Breaking RSS Semantics
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Whats wrong with this picture?  All these URLs return HTTP 200 0K.  The only problem is that none of them actually exist and they're just HTML error pages.  Now whats wrong with this page?  This page has an RSS chicklet.  The problem is that it doesn't LINK to an RSS page.  It links to an HTML page which then *describes* the link to the RSS feed.  People click on the RSS link and subscribe to this and not the real RSS feed.  To add insult to industry *none* of these HTML pages have RSS autodiscovery.  This isn't funny.
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It seems  PubSub.com is offering a bounty  on an HTTP Delta implementation of RFC 3229.  This seems in response to the current meme  of RSS and Atom syndication bloat.   First off this is certainly *very* generous of them.  I'd like to see this happen more.  Good for you guys!  I myself  have thought that HTTP Deltas were a viable solution but I was wrong.  Of course most people aren't familiar with HTTP deltas.  Eseentially what an HTTP delta enables is a client/server differential protocol that can exchange a patch from the server to the client.  The client is then patched and it will then have the updated version without having to transfer the *entire* document again.  For example say you ...
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It's not very often that you see something new in News.  News is not exactly new technology, but when personal computers came along, and then widespread networking, it created a whole new playing field for news, that has shaken things up for most of my life. Change comes in fits at starts. First there was the web, then RSS, and now I think we're on the cusp of another bit of change. If you want to see what I think it looks like, check out the home page of nytimesriver.com. But that's not the end of the story. A flat completely chronologic view of news probably isn't enough. And earlier this month at a meeting in NY, two engineers at the NY Times set me off in a new direction, with a very simple bit of advice. They told me to look in the HTML source code of their stories. When I did I saw they had applied a taxonomy to their news flow, and this opened the door to what I would like to show you today -- an outline view of the news.  http://nytimesriver.com/outline/  I believe it's fairly self-explanatory.  The topics are arranged in order of frequency in today's news.  In a previous rendering, the stories were shown in a histogram, but this view I think is much better. You can still see how many pieces relate to the indicated topic, but by clicking on the plus next to each topic, you can actually see the headlines and descriptions, and if you want more you can click through to the full stories. (Initially, the outline was sorted by frequency, with the most frequently occurring keyword appearing first. I changed it, based on feedback, to be alphabetic.) Now, there's still more to do, I showed this to a number of people during the weekend and got some excellent clues on ideas to pursue next, and I will do that. Further, in the process of exploring this, I've been shown the work of other developers who discovered the keywords on their own, and one in particular is very interesting. I'm hoping that these projects will come public so I can show them to you and tell you what I think they mean. This is what I live for, professionally -- the sense of being somewhere with great unexplored potential, a virgin landscape of the intellect. I'm never happier than when I get to play in such a place.  Om Malik: A new way to view news. Please comment on the screen shot page.
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Alexey Zakhlestin gave a talk for the PHPThinktank IRC channel recently on the topic of YAML, PHP, and some of the work that he's done combining the two.   It happened a bit of spontaneously, so noone was invited. It was my first try, to make introduction to yaml for php prgrammers, and if there is more interest I will give another talk which will cover more details, this time with proper scheduling :)   You can check out the log of the discussion for his entire talk (covering topics like what YAML is, where to get more information on it, some of its features, and a mention of the Syck library for parsing it).
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Okay I've been writing about OPML reading lists here for years. I'm now on my second implementation, so maybe this time I'll get it right.  But there's something cool that happens when (hypothetically) the entire installed base of podcatchers supports OPML reading lists. All of a sudden the subscription problem goes poof! Ask anyone who's worked on a RSS reader, for that matter, ask anyone who's used one, what a PITA it is to subscribe to a feed. All those little buttons, or copying and pasting, and looking at urls, and trying to figure out whether you want this format or that format. It's a miracle anyone actually subscribes to feeds it's so damned complicated. Before you blame anyone, it's not actually anyone's fault. It's a result of the market not being a monopoly. The only way to solve the problem is if everyone uses the same web app to manage subscriptions. And we know that's not going to happen any time soon. Or, if every reader supports OPML reading lists. Now that might actually happen, even though it's not very likely. But podcasting, that's a whole other story. According to many people there's only one podcatcher, iTunes. So that's simplified the problem. For example, look at this page of NY Times podcasts, and how they handle it.   See the Subscribe button? Nice. Except for one thing. It really should say "Subscribe in iTunes" because that's what it does. And it works, because in many people's minds, iTunes is the only way to subscribe to a podcast. And it could stay that simple if Apple would do one thing, offer the option of publishing the OPML automatically to a publicly accessible web address, so the user could continue to use Apple's server to handle subscriptions, even if they're using a different podcatcher (for example one that runs on a Nokia N800). It would be the mark of a truly great company if they did that. Maybe they are that great. Otheriwse at some point we're going to ask the NY TImes to change their page. And they may not be too happy about that. Wouldn't blame them if they were. Moral of the story: If we can centralize the subscription process, and move it out of one reader or another, and get the readers to all support subscription to reading lists, the awful ugly issue will go away for users. It's one of the oldest tradeoffs in the tech business, to make it simple for users, the vendors have to give up some power.
