the Randall Munroe web now. I know there are minds at play far beyond my own meager insights.
[2] Sharebot I am.
[3] In those days Global Shares were static web pages. I tried to generate things that were a cross between blog posts and Simplenote entries via FileMaker web page generation.

See also

• Filtering my Google Reader Share with Yahoo Pipes 9/2008 - That was my most serious streaming effort, not coincidentally around election time.
• Gordon's Tech: App.net - using Duerig's custom RSS feed to see only root posts from selected people
• Tweeting Google Reader Shares and Notes via feedburner 2010 - Google Reader shares had channel-like options
• Google reader shared items to Facebook 2009 - another example of trying to stream

Post Google Reader: Feedbin, Newsblur, Feedly - all disappointing at the moment

I'm scrambling as usual, so no time for a full post. I've been running through Feedbin, Newsblur and Feedly today. I paid for both Feedbin and Newsblur, and Feedly is free.

My biggest disappointment is Feedbin and Reeder.app -- the sync isn't working! Feedbin says I have 270 unread, Reeder.app says 1086. Reset didn't help. Next disappointment -- both Feedbin and Newsblur didn't get my Google Reader custom names for feeds. Only Feedly picked those up.

Newsblur (open source!) is far too social. It insists on showing me comments as I try to read my feeds. It shares to Pinboard in the web app, but not in the iOS app. No Reeder.app support. Newsblur is strict folder hierarchy - no tags, no acyclic graph organization. No URL sharing. Newsblur has best performance and most features, but so far it's not right for me. I'll try again in a month or so.

Feedly has the very irritating plugin model and no Reeder.app support. It's my emergency fall back.

Feedbin has URL type share to pinboard; that's enough for me since I use Pinboard tags to control IFTTT routing to app.net, twitter, and kateva.org/sh. Feedbin's tag model is a much better fit to my GR org than Newsblur's hierarchy. That's really big for me. I'm very glad I can now 'hide' all tagged feeds. Renaming feeds are unsubscribing is very awkward; I'd argue there's a bug with that UI. (Tip: rename feeds you don't want to 'z', then when all done with name repair save, then select all 'z' then remove.)

Ugh, this will be a hard transition. There's still no true heir to GR's basic functions, not even counting all the abandoned features it had.

If not for the Reeder sync problems I'd go with Feedbin, but that's a bad fail. For the next few days I'm happily back to Google Reader (7 days left!), I'll see if Feedbin's sync bug clears itself.

App.net - using Duerig's custom RSS feed to see only root posts from selected people

[See update below, Jonathon has revised his stream generator so you don't need to look up the userid any more.]

I enjoy app.net. I like the conversations, but I particularly like the 'root' or initial posts shared by a few of my followed appnetizens. Problem is, these posts are lost in the streams of the app.net clients I use - Felix (iOS), Kiwi or Wedge (OS X), and Alpha or NoodleApp (web). They are mixed with replies and conversations. Current app.net client UIs aren't a great fit for how I'd like to follow folks; they are best suited to recreational engagement. Thanks to Jonathon Duerig (@duerig), there's a better option. He's providing a special RSS feed that accepts parameters. For example, here's mine:

http://jonathonduerig.com/my-rss-stream/rss.php?user=6172&replies=0&directed=1

In this example

• 6172 is my app.net userid (I was #6,172 to sign up)
• replies=0 means I see only root replies
• directed=1 (just include this, don't ask why) [2].

To find the userid you can mouseover the official (shows all activity) RSS feed icon on alpha.app.net profile pages, like https://alpha.app.net/johngordon. It shows the userid. I've created feeds for several people who I particularly like to follow, and put those feeds into a Google Reader folder called App.net [1]. Now that Duerig has also removed an unnecessary username prefix from each post, the results display very well indeed. Each post comes with a link to alpha.app.net, so I can respond easily in that environment. It's really quite elegant, and should be an inspiration for app.net app builders. I'm looking forward to more like this; Duerig will probably make this to a custom domain and tidy it a bit. For now I've put the feed URL into my Profile Bio to make it easier for others to copy.

[1] I haven't settled on a Reader replacement yet, I'll start doing serious testing in May. I do want folders. [2] Duerig: "A directed post is a post beginning with a mention ... to anyone. .. the concept of a directed post is immensely confusing ... Just do replies=0 vs. replies=1 and you will be happy."

