Rss

RSS Advisory Board Goes Public

A new era begins today for the RSS Advisory Board, an independent organization formed in 2003 that publishes the Really Simple Syndication (RSS) specification, helps developers create RSS applications and broadens public understanding of the format. The board is taking on eight new members: Meg Hourihan, Loic Le Meur, Eric Lunt, Ross Mayfield, Jenny Levine, Randy Charles Morin, Greg Reinacker and Dave Sifry. I'm serving as chairman this year unless they kick me to the curb. The new members are ... (read more)

2006/01/30

My RSS is Bright Orange

After tinkering with the common syndication icon for RSS and Atom a bit more on Workbench, I've added text that makes the purpose of the orange blibbet less obscure. Subscribe The HTML markup relies on Cascading Style Sheets to align properly and turn the text orange before it is clicked: Subscribe Here's the styles defined for this markup: .rsslink { font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-transform: uppercase; text-align: center; font-size: 10px; } .rsslink a { ... (read more)

2006/01/30

Mozilla, Microsoft Promote New Syndication Icon

The developers of Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 have agreed on a common icon to represent syndication feeds, an orange radial symbol created by Stephan Horlander for Firefox. Both browsers display the icon in the status bar when a web page has been associated with a feed using autodiscovery, a simple HTML link tag that provides the feed's address: <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="http://feeds.cadenhead.org/workbench"> The icon's ... (read more)

2006/01/24

UserLand Frees Up Manila Servers

UserLand Software is discontinuing free Manila hosting, as I discovered last week when one of their users sought refuge on Buzzword.Com. Edit This Page shut free service on Dec. 1 and ManilaSites will do the same Dec. 31. I can offer free hosting on Buzzword, but webloggers who are committed to publishing with Manila should be advised that I'm migrating the server to new software by May 1, 2006. A better long-term option for those folks is to subscribe to Weblogger.Com or UserLand. (As an ... (read more)

2005/12/05

Adam Curry Caught in Sticky Wiki

Former MTV veejay and podcasting entrepreneur Adam Curry appears to have been caught anonymously editing the podcasting entry on Wikipedia to remove credit from other people and inflate his role in its creation. When someone edits Wikipedia without logging in to a user account, the IP address is recorded to guard against abuse. Four times this year, an IP address controlled by Curry, 82.108.78.107, has made revisions involving the early history of podcasting. On Feb. 5, someone at Curry's ... (read more)

2005/12/01

Choosing an Official RSS Mime

A new article on Advogato proposes an extension to the RSS MIME type. The proposal's premised on a few misconceptions about RSS, but Advogato's trust-metric system doesn't trust me enough to comment. RSS isn't a single format with "a multitude of different incompatible RSS versions." There are two formats: the RDF-based RSS 1.0 and the slightly simpler RSS 2.0. Neither format defines application/rss+xml as the MIME type for RSS, and it isn't officially recognized by the Internet Assigned ... (read more)

2005/08/27

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

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