Stupid Appellate RSS tricks

If you want a few stupid appellate-related RSS tricks, read on.  This post has been updated, and should provide people with food-for-thought about how harness and connect RSS, Yahoo Groups, Listservs, Wikis, blogs, and all that stuff that can be found in the magical place called the "Blogopsheric Internet of Law."  The best part: it is all free!

Basics

If you want to know the basics about RSS, Entrepreneur's Journey, Frederick Faulkner, the E-LawLibrary, and Wikipedia are good places to start.  (Tnx. Home Office Lawyer)

Converting mailing lists to RSS

If you want to get slip opinions in RSS format from a court that doesn’t have them, here is my suggestion:

• Locate listserv for that court (if you can’t find one try LLRX or our survey page ).  E.g. CA1's is here .  If you want to be like certain other blogs, you can use Google Alerts, and if regulatory agencies are your bag, you there is a list of from them GOP and Ballard Spahr Andrews & Ingersoll, LLP.  And for legislative stuff, Govtrack is always fun.
• Bloglines will allow you to create a “disposable” email address to which all mail sent to that address will be posted to your bloglines account as a subscription.  (This, alone, will allow you to read your opinions in bloglines, which is often quite a relief.)  Designate that mailing list as “public.”  This is a very powerful resource, because, if used properly, it will reduce the load on email servers that get 100-1000 copies of the same 8 meg email each day.  Also, you can use it to eliminate spam, or allow email postings to a blog from the general public.  There are various public domain .cgi scripts you can install that will do this from your own server, but I don't think any of you care about this.
• Gmail (and other mail systems) provide for automatic filtering of incoming messages (to a Bloglines address), so you can have your subscriptions converted to an RSS feed.
• UPDATE:  "All writs" reminds us here of the trick of creating a Yahoo group, and letting the listserv "post" to it, and then making it public and using the RSS that is made available.

Sharing with the public

• Bloglines will let create a blog.  However, if you make your blog public, it will reveal all of your subscriptions (RSS, Email, etc.) If you choose to do that, it will create an OPML file for you consisting of your current feeds.  So, if you want to read it in yet another reader, this is how to do it.
• To put an RSS feed onto a website (via Javascript) use this resource.  You can put AL&P on your website following the directions here. 
• Just think, if you convert a Google Alert to an RSS feed, to a Bloglines Blog, you will actually have an automatically-generated blog of news-items about a particular subject.  This will make you a top-notch appellate litigator.
• UPDATE #1:  "All writs" reminds us here of Feeddigest.com, which, among other things will convert an RSS feed into Javascript or PHP, with rather neat formatting options.  FeedDigest (or mailing list) also allows for filtering, so, for example, you can filter a Federal Register feed by only the subject you want, or limit a court feed to only certain keywords.  So, you no longer have to pay for Westclip.
  
• UPDATE #2: Based on “All Writ”’s idea, I figured that one can create a Wiki on Schtuff, and automatically generate a Wiki for your firm, friends, the blogosphere, or the whole world about the cases to come out of a given court, allowing people to comment on them and share ideas.  Schtuff can be configured to have posts that come from a mailing list sent to it via email, and Schtuff is sort of like a blog, in that it allows changes to the substance and/or the comments and display in either chronological or alphabetical order.  Schtuff has a neat feature where you can download a backup file of your entire Wiki, and export it to other formats, so you can rework comments into a treatise or newsletter.

RSS to PDF

• If ever want to convert (on the fly) between RSS and PDF (and hey, who doesn't?), use this resource.

Anyway, if you are reading this and you have set up RSS feeds for any interesting courts or mailing lists, why not share them.  Drop me an email or (preferably) post something in the comments section.

Comments

[All Writs]

Did this another way, created a Yahoogroup then subscrbied that group name as a subscriber to the email alert list (I also made the yahoogroup public and permited only certain names to "post" to the list. All Yahoogroups that are public have a RSS feed. I then took the RSS feed from Yahoogroups and used it in the web-based aggregator I use.

Taking it one step further, I converted the RSS feed using feeddigest to create a RSS on a blog.