Rss

Jason Shellen, Jake Savin Join RSS Advisory Board

The RSS Advisory Board has two new members: Jason Shellen, the product manager of Google Reader and a former strategist for the company that created Blogger, and Jake Savin, the lead developer at UserLand Software. Jason Shellen has spent three years at Google since the company acquired Blogger developer Pyra Labs. First launched in October 2005, Google Reader is a free web-based aggregator that reads Really Simple Syndication and all of the other syndication formats, supporting item sharing, ... (read more)

2006/04/24

RSS Board Expands to 15 Members

The proposal to expand the RSS Advisory Board to 15 members and vote on them privately has passed 6-0. This opens seven spots that can be filled by developers, publishers and educators who'd like to help us work on matters related to RSS and syndication. If you're interested in joining, contact me and I'll pass it along to the board. ... (read more)

2006/04/17

Google Calendar Makes Date with Atom

Google Calendar can import and export calendars created as Atom feeds but does not support RSS, according to Byrne Reese: Only a small minority of people will care about this obscure technology fact, but in the syndication community I think this is tremendously significant. To an engineer, adding RSS support is trivial, so the syndication industry must ask themselves, and the RSS folks especially, why did Google only support Atom? Google also introduced their own proprietary Atom elements or ... (read more)

2006/04/13

I voted today to expand the RSS Advisory Board to 15 members and choose them privately. After serving on the board when it was private and not exceptionally well-regarded by the RSS community, I think it's extremely important to operate in the open. However, the requirement to publicly evaluate and vote on new members chases off anyone who isn't completely flame-retardant. One prospective member with years of experience in RSS development withdrew his name from consideration when he realized ... (read more)

2006/04/10

RSS: I'd Rather Switch Than Fight

Jason Young posed a question on Workbench recently: I have followed the whole RSS soap opera from even well before Mark Pilgrim was writing snarky posts about Winer numbers. I've actually taken more than one opportunity to call it "Internet Jerry Springer" among my IT colleagues and others that I was evangelizing syndication (and RSS) to -- and that was prior to the 2006 events with the Advisory Board and what I feel is inexplicable behavior from Winer. The whole hullabaloo has the group of ... (read more)

2006/03/31

RSS: The Joy of TextInput

I've written 21 computer books in the past decade, documenting thousands of subjects in tree-killing detail. One of my pet peeves as a technical writer is covering something that readers are unlikely to need and should never, ever use, like the discussion board component in FrontPage 2000. I devoted an entire chapter to it in Sams Teach Yourself Microsoft FrontPage 2000 in 24 Hours, a mistake I rectified in subsequent editions. (Buy a copy of the book on Amazon.Com for 92 cents!) FrontPage 2000 ... (read more)

2006/03/29

May Your RSS Always Be Well-Formed

I'm working on an RSS Profile, a set of recommendations for RSS publishers that make it easier to create feeds that work in aggregators and other software. I published the third draft this morning. Unlike a specification, the profile contains subjective advice on how to avoid common pitfalls in RSS, like the unresolved question of whether an item may contain multiple enclosures. The goal of the project is to create a profile that's recommended by the RSS Advisory Board. If that fails, I'll ... (read more)

2006/03/24

RSS Board Supports Common Feed Icon

The RSS Advisory Board proposal to support the common feed icon has passed 5-0. In an effort to make the concept of syndication easier for mainstream users, Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, and Opera will all identify RSS and Atom feeds with the same icon: Subscribe The board has adopted the symbol on its site and encourages its use on web sites, browsers, and syndication software. Additionally, the board encourage web publishers to use the icon on any feed, regardless of whether it employs ... (read more)

2006/03/20

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)

2006/03/15

How Do I Get to Carnegie Hall?

Some bloggers have been talking up the XRSS namespace proposal I made earlier this week. This is one proposal among three currently under development on RSS-Public, the public mailing list of the RSS Advisory Board. The others are a new specification for the Really Simple Syndication format and a best practices profile, a set of recommendations for how RSS documents can work in the widest possible audience of aggregators, browsers and other software. I published the first draft of the profile ... (read more)

2006/03/09

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