Really Simple Syndication
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Copyright 2003-4 World Readable
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Really Simple Syndication
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Copyright 2003-4 World Readable
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Troutgirl: So I was terminated from Friendster today. The reason given was blogging.
Source: Scoble.
Randy: Judging by the posts that got Troutgirl canned, I would suspect she upset some of the JSP folk at Friendster, but we'll never know the truth, just two half-truths.
Cory Doctorow: Joyce Park is a coder who worked at Friendster, leading the charge to re-engineer the poky, Java-based back-end with fast PHP. She blogged about it, got slashdotted, got written up in the press -- and got fired. Even though there was nothing confidential in her blog posts, the new CEO shitcanned her.
Jeremy Zawodny: Now, pardon me while I got figure out how to cancel my Friendster account. I suggest you do the same.
Roger Johansson: Non well-formed XHTML. Using XHTML that is not well-formed. Why? If XHTML is served as âapplication/xhtml+xmlâ, which it should be, strictly compliant browsers, like those based on Mozilla, will not render non well-formed XHTML. Note that this site currently does not serve all documents as âapplication/xhtml+xmlâ, for certain reasons explained in my post on Content negotiation.
Randy: Everybody seems to agree w/ me. Mal-formed XHTML sucks. Don't do it.
Tim Ewald: Randy commented on yesterday's post about how I use XSD. He doesn't like the use of multiple global element decls because it makes it unclear which one or ones can be used as the root of a document. I like the GED-centric model because I often want to reuse chunks of XML in multiple places and it feels like the best way to do that. There is a larger point here, though.
Randy: Tim follows up on my previous concern about his use of XML Schema. I have to agree w/ him. My approach is about authoring XSD and his is about validation. He suggests writing 2 XSD. I've done this many times in the past, most recently when I wrote the Atom XSDs. In this case, I wrote a strict and lax XSD, one for validation and one for use by XSD-based tools like XSDObjectGen. I'm not certain this is a good practice.
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Geeks like stats. BAs like charts. This will be a blogosphere hit. Another great feature from the guys at Technorati. Now, if only they could get their core engine to respond correctly in reasonable time. Source: Sifry. |
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This is not a political blog, but I thought this was a creative use of XML. The question is whether it's valid XML. I ran it thru all the XML validators and they all accepted it. Weird! I investigated the W3C XML specs and found an obscure section that confirms that the </BUSH> end tag is the only end tag that may be present w/out start tag. At first, I thought this didn't make any sense, but then I remembered that Bush is the only president elected w/out a plurality of the vote. XML reflects real life.
Source: BoingBoing.
Source: Danny.
Rich Manalang presents us w/ several XSLT for converting various syndication formats to HTML. Did you know that this blog is presented by running an XSLT on an RSS 2.0 file? Add a CSS file and you have a blog presented w/ 99% XML, HTML and CSS. I do prammatically (C#) add some content to the original RSS file; like the blog archive and referrers.
I was posting to my blinks blog on blogger using their SMTP blogging interface and I got this. Arggg!
Your message could not be posted because of the following reason(s): [cut] XML-RPC Error or Publishing Problem.
David Sifry: We are very pleased that CNN has invited Technorati back to provide real-time analysis of the political blogosphere at next week's Republican National Convention.
Source: Joi Ito.
Randy: And David moves the blogosphere forward. Thanks again!
Devon: That Randy Charles Morin quote is awesome. I couldn't have said it better myself. I've been aggrevated a lot by code with an XHTML DTD and either not closing empty tags or bad nesting all over the place. I'm like, what's the point? If you don't want to code XHTML, then don't. It's simple.
Randy: Thanks Devon.
Anne: Today, Ben posted a phrase in an IRC channel that made me remember my draft:
To X or not to X, that's the question.
Maybe you have read web development mistakes already. The answer is given in comment 30, made by Randy Charles Morin:
You forgot, using non well formed XHTML. This is the most irritating mistake on the Web. I mean, why use XHTML instead of HTML if it's not well-formed?
