Movable Type
As I pore over the Atom syndication format for a writing project, I'm bumping into things that are new to me and probably old hat to the developers working on it. Atom includes an optional id element that provides a globally unique, never-changing identifier for a feed. One purpose of this element is to make clients smarter about syndication feeds that change URLs: If a client finds a feed at a new URL with an id it recognizes, it can stop looking for the feed at the old URL. An Atom identifier ... (
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Last week's discussion of Movable Type's RSS 2.0 template on Workbench prompted e-mail from Anil Dash of the Six Apart Dashes. He wanted feedback on the possibility of adopting Brad Choate's "non-funky" RSS 2.0 template in the upcoming release of Movable Type 3.0. I supported this idea because it's close to what I had in mind. Choate's template differs from my proposal only in two significant ways: the item-level link element is dropped in favor of guid and weblog entry descriptions are ... (
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People involved in RSS and Atom development spend too much time bickering about the past and too little trying to move things forward in a constructive way. I'm as guilty of this as anyone -- there's only a small group of cranks who understand this stuff well enough to get angry about it, and I like arguing with most of them. Now that I'm becoming familiar with Movable Type for reasons I can't talk about yet, I can wade into the long-running controversy over the software's default RSS 2.0 ... (
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