Update 6/30/2013: Duerig has a new format with new header and the ability to use a username instead of a user ID. For example:

rss-app.net/rss.php?user=@duerig&replies=0&directed=1 

I used a list of usernames scraped from the display of people I follow, and Numbers.app concatenate [2], to generate this list of feeds which I've been tediously [3] copy pasting into Feedbin. The current list is below, sorted by name [5]. 

This functionality makes app.net far more interesting for me. I really think it needs to be part of the API, a variation of stream. So we'd have two independent streams:

• Twitter-style conversational stream: see all posts by members of follow list.
• Prime stream: "Root" posts stream - akin to news, item share

For some people I want to follow conversations, for others just their initial item share, for others both streams. So these are independent.

Currently I do stream 1 from Kiki/App.net/Felix, stream 2 from Reeder/Feedbin/ReadKit[4].

- ffn -

[2] Numbers.app can't export as tab delimited, which tells one a lot about iWork. It also "escapes" quotes in CSV fashion when you copy to clipboard, so they're all doubled. Not a problem with this exercise, but very annoying when I tried to create OPML XML entries. iWork, not Apple TV, is a hobby.

[3] Feedbin has performance and reliability issues, especially on adding feeds, but those are improving. What's killing me is the extremely limited UI for manipulating feeds - review, sort, revise names, remove, tag. It doesn't scale past 25 or so feeds; I'm over 300. If this doesn't get fixed in the next few weeks I've gonna have to try something else. 

[4] Readkit is promising but obviously in early state for consuming Feedbin, etc.

[5] Full list -- if you're name isn't on here don't worry, I'm building it out. See [3]

(I had to add bullets due to a longstanding Blogger/MarsEdit formatting bug.

• rss-app.net/rss.php?user=@adamlcox&replies=0&directed=1
• rss-app.net/rss.php?user=@adrianus&replies=0&directed=1
• rss-app.net/rss.php?user=@annatarkov&replies=0&directed=1
• rss-app.net/rss.php?user=@benubois&replies=0&directed=1
• rss-app.net/rss.php?user=@billkunz&replies=0&directed=1
• rss-app.net/rss.php?user=@clarkgoble&replies=0&directed=1
• rss-app.net/rss.php?user=@dalton&replies=0&directed=1
• rss-app.net/rss.php?user=@danfrakes&replies=0&directed=1
• rss-app.net/rss.php?user=@danielgenser&replies=0&directed=1
• rss-app.net/rss.php?user=@darnell&replies=0&directed=1
• rss-app.net/rss.php?user=@duerig&replies=0&directed=1
• rss-app.net/rss.php?user=@erikschmidt&replies=0&directed=1
• rss-app.net/rss.php?user=@fields&replies=0&directed=1
• rss-app.net/rss.php?user=@glennf&replies=0&directed=1
• rss-app.net/rss.php?user=@gruber&replies=0&directed=1
• rss-app.net/rss.php?user=@jdalrymple&replies=0&directed=1
• rss-app.net/rss.php?user=@johngordon&replies=0&directed=1
• rss-app.net/rss.php?user=@gruber&replies=0&directed=1
• rss-app.net/rss.php?user=@jdalrymple&replies=0&directed=1
• rss-app.net/rss.php?user=@marcozehe&replies=0&directed=1
• rss-app.net/rss.php?user=@martinsteiger&replies=0&directed=1
• rss-app.net/rss.php?user=@mfitz&replies=0&directed=1
• rss-app.net/rss.php?user=@mvp&replies=0&directed=1
• rss-app.net/rss.php?user=@prometheus&replies=0&directed=1
• rss-app.net/rss.php?user=@rikishiama&replies=0&directed=1
• rss-app.net/rss.php?user=@reederapp&replies=0&directed=1
• rss-app.net/rss.php?user=@brentsimmons&replies=0&directed=1
• rss-app.net/rss.php?user=@siracusa&replies=0&directed=1
• rss-app.net/rss.php?user=@sirshannon&replies=0&directed=1
• rss-app.net/rss.php?user=@snipergirl&replies=0&directed=1
• rss-app.net/rss.php?user=@spacekatgal&replies=0&directed=1
• rss-app.net/rss.php?user=@teawithcarl&replies=0&directed=1
• rss-app.net/rss.php?user=@thomasbrand&replies=0&directed=1
• rss-app.net/rss.php?user=@treestman&replies=0&directed=1
• rss-app.net/rss.php?user=@voidfiles&replies=0&directed=1
• rss-app.net/rss.php?user=@wickedgood&replies=0&directed=1
• rss-app.net/rss.php?user=@xwordy&replies=0&directed=1

Google Reader: More like this

Sad moment in the last days of Google Reader -- I'd forgotten about the 'more like this' item in the Folder Settings (and Feed Settings) dropdown ...