Excellent question (and answer). Are you well-formed?
Randy: I like this post, but I very much dislike the comments attached. I'll explain further as I compile my own "To X or not to X" micro-article.
Quote: Joichi Ito is in charge of international and mobility for Technorati (www.technorati.com) and the founder, CEO of Neoteny (www.neoteny.com), a venture capital firm which is the lead investor in Six Apart (www.sixapart.com), and is on the board of Creative Commons (www.creativecommons.org).
Randy: One of the blogosphere's finest.
Dave Winer: I just find that I'm repelled by the idea of raising multiple millions of dollars for a business where the tools can be had so cheaply. What are you going to charge for?
Randy: So tonight I'm gonna party like it's 1999. Or at least David Sifry is :)
Randy: Google adds support for us little bloggers. I know there's some license in there that tells bloggers not to reveal performance stats. Well, I'm not going to sign up. So, if you would like to email me your performance stats. Anonymous or not, I will not reveal any sources. But, I'll gladly aggregate the data and report back.
I find XHTML troubling. There's a lot of users out there that are trying to produce XHTML Websites, but are still writing HTML code.
<p><img src="..." alt="..."></p>
Ted Neward: As .NET gains momentum in the developer community, many people (including this editor) have been saying that .NET needs a stronger, more vibrant open-source community to counteract the innovation that's been coming from its competitors' communities.
Source: Bill de hÃra.
Randy: I just wish I had the time.
Evhead: We just launched a cool new tool at Pyra. It's called Blogger. It's an automated weblog publishing tool.
Randy: What an awesome roller coaster. From Blogger, to almost nothing, to a Google takeover, to a great IPO. Congrats to Evhead and Steve.
Om Malik: My sources indicate that it was a mega-round, about $6.5 million at a valuation of around $12 million for the company.
Randy: Awesome news for Technorati. Let the blogosphere moneys flow.
Quote: And people wonder why RSS turned my hair gray.
Source: Roger Cadenhead.
Randy: Another misleading article on RSS and Atom. There's a history here. This is very similar to the presidential race. Bush carries on a positive campaign, while his VP and his lackeys attack the opposition w/ obviously invalid arguments.
Custom eBay searches delivered by RSS.
Source: Smartpatrol.
Tim Ewald: Relax NG is much simpler and much closer to how XML actually works.
Source: Dare Obasanjo.
Randy: I think everybody agrees Relax NG is better. Now, we replace XML Schema in WS-* w/ Relax NG. Tomorrow, somebody says that Schematron is even better. Then what?
Today, I wrote the XSLT code to add a Bloglines subscribe button to my blogs. Here's an example HTML fragment.
<a href="http://www.bloglines.com/sub/https://rssweblog.com/">
<img src="http://www.bloglines.com/images/sub_modern5.gif" alt="Subscribe with Bloglines">
</a>
Change the URL embedded in the HREF to create a subscribe button for your blog. I reverse engineered this fragment from a View Source of Steve Rubel's blog.
Code only follows, for now.
<form method="post" runat="server" >
<INPUT type="file" id="MyFileControl" runat="server"/>
<input type="submit"/>
</form>
private void Page_Load(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
{
System.Web.UI.HtmlControls.HtmlInputFile file =
(System.Web.UI.HtmlControls.HtmlInputFile)FindControl("MyFileControl");
}
Chris Sells: Every year it gets harder to pick speakers for the DevCon. This year, I had 4x the number of submissions for which I had available slots. So, while it's hard for me to pick, it makes for a fabulous line up for attendees: For speakers, we've got keynotes from Tim Bray (co-inventor of XML) and Tim Ewald. We've also got Don Box, Sam Ruby, Jeff Barr (of Amazon.com), Keith Brown, Scott Hanselman, Chris Anderson, Doug Purdy, Ted Neward, Rich Salz and more.