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Semantic interoperability remains a utopian vision without many practical implementations.
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Related to an issue from a previous post, Greg Beaver has posted a solution to his Relax NG schema problem in PHP.   Shortly after my last blog post, I got a very helpful email from Rob Richards, who offered to help me with my trials and tribulations. He took a quick look at the schema for package.xml, and a sample package.xml and was able to find two small tweaks to make parsing actually work (gasp). This changes everything. I am abandoning the creation of a relax NG schema in favor of the battle-tested xsd. The error messages for xsd validation are far clearer than the rng ones.   The code included shows how much simpler the error messages are with the XSD validation option versus the RNG ones.
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Really Simple Syndication technology, which lets news junkies get instant info feeds from multiple sites, is grabbing investors' attention. The latest evidence: a multimillion-dollar funding round for RSS developer Technorati. By Daniel Terdiman.
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In a new post to his blog today, Danne Lundqvist shares his method for creating a blog aggregator (in the style of the planet-planet sites) to re-aggregate all of the feeds back ou tinto one.   Lately I have begun to get more and more annoyed with my feed reader. I use a simple feed reader which lack most features except for subscribing to and reading feeds. The one thing that annoys me the most is that it can't aggregate several feeds into one feed. Yesterday I finally decided to scratch that itch.   His method uses the Zend Framework to accomplish the goal - and "the whole website logic (both model and controller) is about 200 lines of code". There's no exception or error handling in it, but it works and the Zend_Feed module works well to grab just about any kind of feed.
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Blog: Google News shows images linked with article extracts
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RSS is one of the hottest technologies on the Web today. Most blogging and content management systems have RSS file creation capability built in, but if you're not using one of those programs, it can be a bit tedious. Enter the ListGarden RSS Feed Generator. By Lee Underwood. 1012
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Mistakes prompt a demand for grammar to be policed.
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In response to his introduction of the non-well-formed XML patch the other day, Christian Stocker has a new posting with a bit of a rebuttal on the subject.
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Fast, intelligent, automatic spam detector using Paul Graham style Bayesian analysis of word counts in spam and non-spam emails. Filtering adapts to personal tastes automatically. No manual rule creation required. This release adds the final missing pieces to the new parser code.  MBX files and Content-Length headers are now supported.  Database cleanup when signals are caught has also been improved.  I would like to move 1.1 into the stable branch fairly soon so if folks would test out this release and report any problems it would be a big help!   The latest release can be found here: https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=61201&package_id=73566
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On Monday, a new application for RSS. Brilliant! As far as I know, it's never been done before. And no, I didn't invent it.
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RSSOwl is a RSS / RDF / Atom Newsreader written in Java using SWT as fast graphic library. Read News in a tabfolder, save favorites in categories, Export to PDF / RTF / HTML / OPML, Import Feeds from OPML, perform fulltext-search, use internal browser.  The next version of RSSOwl is available. Finally, loading any number of feeds and aggregations is now running completly in the background allowing to open feeds while a loading is running. This not only removes the annoying "Please wait..." dialog, but also improves the performance when loading aggregations.  A comparison of time it takes loading the 130 sample favorites resulted in 14.5 seconds for RSSOwl 0.82b and 90.5 seconds for earlier versions.   Improved handling of protected newsfeeds. It is now possible to let RSSOwl remember username and password so that the user does not have to enter these information everytime the feed is loading.  A lot of bugs have been fixed. Thanks for the feedback!  See the changelog for a complete list of changes.  May the owl be with you, Ben
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Sam  posts an interesting proposal.  This is better than the HTTP delta suggestion but still has a few issues.  The client needs to know the ETags before it can start performing differential fetches.  With date ranges you still preserve the initial archive query.  For example when you first subscribe to a feed you could fetch 30 days worth of posts.  If you like the feed you can even fetch *older* posts which could be really cool.  Also even if you still use faster checksum algorithm like CRC32 or Adler32 you still have an O(N) performance hit for your document.  If you have a btree on your post dates you will gave O(log(N)) for search for a much smaller string (64bit in most situations).  F ...