Rss

Fixing a Pending Urchin Task

I check web stats with Urchin 5.6, a server log reporting program that's available for Windows, Linux, MacOS, and other systems. Urchin does the job reasonably well, but at least once a month the program's scheduler gets stuck reading a site's log, hanging forever as a "pending" or "running" task. I found the solution to the problem on an Urchin support page: Stop the scheduler, use the uconf-driver utility program to set several values that reset the stuck site, then restart the scheduler. ... (read more)

2005/08/26

Syndication is Still Simple

Every time RSS comes up for discussion, someone links to Mark Pilgrim's misleading article about the version history of RSS, making a comment like this: RSS with its 9 [diveintomark.org] +1 [rss3.org] incompatible versions is hardly a standard for anything. It is a huge pain for a implementer to decide which versions to support. There are only two significant versions of RSS: RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0. These formats have one major technical difference that prevents their merger: RSS 1.0 makes use of ... (read more)

2005/08/22

RSS 3.0: Please Pass the Fork

Jonathan Avidan has announced RSS 3.0, a one-man attempt to fork RSS 2.0. As far as I can tell, this is Avidan's first involvement in syndication. He's passing over three groups -- the developers of RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, and Atom -- without making an attempt to work with any of us. RSS 3.0 is pitched as a better-specified version of RSS 2.0, but it drops a bunch of elements and makes changes to several others, so it's more than a spec rewrite. Avidan also claims it will make Atom better, which ... (read more)

2005/08/19

I'd Rather Fight Than Switch

Anil Dash, responding to Don Park's take on the Atom 1.0 launch: Don, you raise a lot of really good points, but surely you can't argue that changes like clarifying the RSS 2.0 spec, transferring ownership to a neutral party, and embracing namespaces weren't at least partially motivated by the existence of Atom? Even if you don't like the feed format (and I'll gladly concede the API is much more interesting), Atom's the best thing that's ever happened to RSS, no? No. If you compare today's RSS ... (read more)

2005/07/15

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

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