http://radio.weblogs.com/0100887/categories/rss/ Copyright 2002 Jon Udell Mon, 03 Jun 2002 15:03:46 GMT http://backend.userland.com/rss092 6/3/2002; 1:55:03 AM http://radio.weblogs.com/0100887/categories/rss/2002/06/03.html#a274 <FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>I've implemented&nbsp;Mark Pilgrim's final version of the </FONT><A href="http://diveintomark.org/archives/2002/06/02.html"><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>RSS auto-discovery technique</FONT></A><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>, inspired by </FONT><A href="http://matt.griffith.com/weblog/2002/05/29.html#a57"><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>Matt&nbsp;Griffith's&nbsp;proposal</FONT></A><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>.&nbsp;A small change in&nbsp;Mark's </FONT><A href="http://diveintomark.org/projects/autorss/radio.html"><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>Radio bookmarklet</FONT></A><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>&nbsp;seemed to be&nbsp;needed, from indexOf(application/rss+xml') to indexOf('application/rss+xml'), in order to be able to subscribe in Radio to sites using this technique.</FONT> <b>...</b> <P><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>I've implemented&nbsp;Mark Pilgrim's final version of the </FONT><A href="http://diveintomark.org/archives/2002/06/02.html"><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>RSS auto-discovery technique</FONT></A><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>, inspired by </FONT><A href="http://matt.griffith.com/weblog/2002/05/29.html#a57"><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>Matt&nbsp;Griffith's&nbsp;proposal</FONT></A><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>.&nbsp;A small change in&nbsp;Mark's </FONT><A href="http://diveintomark.org/projects/autorss/radio.html"><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>Radio bookmarklet</FONT></A><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>&nbsp;seemed to be&nbsp;needed, from indexOf(application/rss+xml') to indexOf('application/rss+xml'), in order to be able to subscribe in Radio to sites using this technique.</FONT></P> <P><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>Mark writes:</FONT></P> <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> <P><EM><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>It has been surprisingly painless and friction-free. Together, we have come up with a new standard that is useful, elegant, forward-thinking, and widely implemented. In 4 days.</FONT></EM></P></BLOCKQUOTE> <P dir=ltr><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>Amen!</FONT></P> <P><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>DJ's </FONT><A href="http://www.pipetree.com/qmacro/2002/Jun/2#blogrollfinder_link"><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>meta-link</FONT></A><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2> is a&nbsp;great&nbsp;idea too. An excellent way to&nbsp;facilitate the kinds of social network analysis that we're all buzzing about lately.</FONT></P> 5/23/2002; 9:08:52 PM http://radio.weblogs.com/0100887/categories/rss/2002/05/23.html#a265 <FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>In the commentary attached to </FONT><A href="http://rss.benhammersley.com/archives/000051.html"><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>Ben Hammersley's RSS discussion</FONT></A><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>, someone (whose name got truncated) cites Jon Postel's famous dictum in regards to use of HTML in RSS:</FONT> <b>...</b> <P><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>In the commentary attached to </FONT><A href="http://rss.benhammersley.com/archives/000051.html"><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>Ben Hammersley's RSS discussion</FONT></A><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>, someone (whose name got truncated) cites Jon Postel's famous dictum in regards to use of HTML in RSS:</FONT></P> <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> <P><EM><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>Escaped html in the <DESCRIPTION>tag is very common and isn't going to disappear any time soon. So let's make it a convention as RSS creators to be sparing and deliberately strip the more aggressive tags when we create it. As consumers, we should be writing code that strips the tags we don't like and not complain too much when people throw incomplete tables at us. Be lenient with what you consume, be pedantic and accurate with what you create.</FONT></EM></P></BLOCKQUOTE> <P dir=ltr><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>I took a run at this problem last week on a plane trip. For a long time now, I've intended to rip out the MS DHTML edit control in Radio, and pop in Ektron's slick </FONT><A href="http://www.ektron.com/support/ewebeditpro_support.cfm"><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>eWebEditPro</FONT></A><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>, which I wrote </FONT><A href="http://www.byte.com/documents/byt20010608s0001/"><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>a column</FONT></A><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2> about last year. It should be a straightforward swap that would make Radio's WYSIWYG editor able to emit either clean HTML or XHTML, rather than the hideous stuff that MS control spews out now.</FONT></P> <P dir=ltr><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>Given the amount of writing I do here, I'd be quite willing to pay something for a&nbsp;add-in that would enable me to honor Postel's dictum -- that is, "to be conservative in what you send." </FONT></P> <P dir=ltr><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>For some reason, though, I went round in circles. Couldn't seem to find the right combination of UserTalk, HTML, and JavaScript to get that Ektron control working in place of the default WYSIWYG control. I'll take another run at it one of these days, but I just thought I'd report the idea in case somebody else wants to go there first.