Programming

Saving Bandwidth on RSS Feed Details

With the current interest in rssCloud and PubSubHubbub (PuSH), I've been thinking about all the bandwidth that's consumed by the RSS elements that describe the feed. When a client requests an RSS feed 10 times in one day, it gets the basic details of the feed over and over again. When clients request the Workbench feed, they get 1,800 characters containing optional RSS elements that I haven't changed in years, except for the PuSH element I added last month. Workbench has 1,900 feed subscribers, ... (read more)

2009/10/13

PubSubHubbub is a Lot Easier Than It Sounds

I've begun digging into PubSubHubbub (PuSH), the real-time RSS update protocol created by Brad Fitzpatrick and Brett Slatkin of Google and Martin Atkins of Six Apart. I was under the impression that it's harder for RSS publishers to use than the RSSCloud Interface, but that isn't the case. The specification is simple and precisely written, adopting conventions like RFC 2119 that make a spec considerably easier to understand, and it communicates using basic HTTP requests. I wrote the software ... (read more)

2009/09/17

RSSCloud Should Not Be Controlled by One Person

I posted a call for comments last night on RSS-Public, the mailing list of the RSS Advisory Board, asking what people think the board should do in response to the ongoing effort to revise the RSSCloud Interface. The interface has been a part of the RSS specification since the publication of RSS 0.92 in December 2000. It determines how software can use the cloud element in an RSS feed to connect to a server that offers real-time notifications when the feed has been updated. In a nutshell, here's ... (read more)

2009/09/15

There's a Reason RSSCloud Failed to Catch On

WordPress and Dave Winer are working together to bring real-time, Twitter-style updates to RSS feeds using the cloud element and the accompanying RSSCloud Interface. Yesterday, WordPress added RSS cloud support to "all 7.5 million blogs on WordPress.com." Winer's documenting the ongoing work at RSSCloud.org. Although some tech sites are reporting this as a new initiative, cloud has been around since RSS 0.92 in December 2000. I was getting real-time RSS updates as a Radio UserLand blogger back ... (read more)

2009/09/08

Sharing Blog Posts on Your Facebook Profile

Over the past few months, I've gotten back into contact with more than a dozen old friends and coworkers through Facebook. After blogging for nine years, I prefer hanging out here on Workbench over social networking sites, but I'm beginning to feel like an anachronism. It's easier for people to keep up with their BFFs on sites like Facebook than to visit a bunch of personal blogs, even with the help of RSS and a feed reader. I recently began linking my posts on Facebook using Simplaris ... (read more)

2009/02/15

Obama's White House Adopts Atom Format

I became the first subscriber on Bloglines to the feed for the new White House web site, which launched at 12:00 p.m. as Barack Obama became the 44th president of the United States. As a syndication dork, I was interested to discover that the feed employs Atom as its format: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">   <title>White House.gov Blog Feed</title>   <link href="http://www.whitehouse.gov" /> ... (read more)

2009/01/20

Creating PHP Web Sites with Smarty

I recently relaunched SportsFilter using the site's original web design on top of new programming, replacing a ColdFusion site with one written in PHP. The project turned out to be the most difficult web application I've ever worked on. For months, I kept writing PHP code only to throw it all out and start over as it became a ginormous pile of spaghetti. Back in July, SportsFilter began crashing frequently and neither I nor the hosting service were able to find the cause. I've never been an ... (read more)

2009/01/14

Peace Declared Between Myself and Sweden

As it turns out, Sweden did not intentionally declare war on my web server earlier this month. Programmer Daniel Stenberg explains how the international incident happened: A few years ago I wrote up silly little perl script (let's call it script.pl) that would fetch a page from a site that returns a "random URL off the internet." I needed a range of URLs for a test program of mine and just making up a thousand or so URLs is tricky. Thus I wrote this script that I would run and allow to get a ... (read more)

2008/12/30

Using Treemaps to Visualize Complex Information

I spent some time today digging into treemaps, a way to represent information visually as a series of nested rectangles whose colors are determined by an additional measurement. If that explanation sounds hopelessly obtuse, take a look at a world population treemap created using Honeycomb, enterprise treemapping software developed by the Hive Group: This section of the treemap shows the countries of Africa. The size of each rectangle shows its population relative to the other countries. The ... (read more)

2008/12/23

Finding Updated Feeds with Simple Update Protocol

FriendFeed is working on Simple Update Protocol (SUP), a means of discovering when RSS and Atom feeds on a particular service have been updated without checking all of the individual feeds. Feeds indicate that their updates can be tracked with SUP by adding a new link tag, as in this example from an Atom feed: <link rel="http://api.friendfeed.com/2008/03#sup" href="http://friendfeed.com/api/sup.json#53924729" type="application/json" /> The rel attribute identifies an ID for the feed, ... (read more)

2008/12/06

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