Rss

Happy Birthday, You Old RSS Advisory Board

The RSS Advisory Board just turned 20. It was launched on July 18, 2003 -- the same day Harvard was given the RSS specification and released it under Creative Commons for the board to manage. I became a member 10 months later and have been one since then, often as the chairman and always as the webmaster. The brouhaha last month over the W3C republishing the RSS 2.0 specification was the first in a long time. There used to be more drama around RSS than on The Young and The Restless, but ... (read more)

2023/07/18

Helping Doc Searls Survive a Blog Apocalypse

Five days before the Blogs at Harvard server was scheduled for shutdown, I asked Doc Searls on Twitter where his blog would be moving. He'd been on the server since August 1, 2007, and had written a staggeringly huge number of entries. I was not expecting his response: Holy shit. I hadn't heard it would. Do you have a link? This began a frantic four days in which I helped him export his blog to a new server before the meteor struck. The move was from one WordPress server to another. ... (read more)

2023/07/14

What Do I Think of the Pie?

With all the attention the RSS Advisory Board has been getting lately, I've been doing some work on the site, primarily to make it look better on mobile. I also wrote a tutorial on how to read RSS with PHP using SimplePie. For years my sites have used another library called Magpie to do the same thing, which made me wonder why people keep naming RSS libraries after pie. SimplePie co-creator Ryan Parman explained this on his blog: SimplePie is an amalgamation of the phrase "Simple API for Magpie ... (read more)

2023/06/26

Defending the W3C's Publication of the RSS Specification

The W3C publishes a copy of the RSS 2.0 specification on its website as part of the documentation for its Feed Validation Service. Dave Winer has started making complaints that the W3C is violating his copyright. As the chairman of the RSS Advisory Board, the group whose document the W3C is republishing, I can state that there is no copyright violation by the W3C. It is redistributing our copy of the RSS 2.0 Specification under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike ... (read more)

2023/06/19

What Do You Use to Read RSS Feeds?

In 2007, the RSS Advisory Board published the RSS Best Practices Profile, our advice for how to produce RSS feeds that work best in the wide variety of feed readers, web browsers and other software that consumes feeds. The RSS specification is poorly written in several areas, leading to disagreement over the correct way to do things. We wanted to help programmers and web publishers avoid these hassles. The programs tested as we drafted the profile were Bloglines, BottomFeeder 4.4, Feed Demon ... (read more)

2014/02/25

Subscribers I Lost When Google Reader Died

Back in July, I noted how many RSS readers my sites had. I figured that the July 1 closure of Google Reader, by far the most popular feed reader used by my visitors, would show up in the stats at some point and I wanted to quantify the change. The subscriber numbers didn't drop for a long time, but it appears they finally are reflected in the analytics on FeedBurner, the service I use to deliver feeds. Here's the past and current RSS reader counts for my sites and the percentage drop: Drudge ... (read more)

2013/09/06

Hey! You! Get Off of RssCloud

Clinton Gallagher recently posted a blistering tirade against me in the comments of Workbench. He thinks that I'm part of a dishonest campaign against Dave Winer and the RssCloud element: Cadenhead you are being a jerk putting words in the mouth of Dave Winer --again-- as those of us who used to read the RSS mailing lists can attest; so herein I speak for myself in this regard. Secondly, if you were as professional as you imply Cadenhead --and-- if you were an all-around decent kind of fair ... (read more)

2010/07/22

Google Isn't Trying to Screw RSS

Dave Winer claims on Scripting News today that Google is playing dirty with RSS in favor of Atom: ... Google is going to start reading feeds, but if I understand correctly, they're going to ignore the billions of RSS feeds out there, and ask everyone to convert to Atom to get more currency in search. You can imagine that I don't like this. I wouldn't like it even if I didn't play a big role in getting those billions of feeds out there. I wouldn't like because I have thousands of RSS feeds on my ... (read more)

2010/03/04

Real-Time Twitpic Images Coming from Chile

When news breaks such as today's massive earthquake in Chile, one of the first places where images show up from the scene is on Twitpic, a popular image-posting service for Twitter users. You can find links to these images on Twitter search by including "twitpic" as one of your search terms, but that's not as useful as seeing thumbnails of the actual images. You have to click each link to see what it contains. To make it easier to see the images being posted about Chile, I wrote a Java ... (read more)

2010/02/27

Anil Dash is Wrong About Treehouse Clubs

In a post about how the Twitter API is becoming a de facto standard, Anil Dash derides the impulse of groups to work together to create web standards: The natural inclination right now for geeks of a certain type is to start dreaming up new standards bodies, or how they can participate in the Open Web Foundation to make a Super Awesome Twitter API Evolution Committee. Here's my recommendation: Don't. Don't do any of that ----, and don't run off to make membership badges for the Treehouse Club ... (read more)

2009/12/18

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