Syndication Entries
Tuesday, 24 February 2009
Rob Sayre points out that this blog still doesn’t show a preference for Atom, embarrassingly enough. I know that at one point I had a transition plan, and started by generating an Atom feed alongside the RSS, but I never completed the switch. Oops. So, at his prodding, I just finished the changeover, making all of the feeds on this site Atom. Note that some that I point to elsewhere are still RSS, and since it’s late and I’ve...
Thursday, 15 May 2008
Huh. The Atom Format RFC has been out for a while, and as one of the authors, I get the odd mail now and again asking a question or just saying “thanks.” In the last week or two, however, there’s been a bit of an uptick, and all of these e-mails contain the word “Astoria.” As a Unix/Open Source developer, it’s easy to forget that there’s a whole other world out there that’s much bigger than the one I live...
Saturday, 8 September 2007
Feed Paging and Archiving (nee Feed History) has finally made it to a standards-track RFC. For many non-traditional (read: non-blog) applications of Atom, I think archived feeds in particular are going to be vital. I’m already using it in some places which should be seeing the light of day before too long; e.g., sending events to HTTP caches — a problem space that people have been noodling on for a very long time indeed. I’m also hoping that blog...
Thursday, 5 April 2007
We’ve announced the program for this years’ Developers’ Track, and I’m very excited about the lineup. For example, Ryan Boyd from Google will be presenting about GData right before Pasha Sadri talks about Yahoo! Pipes. These are two cutting-edge uses of feeds, and with a little luck we might even be able to get them to field some joint questions in the middle. Also on the topic of feed syndication, Elias Torres is scheduled to talk about Apache Abdera...
Wednesday, 7 February 2007
Yahoo! (finally!) released Pipes as a beta today; congrats to the very talented team that put this together. Niall gives the geeks-eye view, and to be clear, this is not going to be the next great consumer Web site; your grandmother is not going to go out and build pipes. However, I do think it’s going to be a big wake-up call for the “Enterprise” software industry. This tool does more to deliver on their promises of non-programmers slicing...
Thursday, 22 June 2006
Recently, there’s been a resurgence for the Link element in HTML; everything from Microformats to Atom autodiscovery is using it. This isn’t surprising; as machines start processing Web documents more, it’s necessary to use hyperlinks — the foundation of the Web — to tie resources together, without getting in users’ faces. Such linking is useful beyond HTML, of course; Atom defines its own concept of link relationships, and uses them in the Atom Publishing Protocol. Usually, embedding this kind...
Friday, 9 June 2006
See if your aggregator can subscribe to this feed (username/password: test/test) and post the results in comments.While you’re there, it would be interesting to know what happens if you shut down / log out of your aggregator, get back in, and then refresh....
Wednesday, 1 March 2006
Over the weekend, I submitted a new draft of Feed History. The big (and hopefully, last) change this time is the use of the “previous” and “subscription” Atom link relations, rather than extension elements. Of course, just because they’re in the Atom namespace doesn’t mean that they can’t be used in RSS. The algorithm for recreating the state of a feed is also specified much more carefully; please have a look and make sure it makes sense, and does...
Wednesday, 25 January 2006
About two years ago, I got a little grouchy about those little orange XML buttons, and exhorted people to label them properly with RSS. Then came along a little thing called Atom, and “RSS” doesn’t necessarily cover it. Besides which, a TLA isn’t necessarily the most user-friendly way to foist a new Web technology onto people. Rather than confronting people with a miniature forest of icons and badges for different formats, I’ll be gracefully transitioning to Atom by first...
Friday, 13 January 2006
The RSS Tutorial for Content Publishers and Webmasters has been translated to Brazilian Portuguese, thanks to the efforts of Maurício Samy Silva. Note that while the title says “RSS”, it isn’t limited to that; or as Maurício wrote, Apresenta ainda informações sobre um formato semelhante denominado Atom. What a beautiful language. Maybe it’s just because today’s Friday, but reading this makes me want to fly to Brazil…...
Monday, 26 December 2005
Another year has gone by, and rather than cataloguing music, movies or books that I liked, here are some feeds on the Web that I enjoyed reading throughout the year. I’ll avoid repeating the obvious news, technical and blogroll feeds. HotelChatter remains one of my favourite feeds, perhaps due to my acknowledged problem of collecting boutique and design hotels. If you have to travel for work or pleasure, check your destination out there first; you might find a great...