Randy: That's quite a list of speakers. This sounds like the one conference I would like to attend, if only I lived on the West Coast. Sam is calling his presentation "XML is an attractive nuisance."
Shelley noted there are no women in the speaker list. Dare responded w/ a list of women in XML.
I thought it might be interesting to visit the largest blogs in our blogosphere and find out just who's HTML validates and how well. My results follow.
Actually, I skipped a couple that validated, like Sam Ruby and Tim Bray was really close (1 trivial error).
eWeek: Feedster Inc. is embracing RSS advertising with plans to add sponsored links into its feeds of search results. The search engine for Weblogs and syndication feeds on Monday will announce an expansion of its advertising program that will include the use of contextual advertising from Kanoodle Inc. in its feeds. [cut] Users wanting ad-free feeds can pay a $10 annual fee and receive a Creative Commons license for noncommercial use of the feeds.
Source: Ross Mayfield.
My list of bloggers that should immediately be inducted into such a hall of fame. In no particular order.
What is yours?
Bloglines: Bloglines [cut] today marked a major growth milestone: more than 100 million live, dynamic articles are now indexed and tracked by the service.
Source: Steve Rubel.
Steve Rubel: Blogging is growing. And let's face facts. As a result there are some webloggers who have been at it a long time and are truly outstanding. They write better than the rest of us. They break the news. They define what blogging is and then smash the rules. These bloggers deserve special recognition. They have graduated from the ranks and are superstars. They're Hall of Famers.
InternetNews: The tried and true marketing and PR departments may one day make the endangered species list thanks to a rush of corporate interest in blogs and RSS feeds. Weblogging -- or blogging -- is taking social networking to new heights.
Source: Steve Rubel.
Randy: A very interesting article on how RSS is taking the world of PR by storm. There is some obvious mistake in the article. Italics are quotes from the InternetNews article.
The addition of XML, (define) and Atom have augmented RSS, making posting and retrieving information easier than ever. Randy: Nobody added XML to RSS, it started out as an application XML. Atom is still in the specification stage, so it hasn't made anything easier, yet.
While it is difficult to calculate exactly how many individuals are using Web sites as journals, Blog Census estimates that there are roughly 2.1 million likely Weblogs. Randy: LiveJournal has over 4 million blogs alone.
I spent a half hour today, making certain that my four primary blogs (iBLOGthere4iM, RSS, RVDad and Juice) validate using W3C's HTML validator. This is part of my spread the HTML validation meme, at home first. I didn't try to fix up my archive pages, that would be a task for a rainy month. Also, I validate the pages using my Juice browser. Point, click and validate.
Update: Validation requires persistance. In writing this blog item, I caused my blog to become invalid. Need a better hammer.
There's a movement a foot to validate everybodies' blog using the W3C HTML validator. My blog has a few issues. A couple are long known issues that I've fix in the transform, but have not yet deployed. A couple others are simple laziness on my part when I write new blog entries. I'll try to do a better job.
My point, I haven't made a point yet. We should validate our HTML, no doubt. A few errors here and there isn't that bad, but it's still bad. A truck full of errors is, well, bad. Any errors on a few lines of HTML is, well, bad. Non well-formed XHTML is very bad (Why use XHTML if it's not going to be well-formed). My point, is that most of us have HTML validation issues. Let's work on them. But, those complaining have HTML validation issues also. Find a mirror and fix your own blog.
Last, validation is a great reason to use the Juice Browser. There's menu options to validate HTML, CSS, RSS, XML well-formedness and XML. It's pretty cool. Surf to the page you want to validate. Point and click. Validation results.
Bloglines: It appears that Slashdot is banning the Bloglines crawler for at least some of their feeds. Our standard policy is to only crawl feeds once an hour, which agrees with Slashdot's feed polling policy. We hope to have the issue resolved soon.
Randy: The problem is that Bloglines' standard policy and implementation are not the same.
