Randy Charles Morin Becomes RSS Advisory Board Chair
When I became chairman of the RSS Advisory Board two years ago, one of my goals was to resist the temptation to bogart the job. I wanted to find somebody who could keep the group going as chairman and bring a fresh perspective to the tasks of maintaining the RSS Specification and helping RSS developers and publishers adopt the format. It became obvious pretty quickly that Randy Charles Morin would do a great job leading the group. With the approval of the board, he's taking over as chairman while I continue as a ... read more
Displaying Twitter Updates on a Web Page
I recently began using Twitter, a microblogging service for posting short, chat-like blog entries and reading what other users of the service are doing. The site has severe reliability problems, but it's still an entertaining way to get real-time updates from bloggers I read along with others I know who've been sucked into Twitter's maw. I wrote some code to display my most recent Twitter update on my weblog, Workbench, in a sidebar at upper right. This afternoon, I've released the Twitter-RSS-to-HTML PHP script ... read more
Following Web Page Redirects with Java
CNET moved a bunch of its blogs to a different domain this weekend, including Beyond Binary, Coop's Corner, Geek Gestalt, One More Thing, Outside the Lines and The Social. I mention this because the change hosed Meme13, which treated all six as if they were newly discovered sites. One of my ground rules for developing Meme13 is that I won't hand-edit the site to make it smarter. I need the application to recognize when existing sites in its database have moved. Meme13 monitors sites using a Java application I ... read more
Setting the Link on a ShareThis Widget
I'm continuing to work on Meme13, a site that packages together the last 13 sites to show up on the Techmeme Leaderboard so they can be sampled as a feed or web site. The site has attracted around 25 RSS subscribers in its first month. I've added a ShareThis widget on each entry that makes it easy to share content from Meme13 on sites like De.licio.us, Digg and Facebook. Normally, ShareThis links to the page the widget has been displayed on. That doesn't suit my purposes on Meme13, because I'm trying to promote ... read more
Wikipedia Documents Fake Syndication Format
Ever wonder how long a hoax page could last on Wikipedia if the subject was technical enough to scare off most readers? The answer appears to be six months. I recently discovered the Wikipedia page for RDX, a syndication format that doesn't exist outside of the encyclopedia and the mind of its creator. I thought I had heard of every feed format after four years on the RSS Advisory Board, but RDX was new to me, so I did a little digging into the subject. As far as I can determine, every single thing in the ... read more
Meme13: Angering New Bloggers in Tech
Meme13 is getting knocked around a bit by people who think that it's just another scraper republishing RSS feeds, hurting the search-engine rank and traffic of the publishers who created the content. Two of those people are Tony Hung and Darren Rowse, bloggers currently featured on Meme13. Hung writes: ... Meme13 is simply pulling feeds and republishing them all. Like any good ol' scraper blog. ... More of the GD same -- and what's really funny (again, not in a ha ha way) is not even that Meme13 acknowledges ... read more
Meme13: Finding New Bloggers in Tech
Steven Hodson writes: I get a real kick out of it when people start pontificating on why the tech blogosphere is becoming nothing more than [a] self-fulfilling chamber filled with the dull echos of me-too posting that attach themselves like leeches to the supposed brilliant writings of the blogosphere mucky mucks. Me too. Every six months or so, techbloggers reach the joint realization that we're all linking to the same people having the same thoughts about the same subjects. Somebody blames Techmeme, a site ... read more
