RSS and Syndication

14th September 2004

Browser innovation is alive and well

Here's a feature that caught me by surprise (maybe I haven't been keeping my ear close enough to the ground): the new Firefox 1.0 preview release supports Live Bookmarks, a novel twist on RSS aggregat...

1st September 2004

How to track an RSS feed

According to the HTTP specification, RSS/Atom aggregators should obey the HTTP 301 Moved Permanently header by altering the stored subscription URL for the feed they are attempting to retrieve. Thi...

16th June 2004

The orange XML icon sucks

I'm not a fan of the orange XML icon, even though I use it on my categories page. I love the concept of a universally recognised icon for RSS feeds, but XML is simply the wrong acronym to put on it. D...

6th June 2004

They Work For You

Today is/was (you never can tell with these wretched time zone differences) NotCon 2004, London's premiere low-cost, informal, one-day technology conference. Friday's MiniNTK promised the unveiling of...

18th May 2004

Atom discussion minutes

The minutes from the Atom/W3C discussion in New York have been posted online. Unfortunately the default formatting is pretty difficult to follow. I found it a lot easier to figure out who was saying w...

18th February 2004

Advanced Python network programming

Understanding Network I/O, Part 2 by George Belotsky (via The Farm) is the best tutorial on the subject of network programming I've seen yet. It provides a detailed explanation of simple threaded netw...

12th February 2004

RSS vs Atom, condensed

Jeremy Zawodny: Since everyone's jumping up and down about the Atom vs. RSS (or "Google vs. RSS" if that's your paranoia) debate, it's probably worth pointing out that My Yahoo's RSS module also gr...

5th February 2004

Hot Links

The thing I love about RSS, and by extension web services, is that they allow people to take publically available data and combine it in ways never thought of by the originator of the feed. The intern...

20th December 2003

Atom autodiscovery test suite

Mark Pilgrim has released the Atom autodiscovery test suite, comprising 148 tests: When we say that Atom is going to have better specs, validators, and conformance tests than anything you've ever s...

26th November 2003

Feed you

Wow, that's what I call feedback! It's a shame pretty much everyone hates the new design but I like it so it stays. I've taken a few tips though and tweaked the link colours a bit, as well as making a...

8th October 2003

Yahoo News Search RSS feeds

It's not a new idea (Feedster has been doing it for a while) but it's a first for a major search engine: Yahoo are now offering RSS feeds of the results of searches within Yahoo news. The feeds are ad...

11th July 2003

Sitting nervously on the fence

Today's hot topic is the Winer Watcher, Mark Pilgrim's new tool that tracks and highlights edits made to Dave Winer's Scripting News. The blogosphere is pretty much evenly split on this: some people t...

RSS Links

Here's one for budding RSS historians: Ken MacLeod's RSS Links is a collection of links relevant to the development of RSS between March 15, 1999 and August 14, 2000. Ken also provides a distilled lis...

10th July 2003

Clearout

Tristan Louis' RSS to Necho convertor puts paid to the idea that the success of one format will be detrimental to the usefulness of the other. O'Reilly's RegExp Power series (part one and part tw...

9th July 2003

Throwing your money around

Adam Curry is a dangerous man: He's throwing $10,000 at a problem he clearly doesn't understand. Quote from June 29th: I wonder if netscape came up with the Really Simple Syndication when they hi...

6th July 2003

Google oddities

Dave Winer: For several months this Google search would turn up a UserLand page as the number one hit. Today it's not in the first ten pages. Must be a bug. Or do they play games with their se...

2nd July 2003

The Verbosity of Echo

Sam Ruby has called for people to start experimenting with the current (very early) Echo example feeds, and the response has been pretty impressive; check out these feeds from Joel Spolsky, Phil Ringn...

25th June 2003

More thoughts on RSS

I helped my girlfriend set up an RSS feed for her (home brewed) weblog last night. Explaining what RSS was was easy. Explaining what she needed to put in her feed took a little bit longer. All she nee...

24th June 2003

BBC News Feeds

Adrian Holovaty has the scoop on the BBC's new RSS feeds, one for every news index page of their site. Adrian has also written a bookmarklet to find the feed for any section of the BBC site....

Friends' Blogs

My friend Tristan has got his blosxom powered blog up and running again. He's also set up an experimental public aggregator of feeds from a small group of friends from Uni, using blosxom's companion a...

20th June 2003

Problems with RSS

Tim Bray explains RSS to an imaginary bank manager: Mr Safe: Well, I've learned that sometimes we have to take little risks on these Internet standards, and they pay off. RSS is an Internet Sta...

12th June 2003

Safely consuming RSS: RegExps don't cut it

Mark Pilgrim highlights the severe security issues introduced by RSS aggregators that display potentially unsafe HTML, often executing it in the "secure zone" generally reserved for trusted local docu...

23rd April 2003

Supporting Conditional GET in PHP

This site's RSS feeds now support Conditional GET. Since the feeds are dynamically generated on every request, adding support took a bit of hacking around with PHP. Here's the function I came up with ...

22nd April 2003

Tim Bray on RSS

Tim Bray: RSS Needs Fixing: Because, boys and girls, RSS is no longer a science experiment, it's becoming an important part of the infrastructure, which means that a lot of programmmers are going...