Note the Translation services, and ability to create a 'bundle' (shareable set of feeds made of all the feeds contained in the Folder).

There's so much in Google Reader that most users never saw.

Pinboard and IFTTT - credential outage

I was quite pleased with my jury rigged replacement for my long lost Google Reader Shares. (Few remember them now, the net years have passed like leaves in the wind ...)

I had IFTTT tracking Pinboard posts and creating Tweets and posts to an archival WordPress blog. The Pinboard posts were largely created from the essential iOS Reeder.app and, less often, from Google Reader and Reeder.app for OS X.

It worked. I was happy. I started composing the celebratory blog post and explanation when...

Yes, you can guess. It fell apart.

I don't know why. Pinboard had blocked Superfeedr around that timefor aggressive crawling, but this turned out to be a red herring. IFTTT doesn't use Superfeedr.

IFTTT hasn't gotten back to me, but they're a free service so support is not predictable.

Well, I did know this was going to be a fragile and shortlived solution! I particularly didn't like that IFTTT is "free". I'm now looking for an alternate solution I can build around Reeder.app and Google Reader with Twitter and WordPress as outputs.


Update 6/19/2012: I didn't hear back from IFTTT support, but Pinboard convinced me to dig deeper there. I tried creating a new task but that also failed. The clue was in a screen I'd not visited, the Channels screen.

There I found this icon:

I edited it, reentered my credentials, and it's no longer offline. Now I'll see if it starts working again.

What happened? Well, there are two possibilities, and without help from IFTTT I don't know which is true. One is that Pinboard was unresponsive and IFTTT took the channel offline, but then never restarted it.

The other, which is at least as likely, is that I changed my password to Pinboard (I do that sort of thing) and that any email notification of subsequent credential failure was either misread, mislabeled, or filtered out. IFTTT doesn't use OAuth or similar service with Pinboard, so it needs my credentials to work. If that was the problem then IFTTT might be able to come up with a better way to notify users. For example; there was nothing on the IFTTT task screen to tell me a channel was offline, and when I manually triggered my tasks there was no error message.

Update 6/19/2012b: Fixing the Channels problem did the trick.

Thinking this over, why does IFTTT need my Pinboard credentials anyway? They are reading from a public feed, not writing to my account.

Update 6/22/2012: The latest IFTTT rev has much improved diagnostics. 

My Google Custom Search just died. Did I offend the GoogleNet? (fixed)

Two days ago my much loved Google Custom Search was working beautifully (emphasis added) ...

Why coupons? Price concealment information and memetic archeology in the pre-web world 

... I found that reference through my pinboard/wordpress microblog/memory management infrastructure now integrated into my personal google custom search...

My latest enhancement was paying off; my ("free" = ad supported) personal custom search engine was now successfully indexing a blog that archived my pinboard.in shares and annotations [1] as well as my ancient web pages (archived) and my tech.kateva.org and notes.kateva.org blogs.

My extended memory was better than ever!

Until it died. [2] As of yesterday my custom search engine is returning very few results.

My first thought was that I'd unwittingly committed a Class One transgression against the GoogleNet. Perhaps Google considers my link/annotation blog to be a link-farm-equivalent -- and had blacklisted my entire kateva.org domain. Perhaps I had broken an unwritten rule of the GoogleNet (formerly known as the Internet, home of Archie and Veronica [3]).

I'm still able to find my notes.kateva.or and even kateva.org/sh posts in Google's standard search however (if I restrict by domain). So I'm not certain I've transgressed. If the search doesn't work soon I'll try recreating that engine. If that doesn't work, or if I detect more signs of transgression, I'll have to remove my pinboard archive and beg mercy of The Google.

I've a broken iPhone I could burn. Perhaps that will appease.
--
[1] It's my tawdry substitute for my long lost and much mourned Google Reader Share page. I hate the way it looks, but it's primary use is RSS consumption and index fodder. I am looking for a better template but WordPress themes/templates are a rats nest of complexity.
[2] Echoes of losing Google Reader Share!
[3] If you know what that means you either used Google or you are a very old geek.

