Radio Weblog 0100044

Fri, 13 Dec 2002 18:21:44 GMT

Reading Tim O'Reillys piece this morning made me want to go find a couple good books to read.

So, Small Pieces Loosely Joined was one I bought and reading now. In queue is The Social Life of Information. It looked interesting. For some reason I have been reading more books lately. Probably because weblogs have tempted me to read more.

Sat, 16 Nov 2002 15:08:26 GMT

Email Archiver

Ok! Work is progressing on my Email 2 Archive application. I added lots of new features and I deployed it where I work. I added the ability to archive it to a relational database which is how it is deployed at work. We archive 100+ email's a day from 8 different mailing list effortlessly; it could easily archive thousands if not tens of thousands.

Other than that it's a tray application with which you can configure it to run at hh::mm::ss interval's. You can also add as many POP3 accounts as you want to archive. The finally version is going cost more than I originally thought but it will be well worth the price when I am done.

BTW. I need a grovvy Icon in .ico format. Any takers... I will pay up to $30 or $40 us dollars if I use it. Make sure it's original before you show it to me!

Thanks,

Sun, 10 Nov 2002 03:09:50 GMT

Email2Rss

I am currently working on Email2RSS it is an application that converts your pop3 email account(s) to RSS it also writes the email and attachments to file. ("You can configure where it goes").

So far so good, it works and I am happy with how it writes out the email and attachments the RSS 2.0 generation is finally valid. I am going to release the beta sometime next week. It will sell for about $20.00. Check here for updates.

Colin Faulkingham

Sun, 08 Sep 2002 06:13:13 GMT

RSS is dead dying !!!!!!

So why is RSS a dead dying format! Well my answer is not so simple, RSS is not dead as in usage dead, it's dead as in going nowhere dead. If webloging is going to take the next evolutionary step it's going to have to cut it's ties to RSS. RSS only covers such a small part of how we communicate with our blog that it's bound to take a back seat to a more powerful format at some point.

Don Box:
While spending my evening with RSS, I had two epiphanies:

The connection between blogging and RSS is deep.

I would say that webloging might even escape the browser some time soon. And I don't think you can express your weblog in a RSS file and HTML is to limited.

Content xml sounds like RDF.

Why is RDF bad! I don't want to start yet another flame war over RDF and usablility. But the beauty of the WWW was HTML. Html is a simple format and it has empowered people. It was also simple enough for the common man to understand and produce. Can the common man produce RDF? If the answer is NO which it is, then HOW IN THE HECK IS RDF EVER GOING TO REACH CRITICAL MASS?

Writing Content xml extensions.

The idea behind RDF is a solid one IMHO :-) namespaces for adding extenstions is good; but their has to be an easier way.

The <extension> element requires two attributes “name” short for namespace and a “version”. The name attibute works like this [extension].[domain] where the prefix is the name of the extension and the rest is the namespace or domain. The version attribute which is the version of the extention is alslo required. This give us the ability to have multiple version and multiple extensions of the same format sort like RSS format with rss.userland.com and rss.purl.org.

It is my hope that extenstions will be easy to understand and have absolutley no rules except for dropnig the root element of an exsisting spec such as <rss> or <opml> or <html> “kind of redundant”. Extnetsion(s) should also be easy to read. I would think dtd(s) or xsd(s) would work with good docs.

Example not in DTD or XSD format.

Required -elements and *attributes 
-Name [PCDATA] 1 
- internetAddress [URL | *prefix] n * prefix="http | https | smtp | ftp | jabber | im | icq"

Which would produce a segment that looks like this:

<extension name="author.radio.weblogs.com/0100044/" version="0.1">
<name>Dave Winer</name>
<internetAddress prefix="smtp">dave@userland.com<;/internetAddress>
<internetAddress prefix=HTTP>http://www.scripting.com/<;/internetAddress>
</extension>