Rss

Feed Autodiscovery Wiki Launched

Robert Sayre has created a Feed Autodiscovery reference that's growing more useful by the minute. He took the original document created by the RSS Advisory Board, placed it on a brand-new wiki, and is encouraging submissions from the public to cover autodiscovery for all syndication formats. One way people can help is to add software they use to the supporting products section if it supports feed autodiscovery. I like seeing a Creative Commons-licensed document I worked on put to use elsewhere, ... (read more)

2006/12/01

Atom and RSS Go Together Like Peanut Butter and Bananas

When Randy Charles Morin and I were trying to wrap up the RSS Autodiscovery specification, we removed references to Atom to avoid discord. Telling Atom publishers how to implement autodiscovery while they're working on their own spec seemed like a good way to spark a war between syndication formats worse than "Dick York vs. Dick Sargent" or "let the rabbit eat Trix." Naturally, our decision angered Atom developers. Sam Ruby: Push the reset button, and get a better attitude. I thought I had the ... (read more)

2006/11/28

Use RSS Autodiscovery to Get More Feed Subscribers

The RSS Advisory Board has published a specification for RSS Autodiscovery, the most effective way to let readers know that your web site offers an RSS 1.0 or RSS 2.0 feed. (A similar effort's underway for Atom.) If you're using Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 or Mozilla Firefox 1.5 or higher, you might have noticed an orange icon on the right edge of the address bar when you load some pages. This icon indicates that the site offers a syndicated feed. You can click it to subscribe to the feed in ... (read more)

2006/11/27

Proposal: Revise the RSS 2.0 Specification

In the 2.5 years I've been a member of the RSS Advisory Board, three questions have been asked most often by programmers having difficulty interpreting the RSS 2.0 specification: Can an item contain more than one enclosure? What elements are allowed to contain HTML? How do I deal with relative URLs? I think it's time that the board answered them. In February, work began on a new, written-from-scratch draft of the specification, with each revision announced and vetted on the RSS-Public mailing ... (read more)

2006/10/04

James Holderness and Paul Querna Join RSS Advisory Board

James Holderness and Paul Querna have joined the RSS Advisory Board. Holderness is a software developer working on the Snarfer RSS reader for Windows whose past projects include the WebFerret search utility and Delrina CyberJack Internet application suite. He's also an active participant on the board's RSS-Public mailing list who contributed to the RSS Profile, a set of best practice recommendations for RSS in ongoing development. Querna is a software engineer at Ask working on Bloglines, one ... (read more)

2006/10/03

USPTO Rejected 'Podcast' Trademark Registration

I submitted a proposal today urging the RSS Advisory Board to support the common usage of "podcast" and "podcasting" as generic terms that cannot serve as trademarks for Apple Computer or any other entity. Since its coinage in 2004, the word "podcast" has referred to all audio files delivered as RSS enclosures. This usage became so popular that "podcasting" was declared the 2005 word of the year by the editors of the New Oxford American Dictionary, who gave it the following definition: A ... (read more)

2006/09/27

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)

2006/09/26

Aaron Swartz Running for Wikipedia Board

Aaron Swartz is running for a position on the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation, an election that began today and ends in three weeks. A contributor to the site since 2003 with around 2,400 edits, Swartz is running in part to help out on the huge engineering requirements of the project: Since January, Wikipedia's traffic has more than doubled and this group is beginning to strain under the load. At the technical level, the software development and server systems are both managed by ... (read more)

2006/09/01

Testing an RSS Feed's TTL (Time to Live)

I'm currently researching the RSS element ttl, which tells aggregators how long to cache a feed before checking it again. Although ttl has been part of RSS since the original version 2.0 published by UserLand Software in 2002, I'm having trouble finding aggregators that honor it. This weblog entry is going out in an RSS feed with this value: <ttl>90<ttl> Aggregators that support the element should check it no more than once every 90 minutes. ... (read more)

2006/08/30

Cry Me a News River, Dave Winer

Dave Winer boasts about earning millions in revenue last year by blogging. Over in another part of the tech blogosphere they're having a discussion about blogs that make big money. I still think Scripting News has the record there, by a wide margin. Last year we did $2.3 million in revenue. Expenses? One salary (mine) and about $1000 per month in server costs. A few thousand for contract programming. Pre-tax profit? Millions. His claim to have made seven figures blogging is a stretch, since ... (read more)

2006/08/23

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