Update 5/31/2012: It's back.

I followed some of advice that "omr" (not a Google employee) generously gave on the Google Search product forum. Instead of creating a new CSE however, I replaced many of the entries of the old CSE with the patterns he suggested. Perhaps most importantly, I changed the setting for indexing kateva.org/sh.

I'd previously opted to index all entries and all linked pages. Considering I add about 20-60 links a day I think that was a tad ambitious. I now index only the text of this shared items/pinboard (micro) blog.

For reference, here's an edited version of omr's recommendations:

In the "Sites to search" box, enter this URL Pattern:
  *.kateva.org/*
If you wish to include some of your other sites, enter additional URL Patterns to match them.  (Enter one URL Pattern per line.)  For example, if you want to include the msptrails site, add:
  *.msptrails.org/*
For more information about URL Patterns, see
Please include only a limited number of sites.  Start with the minimum number of sites that you consider necessary to include; or, if you wish to include several, preferably no more than ten.  (If you own some older or less-active sites that you don't need to search anymore, don't include them.)
Click the new CSE's "control panel" link (which takes you to the "Basics" page of the control panel).
Leave the "Search engine keywords" box empty.
Near the bottom of the page, note the "Show automatic thumbnail" option.  The automated thumbnail-image selection is not always ideal, so perhaps you may want to turn off that option.  (Click to remove the check-mark, then click the "Save Changes" button BELOW the option.)

Finding partly played podcasts: In Our Time

iTunes tracks how many times tracks have been completely played [2], but it doesn't provide any UI for tracks that have been partly played.

This isn't a big deal for music or videos, but it's a real bother for podcasts. I have 72 episodes of "In Our Time" in my "IOT unplayed" shortlist; and I know some of them are partly played. I just don't know which ones. 

It's been a longstanding frustration, but this week, Doug's AppleScript for iTunes gave me the answer:

Project: Gather Partially Played Tracks « Doug's AppleScripts for iTunes

... Smart Playlists don’t include any criteria for detecting how far along a track has been played, and Last Skipped may not necessarily have been set if a track was simply stopped rather than skipped.

... a track’s bookmark property will contain the number of seconds the track had been played before it was stopped. Thus, if any tracks have a bookmark value greater than zero then they’ve been partially played...

I'm lousy at AppleScript, but it wasn't hard to modify the example Doug provided. I have a smart Playlist called "IOT Unplayed" and I modified the AppleScript to find tracks in that Playlist that had a bookmark value greater than zero [3]:

property nameOfPlaylist : "Partially Played"

tell application "iTunes"
	set opt to button returned of (display dialog ¬
		"Find partially played tracks in:" buttons ¬
		{"Cancel", "Podcasts", "IOT Unplayed"} default button 3)
	
	if opt is "Podcast" then
		set targetLibrary to (some playlist whose special kind is Podcasts)
	else
		if opt is "IOT Unplayed" then
			set targetLibrary to some playlist whose name is "IOT Unplayed"
		else
			set targetLibrary to library playlist 1
		end if
	end if
	
	try
		set thePlaylist to some playlist whose name is nameOfPlaylist
	on error
		set thePlaylist to (make playlist with properties {name:nameOfPlaylist})
	end try
	
	try
		delete every track of thePlaylist
	end try
	
	duplicate (every track of targetLibrary whose bookmark > 0) to thePlaylist
	reveal thePlaylist
end tell 

Of course this isn't as elegant as a Smart Playlist -- I need to run this AppleScript manually. Even so, it solves 80% of my pain. Thanks Doug!

[1] I donated $5. It was a royal PITA to do so. It reminded me of how bad our donation system is. Among other things:

• I distrust PayPal intensely based on past experience. So I had to use the awkward data entry UI.
• It took me a while to figure out I had to 'update amount' - so that cost me two data entry episodes
• I had to go back and add an email
• If I could keep track of how much I'd previously donated to the site, I might make a larger (or smaller) donation.

Sucks.

[2] I have a feeling that years ago iTunes would consider a track "played" if one simply started listening to it. I'm probably wrong about that.

[3] In my hacked AppleScript the 'library playlist 1' statement will never be reached; I just kept it in as a reminder of how to scan all tracks. AppleScript only allows 3 buttons, otherwise I'd have made this an option.