Monday, 5 December 2005
Atom has finally realised its most important advantage over the various flavours of RSS — it’s a Standards-Track RFC. What does this mean? It doesn’t mean that it’s (necessarily) technically better, is easier to use, or will be more broadly adopted. Hopefully, it will have these things due to the quality of the WG participants and exposure to the resources of the IETF. What it does mean is that there isn’t any contention at all about who owns it...
Wednesday, 26 October 2005
Does anybody know of a program or service that will look at a calendar file (e.g., vCalendar, iCalendar, hCalendar) and publish the entries on it as an RSS feed, where each entry in the feed has a link to that one calendar entry? It strikes me that this would be useful for public calendars where you don’t want to see the whole thing dumped into your personal calendar, but instead want to selectively add events to your calendar as they...
Monday, 5 September 2005
Feed History draft -04 is out, with the only major change being the replacement of fh:stateful with fh:incremental, with corresponding changes throughout the document, to make the concepts a bit clearer. This revision also makes cardinality, relative URIs and white space handling more explicit, and adds an acknowledgements section as promised. On the implementation front, here’s a quick-n-dirty Python script that demonstrates reconstruction of an incremental feed (RSS or Atom); while it’s more prototype code than something you’d want...
Thursday, 1 September 2005
I took a pass at a revision of the RSS Tutorial for Content Publishers and Webmasters on the train this morning, as I realised it was dreadfully out of date. It now includes Atom, and RSS 2.0, rather than 0.94. Corrections and suggestions are always welcome; in particular, I’m interested in any links you might have for the Tools or More Information sections (although I’ll only list free — preferably Open Source — products and services)....
Monday, 15 August 2005
I’ve had a few e-mails asking how I got this site’s RSS feed to include its history, so here are the instructions for doing it in Moveable Type (the software that I use to manage this site). If you have instructions for other feed-generating software, please either leave them in comments below, or send me an e-mail. In a nutshell, there are two easy steps; 1. Link your archives together The feed needs to be archived for it to...
Monday, 15 August 2005
Draft -03 of Feed History: Enabling Stateful Syndication is now available. Significant changes include: Added fh:archive element, to indicate that an entry is an archive Allow subscription feed to omit fh:stateful if fh:prev is present Clarified that fh doesn’t add ordering semantics, just allows you to reconstruct state Cleaned up text, fixed examples, general standards hygiene See this site’s feed for an example. There’s going to be at least one more draft, as I neglected to acknowledge people who...
Saturday, 16 July 2005
After more than five years, syndication is maturing rapidly. It’s being used for more than blogging — whether it be stock quotes, system logs, or order lists — and even blogging will change in nature as it gets more popular; people will be using blogs to fundamentally change the way they do business, inside and outside the firewall. In the enterprise, people are going to look at syndication as a pub/sub replacement. While feeds over HTTP won’t be able...
Friday, 15 July 2005
It’s been covered before elsewhere, but just a friendly reminder: ‘feed’ URIs are bad for the Web, as are any that are used solely for dispatch (e.g., ‘itms’, ‘pcast’). I’m looking at you, Apple. Interestingly, Apple also supports doing Web dispatch the right way; with media types. I know this because going to my test page — a zero-length file with a generic extension, but a ‘application/atom+xml’ media type — gets dispatched to my RSS reader in Safari on...
Sunday, 24 April 2005
Should cookies be shared between your RSS aggregator and your Web browser? If they were, sites would be able to automatically personalise the feeds you subscribe to; would people be interested in that, or see it as an intrusion in their privacy? The possibilities are certainly interesting; if I knew who you were, I could not only modify entries to suit you, but I could also insert an entry into just your feed, saying anything from “Hi” to “Do...
Tuesday, 12 April 2005
Way back when I put the first Atom drafts together, I included a placeholder for a section that I hoped would allow reconstruction of feed state. Presently, this often isn’t necessary, because you have to be away for a seriously long time (e.g, on vacation) before you actually miss anything. However, I’d put forth that this state of grace is going to be increasingly unlikely. Why? While your average, computer-obsessed geek — the main audience for syndication so far...
Monday, 2 August 2004
Melbourne’s The Age now has RSS feeds available — hooray! I’ve been scraping them and bugging the staff for a while, so it’s nice to see that Fairfax (now “Fairfax Digital” instead of “f2”… whatever) finally get it. Oh, and Sydneysiders apparently have feeds of its own; not that anyone really cares about what happens to that lot… These links were really hard to find, under their “mobile” section instead of “syndication,” and not linked off of the newspaper’s home...
