It’s just data
Bob Aman: Or more accurately, a list of things which claim to parse feeds, but generally do a bloody terrible job of it
This is unabashedly a Fat Tuesday metaphor that may only make sense to the author, namely me. But then again, isn’t that what weblogs are for, after all?
Brendan ‘DaHat’ Grant: For those who enjoy the Microsoft’s latest wave of product names and packaging... take a watch of this lovely parody of if Microsoft designed the iPod packaging [via Robert Scoble]
Update: New location.
Shelley Powers: I started with BASIC. Contrary to popular myth, that’s B-A-S-I-C, which stands for: Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. However, the language is now usually given as just ‘Basic’
My first language was BASIC too. Ah, it is fun to reminisce.
James Holderness: I’ve just been putting together a test feed for IRI support in Atom.
I wonder how many feed consumers (from simple aggregators to the most complex blog engines) support Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications?
Norman Walsh: Considering that I started knowing nothing about Ruby, essentially nothing about SQL, and with only the most meager experience with any sort of framework at all, the fact that I got from zero to working prototype in half a day, give or take, strikes me as pretty remarkable. (I’m not sure how I feel about the fact that I still know almost nothing about Ruby even after successfully building a working “application”. :-)
I’ll say that’s a good thing.
Joe Gregorio: APP, OpenSearch and Microformats. Get used to seeing them; those small pieces loosely joined are the future of web services
Joe’s referring to the Lucene Web Service API.
Sean McGrath: I’ve cleaned out the blogroll on my blog home page pretty dramatically. I’m now just using it for pointing to various ways of contacting me rather than linking to blogs that I read/recommend. The main reason is that the blogroll isn’t a true reflection of the blogs I read these days. That would be by bloglines OPML file, not my blogroll.
Why not simply point to your BlogLines subscriptions? That’s how I do it on my weblog. It is even functional - people can click on feeds and then click on subscribe if they like what they see. And if they scroll down, there is even a link for exporting the subscriptions.
“Small Pieces, Loosely Joined”
When I first saw Tim’s What Dave Said, my first reaction was to view this as classic Stockholm Syndrome. Then I slept on it.
Joseph Walton: With the RSS Advisory Board recommending the Feed Validator, and highlighting that it’s an open source project (Python licence), here’s a simple starter for hacking on it, either to make fixes, or simply to use it for non-public feeds.
Last June, I wrote about a some ambiguities in an Apple spec that were troubling me. More troubling than the ambiguities was the lack of an ability to have a conversation. So I decided to raise a flag.
The technique worked. It took multiple iterations, but the point is that the spec got clarified, and the Feed Validator was updated to match.
Now it is time to do it again. Hopefully it will work out just as well this time.
Meanwhile, results from other validators: scripting, kbcafe, w3c. Note: only kbcafe is a completely independent implementation, the others are different snapshots of the same codebase.
Byrne Reese: I have finally pulled the trigger on ushering the process of getting TrackBack accepted as a core Internet standard. I may feel differently in a couple months, but for some reason I have always wanted to be a key player in the Internet standards. First as an implementor, then as a participant, and now perhaps as a driver.
Tim Bray: It turns out they’re holding what’s
advertised as “the first ever 100% Ruby on Rails event in the
world” right here in Vancouver, April 13-14:
Canada on Rails.
I’ll go for sure.
Q: It has been 31 months since I last talked to Tim Bray, Jon Udell, Joshua Allen, Chad Dickerson, Dave Winer and John Gotze. Can I have an update? Are Funky extensions still an issue?
Phil Ringnalda: If you can ignore the roaring of dinosaurs, it really doesn’t seem like that bad a time to be a small bean.
Hearing that every once in a while an Apple or a Microsoft made a small but significant change in response to feedback makes this all worthwhile.
That and clear specs complete with test cases and a proper venue for feedback.
Nick Bradbury: Well, let me just reiterate that if the board intends solely to clarify the spec, I’ll toss roses your way. Unresolved issues such as whether markup is supported in elements other than description continue to be a burden to RSS developers, end users and feed producers alike. In the past week alone I’ve dealt with three separate bug reports that were caused by HTML in elements other than description, and I’d love to stop spending time on this sort of thing.
The RSS Advisory Board seems to be having some sort of identity crisis. Despite the temporary confusion, the license of the RSS 2.0 specification clearly permits derivative works to be created without requiring the permission of anyone, under certain conditions. The current draft doesn’t meet those conditions, but I’m confident that this will be corrected with the final version.
Being allowed to clarify the specification is one thing. Whether or not others feel like Nick does is yet another. In the long run, the success of the work currently under the working title of RSS 2.0.2 depends little on what Harvard thinks, but instead depends very much on what people like Nick and companies like Microsoft actually do.
The leadership that Rogers is providing has been exemplary. I’ve been quietly aligning the Feed Validator RSS 2.0 test cases to track to the drafts that he has produced. I believe this work is important and should continue.
Don Box: screw with GET at your peril
Chad Fowler: If you want to come to RailsConf, you should register today. We sold out 400 seats in less than a week. These last 150 seats are likely to go fast.
At RubyConf 2005, David Heinemeier Hansson asked the audience if there was interest in a Rails Conference. There was some interest, but privately I thought this was a bit too early. In fact, more than a bit too early, way too early.
Manfred Stienstra: Time to add validation to the functional tests.
Way cool.
I would recommend AA, and strongly suggest avoiding
AAA as that was always experimental and never fully
implemented.
I’d convert the Feed Validator over to Ruby if I felt like that would help it attract a larger development community. I don’t suspect that many of the current contributors have a strong preference.
Phil Ringnalda: So I was quite interested to see that IE7, and thus presumably the Windows Feed Platform, have decided to do the right, and hard, thing, and treat all RSS elements other than item/description as the plain text they are supposed to be.