Rss

Simple Syndication in Communist China

While researching the skateboard jump over the Great Wall of China, I found RSS in an unusual place: The English language edition of People's Daily, the official newspaper of the Communist Party of China, offers 18 RSS 2.0 newsfeeds. In addition to feeds on current events in news, business, sports, and other areas, the paper devotes feeds to party leaders such as Chinese President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao. Outside observers of China often look to People's Daily for clues about the inner ... (read more)

2005/07/10

When I upgraded the Drudge Retort, I wanted to simpify things by offering a single feed in RSS 2.0 format. Any halfway decent aggregator supports RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, and Atom, so offering all three on a site just gives you two more things that can break. I quickly discovered that the Retort has 212 subscribers to its Atom feed on Bloglines, none of whom were getting updates when I redirected the URL to the RSS feed. So I added Atom support to Wordzilla and recreated the feed. Bloglines won't poll ... (read more)

2005/05/27

FeedBurner Plants a Bug

FeedBurner has begun adding web bugs to syndicated feeds that enable the service to track use of individual items. I noticed them recently in RSS feeds for The Nation: Priscilla Owen's confirmation is the bitter fruit of the unprincipled "compromise" on judical nominations. The img tag at the end of this description loads the web bug, a transparent one-by-one pixel graphic. Niall Kennedy wrote earlier this month that they're part of a paid statistics package. Every time a bugged item is viewed ... (read more)

2005/05/26

FeedBurner Users: Playing With Fire

I read this morning that Andrew Sullivan has added syndicated feeds to his weblog using FeedBurner. No offense to the FeedBurner developers, but every time I see this, I marvel that another weblogger has handed over their most loyal readers to a third party. FeedBurner offers several features for feed providers, but only one seems genuinely useful: better feed-reading statistics. The others -- multiple feed format support, podcasting enclosures, Creative Commons licensing -- are easy to get ... (read more)

2005/03/26

Permission to Speak Freely on RSS

After a few webloggers objected to his practice of reproducing their entries in full on his link site, Robert Scoble tied himself into an interesting knot, claiming that RSS is a format that only exists for software to reuse and remix, thus justifying his actions: RSS is a community syndication system. If you don't like your content being reused in weird, dangerous, wacky ways DO NOT PUT YOUR CONTENT INTO RSS!!! Hint: RSS isn't for humans. It's for syndication and resyndication systems to use. ... (read more)

2005/03/24

Microsoft has been experimenting with a server-side news aggregator integrated with MSN Search. The experiment appears to be offline this morning, but Richard MacManus grabbed a few screenshots. ... (read more)

2005/03/10

RSS Begat RSS Begat RSS

Sean Palmer and Christopher Schmidt have released a new draft of RSS 1.1, an independent effort to replace the RDF-based syndication format RSS 1.0. When I covered this subject originally, the spec's subtitle -- which dubbed it an "initial draft" -- threw me off about how long it has been under development. As the Rough Guide to RSS 1.1 explains, Palmer has been working on his proposal since at least September 2002. I don't heart RDF, so I have no opinion on whether 1.1 should replace 1.0. I ... (read more)

2005/01/27

Multiple Item Enclosures in RSS 2.0

I'm gathering information for the RSS Advisory Board on the issue of multiple item enclosures in an RSS 2.0 feed. On first reading, it appears to me that an item must contain either zero or one enclosure elements, but I have to do more research about how existing implementors have interpreted the specification. I created a test feed that contains a single item with two MP3 enclosures. Surprisingly, this feed validates in the Feed Validator and RSS Validator. I'd like to find out if any ... (read more)

2004/12/27

Don't Follow the Script

When his weblog moved in March, Michael Fioritto put JavaScript in the first item of his RSS feed to redirect visitors to his new site.The news aggregator AmphetaDesk read the script tag and executed the redirect, making it impossible for me to use the software until I unsubscribed from his feed, which probably wasn't the effect he was going for.An aggregator that doesn't strip out script and other dangerous tags is a security exploit waiting to happen. ... (read more)

2004/10/08

Elegant Solution to Non-Existent Problem

An article by Mark Pilgrim in XML.Com states that "Really Simple Syndication is really only simple if you're doing it incorrectly," using the guid element as an example. That's a bogus claim to make about guid, a globally unique string that serves a simple purpose: Making sure that an RSS reader doesn't show the same item twice. Pilgrim's article provides a nice tutorial on how to normalize URLs for use as guid values, but he neglects to mention a salient fact: This solves a problem that no one ... (read more)

2004/08/23

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