Tuesday, 18 May 2004
A few people got together in NYC to talk about Atom going to the W3C this morning. One part of the minutes of this discussion raised my eyebrows a fair amount; sr: […] Lots of people are saying RSS won’t scale. Somebody is going to say I told you so. bw: Werner Vogels at Cornell has charted it out. We’re at the knee of the curve. I don’t think we have 2 years. sr: I have had major media people...
Monday, 1 March 2004
This just popped up on the iTunes “new releases” list. I think we’re going to see some Atom-related products called “Tomato.”...
Sunday, 15 February 2004
One of the problems facing the syndication community as a whole is the number of formats that have been minted. This a particular concern for Atom as the newcomer; a common argument against it is that RSS content will never go away, so it’s just adding to this problem. Somebody has probably come up with this already, but it strikes me that this might be mitigated if there were simple extensions for each format that advertised the availability of the...
Wednesday, 28 January 2004
It’s like having a “get your ASCII here” button; completely meaningless. There are literally thousands of XML formats out there, so you’re not really being helpful by labelling it as such (the */xml media types have similar problems). If you want to advertise that you have an RSS feed available, call it RSS; it’s not that hard. And do us all a favour; put it at the top of the page so it’s easy to find. Orange is fine. (Feeling...
Thursday, 22 January 2004
This is the way syndication should be; user-customisable and aligned with the Web view of the resources it talks about. Cool. I’ve updated the RSS Tutorial to point to this as a shining example; it’s what all RSS feeds should look like. (Yes, I know that this link is “so this morning.” I’m falling behind…)...
Friday, 12 December 2003
As you may know, I’m editing the Atom format draft in my copious spare time, but not actively participating in the community (I am watching, but I don’t have the time to really dig in). I think this is healthy, because it forces me to concentrate on the quality and clarity of the specification; so many efforts come up with unreadable (and therefore unimplementable, unless you were at the table) specifications because you “had to be there” to understand what...
Thursday, 11 December 2003
Tim Bray's latest missive contains a passage about offline RSS; But, pointed out Sam, think of it as a synchronization/offline problem. If I stick the whole essay in the feed, then someone can read it even when they're offline, because their RSS reader will have pulled it in. That's true, but why can't anyone write an aggregator with a "fetch this feed's content for offline use" option? That's the best of both worlds......
Friday, 3 October 2003
Jeremy Allaire is writing about something he calls RSS-Data, and I must say it touches on a lot of interesting points. A few; data encoding - Jeremy's view of SOAP Encoding (aka "Section 5 Encoding") seems to be contrary to the rest of the industry, as evidenced by WS-I's ruling it out in favour of document-style services, because there is no schema for sec5 encoding. However, I think his problem is more relevant to...XML Schema - There's a lot of...
Wednesday, 24 September 2003
Tim Bray wonders what the difference between an RSS feed delivered via HTTP and an e-mail folder (e.g., via IMAP) is; I've wondered the same thing myself. As far as I can tell; * Subscribing to an RSS feed is anonymous; no one can send you messages outside of the channels you're subscribed to, and if one starts carrying content you don't like, you can unsubscribe. With e-mail, once your address is out there, you can't get it back. *...
Sunday, 24 August 2003
Somehow, I've been drafted into editing the Atom syntax specification, and have just thrown up a first draft. I'm reasonably happy with the language around the requirements, but a lot more needs to be said about conformance (maybe it's all that time in WS-I ;) and use of XML, as well as extensibility and embedding. For those who wonder, my place in this process is pretty much at arm's length; I'm interested in Atom/Pie/Echo/Whatever, but don't have time to actively...
Monday, 4 August 2003
RSSJobs looks interesting; hopefully, we'll see more of these "non-traditional" uses of RSS as time goes by....
Monday, 21 July 2003
Back when we were exploring the possibity of a profile of RSS, I set up a wiki on the topic and promptly let it run wild, to see what would happen. Although most people have moved on to other approaches since, there have been a few interesting things happening there, including the RssProfileTestbed , apparently started by Ken MacLeod. This is the ground-up approach; rather than talking about how to make things interoperable, they're showing how they aren't. This is...
Friday, 18 July 2003
Dave Winer has announced a few changes to RSS, which seem positive at first glance, but need a little closer inspection. It appears that the copyright for RSS 2.0 is now in the hands of Harvard Law school, and maintained by an Advisory Board. Good stuff so far. This implies that there is some legal basis for the Board; unfortunately, we don't know the extent of the powers of the Board, how it operates, or how its membership is appointed....