Quote: Do you want to help shape one of the fastest-growing and most innovative areas of the web? As a user-interface engineer, on the Blogger team, you will help define how people create, find, and share personal content online. Be a part of the Google team that pioneered the blogging phenomenon.
Source: Steve Jenson.
Geeking w/ Greg: Scott Johnson (VP of Engineering at Feedster) has a desperate sounding post about dealing with quality, reliability, and scaling issues at Feedster. [cut] Feedster and Technorati are fantastic blog search engines, more targeted and useful than Google for finding weblogs and weblog articles. Lately, because of Technorati's own scaling issues, I've been tending to use Feedster a lot more. I haven't noticed quality or performance issues with Feedster, but it does sound like they're struggling. [cut] Some might recommend taking time for a big rearchitecture project. "Stop doing anything, freeze the code, and rewrite everything," they'll say. I'd recommend against that approach. I've never seen anyone successfully deliver a rearchitecture project that had no other purpose but "cleaning up the code."
Randy: Greg is pretty smart. I have to agree entirely w/ his last statement where I too have never seen a successful rearchitecture project. And you can add my current project, Lemontonic to the scaling woes category.
header('Content-type: application/rss+xml', true);
Randy: Let good RSS practices spread thru the blogosphere.
Sam Ruby: In researching how Atom and the FeedValidator should handle URI equivalence, I took a look at how language environments with built in URI classes implement equality methods.
Randy: Question? How would the Python URI type or class do? Is it fully compliant w/ RFC 2396bis.
Quote: Microsoft Corp. said on Wednesday it was launching its first-ever Web log service in Japan next week and aimed to have one million users in the first year, intensifying competition with Google Inc.
Randy: Interesting! {add Transylvanian accent}
Phil Ringnalda: atom-syntax means never having to wonder whether you've got unread mail.
Source: Dave Walker in my comments.
Scott Johnson of Feedster: "Clearly this could be easily done through an RSS 2.0 namespace extension [cut] So its not a question of "can it be done" but more "should it be done".
Randy: IMHO, trackbacks as commented-out RDF w/in your HTML is nothing more than a lazy programmer's hack, but trackbacks in your RSS is a well architected solution. Check out my RSS feed. The trackbacks have been in place for some time.
SEO's generally don't have a grasp of the technology to do an automated post, automated comment or automated trackback. Most blog SPAM comes from manual entry by a persistant SEO. Now, don't get me wrong, trackback SPAM is on the uptake and they'll eventually figure out how to do the automated trackback via RSS, so be prepared w/ a neat little feature to either approve comments individually or delete them individually.
Update: Here's the link to the Trackbacks in RSS specification.
W/ all the recent misleading blog entries on RSS scaling, I thought I'd spend a few moments enumerating the techniques that can be used to better scale your RSS feed.
I'll further post individually on how each technique is used to reduce RSS bandwidth.
Rogers Cadenhead : For West's weblog, I used this technique to add another feature she wanted -- the full text of extended weblog entries in the feed:
<description>
<![CDATA[<MTEntryBody>
<MTEntryIfExtended>
<p><MTEntryMore>
</MTEntryIfExtended>]]>
</description>
Randy: More full-content blog entry in MovableType. Note this is proper RSS 2.0 form. Don't use a CDATA encoding in a RSS 1.0 description. This is illegal. Rather, you should use content:encoded in place of description when using RSS 1.0.
Jason Calacanis: After trying to figure out a deal they told me that I could just buy the editorial. The cost? Like $300 to $400 for a story. I was shockedâ¦. all this time Iâve been reading Fark.com it turns out that some percentage of the stories are paid for. Looking back on it Iâm now sure the adult links are all paid for, as are the ifilm.com links.
Randy: Fark is a farce? And they admit it. Hmmm! I can buy that. We watched BoingBoing go commercial over the last few months, w/ banners. Why not Fark?
Source: Joi Ito.
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