Pinboard and IFTTT to Twitter

A few weeks after Google 2.0 killed Google Reader Social, I decided I'd take the Twitter route.

My Twitter feed was active for about two months, but in time I gave up on Twitter (again). It didn't work as a memory management solution, I don't like the length limit and the lack of structure, and I don't expect Twitter to take better care of my data than Google. Worst of all, like Google, Twitter is free. I can't afford free.

Next I ran through PosterousandTumblr. They both failed, for different reasons. Worst of all, both are too expensive.

Lastly, I turned to Pinboard. I thought I'd use it restore access to my Google Reader JSON exports -- but that didn't work. I could have gotten my $10 back, but I like Pinboard's style, microblog post formats, export formats, import options, ownership, feed-focus, and bookmarklet -- and I really like the Reeder (and, via SendTo, Reader) integration. Most of all, I like paying for it. Oh, and it's Google-Free too [2].

So I've stayed with Pinboard. I tag my (all public) posts with 1 tap codes that are meaningful only to me - s for share, b for blogworthy, y for yammworthy. Each tag has its own stream. The 's' stream is really aimed at Emily, but anyone can consume it. It shows up in her copy of Reeder.app and on her iGoogle page.

No, it's not Google Reader Social. Then again, nothing is. I've come to think of GR Social as a future-fluke, a transient window into a future that might never be. Pinboard isn't GRS, but it's the best microblog/share platform in the mundane world. It beats the heck out of Twitter and (shudder) G+.

Except Twitter, despite my neglect, refuses to die. So I decided to try injecting my Pinboard shares into the Twitter stream. Pinboard doesn't support this, and they don't intend to. However IFTT supports both Pinboard and Twitter, so I now tweet from Pinboard via IFTTT (recipe) [1]

For example:

• Original in Pinboard: Pinboard: Bookmark Detail
• Format in Twitter: Twitter / @jgordonshare: Information Technology Cog ...: ""

It mostly seems to work, though I don't know what happens if my Descriptions are too long.

For the moment then, I share the same items in two places:

• Pinboard 's' with feed.
• Twitter - jgordonshare

[1] In my own task I have a colon between Title and Description, otherwise they run together in Twitter.
[2] Is it Google's ambition to be more disliked than AT&T?

Pinboard imports Google Reader JSON exports

Pinboard is the first service I know of that will import a Google Reader Social (shared item) JSON file:

Pinboard: howto page

Google Reader Click the gear icon in the upper right corner of the page. Select the Import/Export tab. Choose either items you have starred or items you have shared and click the Reader JSON link (the rightmost column)

When I stumble unexpectedly over something I've been looking for, I look for who else found it. Then I add them to my reading list. Google gave me only these references:

• Google Reader Shared Items -> Pinboard, FeedDemon, Send to Pinboard… « cmiles – blog 11/5/2011
• Pinboard Blog - Nov 2011 - "... Added importers from Firefox JSON format and Google Reader. Wrote scripts for tarring up user archives in human-readable form so people can download them. Removed Google Reader support (RIP, Google Reader, I'll mourn you til I join you)...

Pinboard has a feed, I don't know if importing will trigger feed actions (probably not)

See also:

• Gordon's Tech: Recovering Shared Reader items: JSON import into Wordpress
• Gordon's Tech: Sharing and annotation: Instapaper's supporting apps

Update: I paid my $10 and imported by Google Reader shared item JSON file. I have 3 days to cancel. I used Amazon payments.

Here are the results; as of today the most recent post is 7 weeks old. I may also try importing the JSON for my Reader shared items, which may produce some duplicates.

• http://pinboard.in/u:jgordon - my pinboard collection - really my Google Reader shared items. Note my user name is a part of the URL, so it's nice that 'jgordon' was available. Posts show a title, a bookmark, and an excerpt. I think my GR annotations precede the excerpt. It's more like Google Reader Social than I'd expected.
• http://feeds.pinboard.in/rss/u:jgordon/ - the public feed for my collection. I viewed this in Google Reader; gave me a real sense of deja vu. Alas, GR only pulled in 44 items.

I'm still studying the results. So far Pinboard is only showing a fraction of the JSON file, there are not tags, and every item shows with date of '9 weeks ago'. I don't see a convenient way to navigate across the entire collection.

Update 12/31/11: Pinboard has now imported 2 months of Reader shares - about 1100 items or roughly 1% of the total.