Friday, 11 July 2003
This is exactly what namespaces are for....
Tuesday, 24 June 2003
Sam Ruby suggests a roadmap for a new effort that may very well replace RSS. I and many other people have been tempted in the past to do this, and the landscape is littered with the their bones (always wanted to use that phrase in context). They haven't worked because they don't have convergence - adding another format to the mix doesn't help, especially with RSS getting more adoption every day. In large part, this is why I chose to...
Sunday, 22 June 2003
Mark Baker responded to my thoughts on RSS history a while back, and I'm *finally* getting around to responding (nothing like a hotel lobby to clear your thoughts...). I agree very much with just about everthing Mark says; RSS feeds should be modeled as state transfer. The problem is that the approach he advocates implies the semantics of that state transfer, and RSS isn't *nearly* robust enough of a format, nor its implementations interoperable enough, to count on implied semantics....
Monday, 16 June 2003
Sam Ruby has announced a Wiki about what a weblog entry is. Couple of things out of the way first; * 'log' is confusing; I thought he was talking about logfile formats when I first saw it. Call it a Weblog, don't try to invent new terminology! (and see below for an even better reason not to take the 'Web' out of 'Weblog') * 'well-formed' doesn't make much sense to folks coming from an XML angle, where the phrase means...
Thursday, 12 June 2003
I'm surprised by Dave Winer's continuing reluctance to identify RSS 2.0 with a namespace, given howstrongly he feels about interoperability and respecting format definitions. If RSS 2.0 had a namespace, the conformance and semantics of a particular RSS document would be unambiguous - if you use the namespace, you follow the spec. Versioning doesn't buy you this, because there isn't any management of the version namespace - anybody can say "that's RSS 2.0", and only people that recognize Dave as...
Wednesday, 4 June 2003
Tim Bray is looking for an RSS soundbite, what some people would call an elevator pitch, I suppose (aren't they supposed to be level? Never mind). I made an attempt at motivating RSS for people a while back, in the same style as the caching tutorial; I've gotten reasonably good feedback since, but I'm still not sure it's good enough to sell it to a non-technical crowd. Comments?...
Wednesday, 28 May 2003
Dave Winer argues that RSS implementers should toe the line: The same philosophy dictates an end to the disagreement over RSS. If they want respect for the formats and protocols they implement, they must do RSS exactly as UserLand does. The thing that Blogger and MT currently call RSS is not only not what UserLand does but it isn't even an improvement over what UserLand does. Lose-lose. This would make sense if Dave's version of RSS were the only one...
Sunday, 25 May 2003
Tim Bray thinks out loud about mechanisms to allow RSS subscribers to be counted. His poison of choice is adding a query components to the URI in the Referrer header. I don't think that this is such a hot approach, because it's breaking the semantic of the Referrer header; instead of being "where I got this link", the Referrer becomes something closer to the User-Agent header, with user-specific information stuffed in. This messes up log analysis programs and causes yet...
Sunday, 11 May 2003
Don wants to send RSS to OASIS, of all places. Doesn't that mean it'll have to be corporations standardizing it? Urgh. I agree with most of Tim's assessment; the IETF is the most hospitable place for this. I'm happy to do whatever work is necessary, but I'd observe that unless a good chunk of the community is behind it, it'll be useless, or even bad for RSS. This is why I've been advocating a profile, rather than Yet Another RSS...
Saturday, 10 May 2003
Don, Sam, Ben, Mena and others have started blogging about a profile of RSS. I don't think blogs are the best medium for this kind of development - it's too hard to follow a thread, and it's too easy for one person or point of view to dominate. So, I'm starting an experiment. I've created a RSS Profile Wiki for the explicit purpose of tracking people's thoughts on RSS issues. The idea is to use it as the basis for...
Saturday, 3 May 2003
Excellent. Danny Ayers proposes a Simple Semantic Resolution RSS 2.0 Module. This approach is the most sensible for ANY application of Semantic Web technology (as I've argued before). Rather than foisting RDF's ugly, unusable XML syntax on applications, map from a native XML format to RDF. This gives you a number of advantages; - the syntax is more natural and appropriate to the application - the mapping to the semantics is more flexible; you can change it as your understanding...
Saturday, 3 May 2003
I'm setting up a weblog for a fairly well-known colleague, and doing some traffic estimates to try to size his server. Assumptions: * 5000 people will eventually subscribe to the weblog * Each person's aggregator will poll once an hour for twelve hours a day (some less, some more) * 75% of the hits will generate 1k of downstream traffic (304 Not Modified) * 25% of the hits will generate ~50k of downstream traffic (200 OK) So, 5000 * 12...
