Rss

Don Park wants to fire the RSS Advisory Board: I don't know what the hell is going on over at the RSS Advisory Board but it is starting to make my skin crawl. Who is behind all the recent activities? Whoever it is, let me say this to that person: RSS is not your milk cow. I know many of the newly appointed members and, although I think they are wonderful people, I suspect they are being taken advantage of because I don't see why they are needed. ... (read more)

Requesting a MIME Media Type for RSS

In March, a member of Microsoft's Internet Explorer team asked the RSS Advisory Board for a recommendation on the MIME media type for RSS documents. One of the most reliable ways for software to distinguish different kinds of files on the Internet is through a media type, an identifier that's part of the Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions standard. Web servers return a Content-Type header that identifies the kind of file being returned, such as "text/html" for an HTML page, "image/gif" for a ... (read more)

Matthew Bookspan Joins RSS Board

Matthew Bookspan, the director of product management for the RSS aggregator developer Attensa, has joined the RSS Advisory Board. Bookspan worked at Microsoft for nine years and was part of the company's team for Internet Explorer versions 3 and 4. His experience with web content syndication goes back to Microsoft's Channel Definition Format (CDF), an early attempt to foster XML-based content sharing that predates RSS. He worked on user experience for Microsoft's Windows, Office and SQL Server ... (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)

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)

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)

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)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)

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)

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)