Opml

Adding Atom:Link to Your RSS Feed

The RSS Profile includes a recommendation to add an atom:link element to an RSS feed to identify its URL, as in this example from my own blog: <atom:link href="http://feeds.cadenhead.org/workbench" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" /> To make this work, all I had to do was declare the atom namespace in the feed's rss element: <rss version="2.0" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"> The addition of atom:link, by letting an RSS feed reveal its own address, makes the feed ... (read more)

Exporting a Manila Site Using OPML

The RSS Advisory Board site now includes all of the articles, weblog entries, and comments from the group's old Manila site, dating back to the group's founding in 2004. I never got a copy of the old site's root file from Harvard, so I collected the content using an obscure but cool feature of Manila: All site content is saved in the discussion board as individual messages, each of which can be downloaded as an OPML file. For example, open this weblog entry from Craig Burton's Manila blog in ... (read more)

It's Not the Size of the Blog in the Fight ...

Wired News has declared Dave Winer vs. me as one of the top blogfights of 2006. Back in early 2005, blogger and RSS guru Dave Winer hired programmer Rogers Cadenhead to port Winer's popular Weblogs.com site to a more robust platform. The project was a success -- Winer sold Weblogs.com to VeriSign for more than $2 million later that year -- and Winer struck a verbal agreement with Cadenhead to perform the same magic on another of Winer's web properties, Share My OPML. Winer paid Cadenhead $5,000 ... (read more)

Adopting a Common OPML Icon

Liquid Orb Media and Chris Pirillo are trying to popularize a common OPML icon to identify OPML subscription lists. I'm no fan of OPML, but this icon's such an improvement over the alternatives I wanted to promote it. The similarity to the common icon for RSS should help spur adoption, since the formats complement each other. I've added an OPML link to the sidebar on Workbench that shows an example of how it could be used. The link opens an OPML file that lists feeds I'm reading with Bloglines. ... (read more)A note on the home page of Planet Apache: Planet Apache provides its aggregated feeds in RSS 2.0, RSS 1.0 and RSS 0.9, and its blogroll in FOAF and OPML (the most horrific abuse of XML known to man). RSS 2.0 Specification ... (read more)

Settlement Reached with Dave Winer

I've reached an agreement with Dave Winer regarding the Share Your OPML web application. I destroyed his original code and user data along with everything that was built from it and gave up my claim to a one-third stake in feeds.scripting.com. He gave up the claim that he's owed $5,000. I originally hoped one of us would buy the other out and launch the application, but we found a much stronger basis for agreement in a mutual desire to stop working together as quickly as possible. If Share Your ... (read more)

Letter from Dave Winer's Attorney

I received this letter Friday from Christopher C. Cooke, Dave Winer's attorney: Mr. Winer has retained our firm and asked us to contact you about two related matters. If an attorney is representing you, please provide this letter to your attorney and have him or her contact me. First, we request that you return the $5,000 deposit that Mr. Winer paid to you in October 2005 in connection with certain work that you were supposed to perform for Mr. Winer in revising and maintaining Mr. Winer's ... (read more)

Turning Off a Radio UserLand Scripter

Last June, I published a 23-minute podcast of Juan Cole being interviewed on the Alan Colmes radio show. A Radio UserLand user on Comcast in Monterey, Calif., is apparently a big fan of Cole. His copy of Radio keeps requesting that 5.5-megabyte podcast over and over, as frequently as every 10 seconds. In the last week alone, he's consumed 12.13 gigabytes of my server's bandwidth by downloading the file 2,365 times. I don't know why this is happening -- it could be a bug in Radio UserLand or a ... (read more)

Ayers outlines his beefs with OPML

Danny Ayers offers an "anything but OPML" rant against the world's most popular outline markup language. He writes: It's worth noting that you can express hierarchies and everything else I've seen suggested for OPML (text outlines, links, images etc) in (X)HTML. I suspect there are more HTML readers/writers than OPML ones! Unless XHTML can be used to express the expansion state of specific items, I don't see how it could be used as an alternative to OPML for outlines. OPML's an odd bird, but ... (read more)

Editing OPML link directories with JOE

At first glance, the Java Outline Editor (JOE) looks like a suitable choice for editing OPML link directories and other outlines. The program supports the addition or deletion of any attributes to each outline item, enabling link directories to be created by adding type and url attributes (screenshot). It isn't as easy as using Radio, where you can hit CTRL-K or CMD-K to add a link to any title, but there may be a way to extend the functionality that I haven't found yet. Note: JOE has the same ... (read more)