Rss

I Shot the Albatross

When I wrote a few months ago about a disclosure issue in The Guardian, I didn't expect that the complaint would still be rattling around on weblogs two months later. Perhaps I would feel more strongly if I were quoted in the piece, but to me it's simply a bad judgment call that should have been made differently at the time. I don't want to hang it around the writer's neck like an albatross. I am surprised that editors at The Guardian either don't feel like it was an error or won't admit it, ... (read more)

2004/06/02

Feeding the Feed Validator

I submitted a change to the Feed Validator documentation that was picked up by Sam Ruby this evening: a new answer to the question "How do I make Movable Type output valid RSS 2.0?" that includes a revised RSS 2.0 template. Some old RSS 0.91/2.0 templates in Movable Type produce invalid RSS because date values aren't correctly formatted. The new RSS 2.0 template in Movable Type 3.0 doesn't have this problem, but it includes a new date tag attribute, format_name="rfc822", that isn't supported in ... (read more)

2004/06/01

Atom May Not Be My Type

One of the distinct differences between RSS 2.0 and Atom Syndication Format 0.3 is the ability to declare the kind of information an Atom element holds. In an Atom feed, elements such as weblog entries can have a type attribute that identifies the MIME media type of the content: <p>Kalina, an 18-year-old killer whale at SeaWorld Orlando, gave birth to her fourth calf.</p> Although I originally regarded this as a plus for Atom, as an expert in the format for two going on three days, ... (read more)

2004/05/26

Publishing MySQL Data in RSS 2.0

I'm upgrading all of my syndication feeds to RSS 2.0 so the other syndication format evangelists won't make fun of me. On sites that I publish using PHP and MySQL, I've been offering extremely simple RSS 0.92 feeds that blow up when unusual characters like "¿" are used. I've updated my RSS PHP code, released it into the public domain, and written an article on publishing from a MySQL database to RSS 2.0. Here's example output. ... (read more)

2004/05/22

Avoid Really Skewed Semantics

In an interview with eWeek, Evan Williams of Blogger uses the terms Atom and RSS interchangeably: ... we're certainly excited about RSS. I've actually been using "RSS" as a generic term internally because for a lot of people, it's exactly what you said: That's what you hear about. Of all the positions that can be taken in the RSS/Atom debate, Williams may have discovered the worst. Using the term "RSS" to describe Atom piles more confusion on a subject that a lot of people already find ... (read more)

2004/05/21

I'm On Board with RSS

I've accepted an invitation to join the RSS Advisory Board, the group that evangelizes the RSS 2.0 specification. Contrary to what you may have read elsewhere, RSS 2.0 isn't owned or controlled by vendors. The specification has been released under a Creative Commons license and the format it represents has no trademark or copyright claims. My new job has very little actual power associated with it, sadly enough, and only one groupie. The Advisory Board's primary task is explaining why the ... (read more)

2004/05/12

Improving Movable Type's RSS 2.0 feed

People involved in RSS and Atom development spend too much time bickering about the past and too little trying to move things forward in a constructive way. I'm as guilty of this as anyone -- there's only a small group of cranks who understand this stuff well enough to get angry about it, and I like arguing with most of them. Now that I'm becoming familiar with Movable Type for reasons I can't talk about yet, I can wade into the long-running controversy over the software's default RSS 2.0 ... (read more)

2004/05/03

Google: Don't be Evil to RSS

Jeremy Zawodny reports that Yahoo has added Atom support to My Yahoo: Since everyone's jumping up and down about the Atom vs. RSS (or "Google vs. RSS" if that's your paranoia) debate, it's probably worth pointing out that My Yahoo's RSS module also groks Atom. It was added last night. It took about a half hour. Yahoo's ability to add Atom support that quickly demonstrates why Google is wrong to mothball RSS. As the 600-pound gorilla in weblogging, the company ought to support an established ... (read more)

2004/02/13

I'm a huge fan of Radio Userland, Dave Winer's Swiss Army Knife for Web publishers with data to move around. However, now that Our Favorite Songs is being used to list popular RSS channels instead of songs and Radio Userland's MP3 playlist is only a minor feature of the software, the semantic portion of my brain can't handle all of these misplaced audio metaphors. ... (read more)

2001/02/28