Tuesday, 29 April 2003
Sam mentions dc:date; that's what I was thinking, except that 'date' on its own is pretty useless. As Bill points out, dcterms gives you different date semantics. dcterms:issued seems to match RSS's pubDate most closely, while as far as I can tell, dcterms:modified matches lastBuildDate. The question I have is of precedence; aggregators that support both will need to defer to one or the other. I'd think that the W3C-formatted form would be preferable, because it's easier to parse (so...
Monday, 28 April 2003
[ I tried to post this as a comment on Sam's blog, but I think there may still be transitional issues over there... ] Overlord? COOL... I don't think I've ever been the overlord of anything. Seriously, as Sam says, it's more about documenting best practices and getting people to agree upon something. If we rely on one person - whether it's Sam, me, Don, Dave, Ben or anybody else with a monosyllabic given name, we're asking for still more...
Sunday, 27 April 2003
For discussion: RSS history module (the eventual result of this)....
Tuesday, 22 April 2003
Tim says thatRSS Needs Fixing. Right on! Some people are intereted in endless tinkering with RSS - I'm not. I'm interested in putting it on everybody's desktop, and making it transparent to them. This means we need better interop. How do we fix this? Maybe I've just got a hammer, but it seems like we've faced this problem before - with SOAP. SOAP 1.1 had a lot of ambiguities, but the community got together and came up with a profile...
Tuesday, 22 April 2003
Sam proposes some changes to RSS 2.0 regarding namespaces. My first question was, "why?" but upon reading his next post, I get it. The Big Problem with namespaces the first time around was that it broke some software, which Dave is very sensitive to. Fair enough. So, there are a few ways to go about this; 1) change it in the Internet-Draft - but that wouldn't be RSS2.0, it'd be something else, and I'm quite loath to introduce Yet Another...
Saturday, 19 April 2003
RSS.py has been revved; fixed some problems with addItem (now takes an index argument to say where to add the item; default is first - used to be last), and a few other tweaks. Yes, I am aware of the rich irony of this being an RSS 1.0-speaking library. *shrug*...
Friday, 18 April 2003
Don's worried about the glaciating influences of having a stable spec for RSS 2.0. I couldn't disagree more. Like Don, RSS is my hobby; has been since about 1999, when I started the Syndication list. I watched and occasionally pitched into the RSS wars, to no avail. At the end of the day, I'm just a little sick of having to support a bunch of different formats that do the same thing; four Internet years is a long time, even...
Friday, 18 April 2003
RSS needs a bit of stablity (as I've often said), so I've gotten off of my duff and done something about it. For your interest, an Internet-Draft of RSS 2.0. As it says, this is RSS 2.0, as Dave has specified it, just in spec-ese. It is derived from Dave's spec, but I DON'T intend to fork it with this effort; the idea here is to document the format in a way that can be normatively referenced by the media...
Sunday, 8 December 2002
Wouldn't it be great if The Royal Society, the Commonwealth Club and your local council all had RSS feeds available, conspiquous and up-to-date?...
Monday, 25 November 2002
Almost forgot - today I put an exploration of the semantics of RSS:Channel out there for comment. I've been thinking about various aspects of this for a while; not sure how far I've gotten, but I think it's important to nail this down if we want to move RSS forward....
Monday, 25 November 2002
RSS: XHTML Profile, to me, is another proof that syntax isn't important, as long as you can boil whatever you get down to a format you know. Nice job!...
Tuesday, 3 September 2002
I see Dave is once again rev'ing RSS. I have reservations about the some of the new mechanisms (e.g., shoe-horning MIME into XML is a horrible idea) but I'm encouraged by hints that using XML Namespaces is being considered. IMHO the smart thing for Dave to do would be to start a version of "Minimal RSS"; maybe 0.95, that is just the very, very core markup (say, title, link and description, maybe one or two others for channel metadata)...
Saturday, 24 August 2002
Harumph. Date is a datatype, not a property....
Saturday, 24 August 2002
Interesting; I'm glad thiswas written, because RDF is good stuff, and this is a good walkthrough. However, it still doesn't approach what I see as the critical problems with using RDF in RSS. First of all, considering that it's trying to enable the Semantic Web, RDF/RSS is pretty light on semantics. RDF is about making assertions about resources, which are identified by URIs; in this case, the channel is making assertions about the items' links. However, there's currently no way...
