intertwingly

It’s just data

MSDN 1.0


Mihai Parparita: Blogs hosted on MSDN seem to have started to generate Atom 1.0 recently. However, perhaps due to a misreading of the Atom 1.0 spec, each entry contains a link node with the relation set to “self” when pointing to the HTML version of it (instead of "alternate").

Google Groups did this for a while too when it switched to Atom 1.0, so it seems to be a common error with developers that are just starting out with Atom generation. It would be nice if the validator could flag these errors.

Done

It looks like there are two errors, both should be easily correctable.  I’m confident that MSDN will address them quickly.

Rocket Science


Luke Hutteman: I mean, it’s not like this stuff is exactly rocket science, is it?

Feed Icon


Rogers Cadenhead: I’ve adopted the icon on Workbench this afternoon, because I think it could spark greater adoption of syndication with the general public

To date, I’ve avoided the garrish orange icon because quite frankly, I always thought it was ugly.  I prefer a less graphic intensive page.

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Open Source Web 2.0


Dave Johnson: Web 2.0 is not about having cool software to install on your own personal web server, it’s about getting locked into services provided by and trusting your data to Web sites that you do not control. It doesn’t have to be that way, of course, and perhaps I’m exaggerating a bit just for fun (and hits).

Family Friendly Calendaring


Jon Udell: the calendaring problem is just one of the many ways that real life challenges on our prevailing enterprise security model, with its bankrupt notion of an inside and an outside divided by a wall.

The longest living application I wrote for my personal use is a family calendar.  It is written in PHP.  It is password protected.

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Updated TestCase


Dare Obasanjo: The problems with updates to blog posts is straightforward. There are minor updates which don’t warrant signalling to the user such as typos being fixed (e.g. 12 of 13 miner survive mine collapse changed to 12 of 13 miners survive mine collapse) and those which do because they add significant changes to the story (e.g. 12 of 13 miners survive mine collapse changed to 12 of 13 miners survive killed in mine collapse)

Excellent idea for a test case.

Those Whippersnappers


I got this by email, and I thought it deserved a wider audience.  It can also be found on the internet.  Enjoy! ...

Photocasting Hyperbole


Mark Pilgrim: To sum up, the “photocasting” feature centers around a single undocumented extension element in a namespace that doesn’t need to be declared. iPhoto 6 doesn’t understand the first thing about HTTP, the first thing about XML, or the first thing about RSS. It ignores features of HTTP that Netscape 4 supported in 1996, and mis-implements features of XML that Microsoft got right in 1997. It ignores 95% of RSS and Atom and gets most of the remaining 5% wrong.

For shame.  Why can’t they “Just” use XML, like everybody else does?

It turns out that they do.  Just like everybody else does.

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Understanding namespaces


Aristotle Pagaltzis: Here’s the list of known broken aggregators as of this writing

More fodder for the ever growing set of Atom Conformance Tests

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Rebuilding a Ruby DB2 community


I guess it comes down to this: how to we quantify and locate the “lot of people” who are using ruby-db2?  Given the current state of the documentation and completeness, I have my doubts that there are all that many. ...

Photocasting


Dave Winer: Here’s a look at the “photocasting” feed format that Apple introduced yesterday. It’s fairly bad.

It’s not quite valid.

Either they are improving it in realtime, or they are down to three basic errors: incorrect mime type, they provide a feed level id (something Atom requires and RSS 2.0 doesn’t directly have support for), and use nearly RFC 3339 formatted dates (again nearly Atom).

If they are going to go this far, why not go with Atom?  ;-)

Oh, and some documentation for the wallpapers namespace would be nice.

Ruby/DB2 updated


Resynched to match PHP’s pecl/ibm_db2 version 1.2.0, and to support Syck version 0.60.

Most of the changes in 1.2.0 seem to have been aimed at reducing the number of compiler warnings produced.  Many (most?) were already present in the Ruby version which produces zero warnings with gcc version 4.0.2.  One notable omission: I can’t seem to find strlcpy on a default Ubuntu install, so this change was not applied.

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