Rss

Aaron Swartz Running for Wikipedia Board

Aaron Swartz is running for a position on the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation, an election that began today and ends in three weeks. A contributor to the site since 2003 with around 2,400 edits, Swartz is running in part to help out on the huge engineering requirements of the project: Since January, Wikipedia's traffic has more than doubled and this group is beginning to strain under the load. At the technical level, the software development and server systems are both managed by ... (read more)

2006/09/01

Testing an RSS Feed's TTL (Time to Live)

I'm currently researching the RSS element ttl, which tells aggregators how long to cache a feed before checking it again. Although ttl has been part of RSS since the original version 2.0 published by UserLand Software in 2002, I'm having trouble finding aggregators that honor it. This weblog entry is going out in an RSS feed with this value: <ttl>90<ttl> Aggregators that support the element should check it no more than once every 90 minutes. ... (read more)

2006/08/30

Cry Me a News River, Dave Winer

Dave Winer boasts about earning millions in revenue last year by blogging. Over in another part of the tech blogosphere they're having a discussion about blogs that make big money. I still think Scripting News has the record there, by a wide margin. Last year we did $2.3 million in revenue. Expenses? One salary (mine) and about $1000 per month in server costs. A few thousand for contract programming. Pre-tax profit? Millions. His claim to have made seven figures blogging is a stretch, since ... (read more)

2006/08/23

RMail Feeds RSS to 20,000 Email Users

The path Randy Charles Morin is taking with RMail, a service for reading RSS feeds by e-mail, is beginning to remind me of how Joshua Schacter's hobby project, del.icio.us, was adopted by so many people that it mushroomed into his full-time gig and was acquired by Yahoo six months later. Users are joining RMail at such a fast clip that Morin finally realized there's commercial potential in the idea. With absolutely no Web 2.0 fanfare and a web design that's optimized for Internet Explorer ... (read more)

2006/08/15

RSS 2.0 Specification (version 2.0.8) Published

The RSS Advisory Board proposal to revise the RSS specification has passed 7-0 with members Matthew Bookspan, Rogers Cadenhead, Loïc Le Meur, Jenny Levine, Eric Lunt, Randy Charles Morin and Greg Smith voting in favor. The specification has been edited to reflect http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification as the document's permanent URL and RSS-Public as the mailing list where users should post RSS-related questions and comments. No other changes were made. All edits to the specification are ... (read more)

2006/08/12

Most Major U.S. Papers Offer RSS Feeds

The Bivings Group has issued a study on RSS, podcast and blog adoption at the top 100 American newspapers: 76 of the newspapers offer RSS feeds 0 of those feeds contain the full text of articles 0 of the feeds contain ads 31 offer podcasts 80 offer reporter blogs 19 publish reader comments 77 don't require registration I'd love to have the study's list of papers that offer RSS and don't require registration, because they're the best sources for news articles to pass along on blogs like the ... (read more)

2006/08/07

Minor Edits Proposed to RSS Specification

An RSS Advisory Board vote has begun on minor edits to the RSS specification: Revise the specification to reflect http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification as the permanent URL of the document and RSS-Public as the mailing list where users can pose questions about the format. Give this version of the specification document the revision number "RSS 2.0.8". ... (read more)

2006/08/04

Final Push on the RSS Profile

I published a new draft today of the RSS Profile, a set of recommendations for how to best implement and support RSS. This profile will be proposed to the RSS Advisory Board for its approval on Aug. 28. The profile is four months in the making and could be proposed today, but I'd like to hammer on it for four more weeks. I think it has the potential to become the second-most popular reference document in RSS. ... (read more)

2006/07/27

Jason Douglas Joins RSS Advisory Board

Jason Douglas, the project lead on the RSS Platform at Yahoo and the cocreator of Channel Definition Format, has joined the RSS Advisory Board. The board now has members from Google, Microsoft and Yahoo. If we can find a member from Apple's RSS team, we'll be in an even better position to help the big companies and enterpreneurial companies like FeedBurner and Six Apart work together to promote RSS interop and resolve some incompatibilities between different software that supports syndication. ... (read more)

2006/06/21

Adding Atom 1.0 Support to RSS Sites

I switched to Atom 1.0 on Workbench two months ago, a move that hasn't been as smooth as I'd like because of one popular aggregator that doesn't support the format. This site is created using Wordzilla, a LAMP-based weblog publishing tool that I've developed over the last year. Writing code to generate Atom feeds in PHP was extremely simple, since most of the code used to generate RSS feeds could be applied to the task. Atom uses a different format for date-time values than RSS, so I had to ... (read more)

2006/05/27

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