Re: [syndication] Scraper code?

["Bill Kearney" <wkearney99@hotmail.com>]

I'm left wondering when reinventing Passport/.Net will start here....

> So, site A has a feed that I'm interested in, and they use service B to
> dispatch subscriptions. B knows about aggregators 1,2 and 3, but how does
> it know about my own, hand-written, arse-kicking aggregator, Q?

You want to use B's service?  The tell B about your aggregator Q.

I'm wondering when reinventing UDDI will start...

> Of course, you could have a register-your-aggregator service as well, so
> that B becomes a sort of marketplace of feeds and aggregators, matching
> them up as appropriate. However, as a user, I still have to go to B,
> register myself as a user there, add my aggregator if they don't have it,
> and hope that they have all of my feeds; otherwise, I have to manually
> enter them. Nightmare.

As opposed to what?  Doing the nothing that exists now?

> What's the point? Additionally, it still doesn't
> address the case where my aggregator is behind a firewall, and can't
> expose anything for B to talk to.

See Passport and .Net services.  This sort of thing is nicely handled by it.

> Using the Content-Type to dispatch a particular format (RSS in this case)
> is so much simpler, robust, and - more to the point - it's how the Web is
> designed to work.

That's indeed one step in the right direction.  Apache's had the ability to do
this via .htaccess for quite a while.  Unfortunately many users don't know how
to manage these or their server doesn't support them using it.

-Bill Kearney