</FONT> </P> <P dir=ltr>&nbsp;</P> 5/23/2002; 12:30:20 AM http://radio.weblogs.com/0100887/categories/rss/2002/05/23.html#a262 <FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>Ben Hammersley has </FONT><A href="http://rss.benhammersley.com/archives/000051.html#000051"><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>taken note</FONT></A><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2> of a flock of RSS-related rumblings. Here's some commentary on his commentary on my rumblings. </FONT> <b>...</b> <P><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>Ben Hammersley has </FONT><A href="http://rss.benhammersley.com/archives/000051.html#000051"><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>taken note</FONT></A><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2> of a flock of RSS-related rumblings. Here's some commentary on his commentary on my rumblings. </FONT></P> <BLOCKQUOTE><I> <P><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>&lt;fullitem&gt; a sub-element of &lt;item&gt; </FONT></P> <P><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>&lt;fullitem&gt; does for RSS0.9x what </FONT><A href="http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rss-dev/files/Modules/Standard/mod_content.html"><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>mod_content</FONT></A><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2> does for RSS1.0. It allows the entire item text to be included in the feed, including entity-encoded HTML markup. </FONT></P> <P><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>This, to my mind, is where one possible weakness comes in: allowing formatting HTML markup, such as FONT tags, within an RSS feed does allow feed providers to royally mess up aggregating sites. A misplaced *lt;tr&gt; might break much layout, as would a missized font, and so on. My suggestion is to include an attibute that points to a suggested stylesheet: </FONT></P> <P><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif><FULLTEXT stylesheet="http://rss.benhammersley.com/site-style.txt"><FONT size=2></FONT></FONT></P> <P><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>This fits nicely with the push toward XHTML in ordinary webpages, and seems more elegant. To me at least. </FONT></P></I></BLOCKQUOTE> <P><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>I guess I'd say that &lt;fullitem&gt; does for RSS0.9x what &lt;description&gt; does for RSS0.9x, in a situation where (as is true for my primary feed now), &lt;description&gt; is truncated to less than the entire item. </FONT></P> <P><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>Sending escaped HTML markup can cause all sorts of trouble, for sure. It's really embarrassing to break other peoples' aggregators with a bum feed, as I've discovered for myself. It'd be wonderful if XHTML writing tools were common. But they're not, and until/unless they become so, I guess the safeguard is the immunological system of blogspace, which quickly punishes offenders. </FONT></P> <BLOCKQUOTE><I> <P><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>&lt;blurb&gt; a sub-element of &lt;item&gt; </FONT></P> <P><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>The blurb element contains a precis of the item, halfway in size between a description and a full text. I would suspect that this might only be used for very long pieces, where the full text is much too full, and the description too high-level. </FONT></P></I></BLOCKQUOTE> <P><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>As I'm using it (in my secondary feed), &lt;blurb&gt; is the truncated item which, in my primary feed, is called &lt;description&gt;. </FONT></P> <P><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>This is goofy, of course. I did it in part to see if the sky would fall&nbsp;if I added extra tags into my non-modularized feed. (It didn't.) </FONT></P> <P><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>I'm aiming to offer choice. Rather than always truncating (which disappoints people who like to read whole items in aggregators), or always sending whole items (which disappoints people who like to scan and decide whether to click through), I offer both styles. At the moment, I do this in parallel feeds: </FONT></P> <P><A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0100887/rss.xml"><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>primary feed</FONT></A><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>: &lt;description&gt; = truncated, &lt;fullitem&gt; = nontruncated </FONT></P> <P><A href="http://www.w3.org/2000/06/webdata/xslt?xslfile=http%3A%2F%2Fradio.weblogs.com%2F0100887%2Fgems%2FlongFeed.xml&amp;xmlfile=http%3A%2F%2Fradio.weblogs.com%2F0100887%2Frss.xml&amp;transform=Submit"><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>secondary feed</FONT></A><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>: &lt;blurb&gt; = truncated, &lt;description&gt; = nontruncated </FONT></P> <P><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>I'm sure nobody is using either &lt;blurb&gt; or &lt;fullitem&gt;. Personally, I'd rather to combine these functions like so: </FONT></P> <P><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>&lt;p class="lead"&gt;The lead...&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;The rest...&lt;/p&gt; </FONT></P> <P><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>In principle, the algorithm used to truncate (for me: first paragraph; for </FONT><A href="http://snowdeal.org/section/ex_machina/"><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>Eric Snowdeal</FONT></A><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>, the first 500 characters) could be applied within a single instance of the item, without the duplication I've introduced. In practice, I doubt such intra-item coding would work reliably. </FONT></P> <P><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>I expect that current practice -- either truncating items or not -- will continue. A few people (like me) may bother to offer a choice, in the form of parallel versions. The overhead is no big deal really, XSLT happily transforms one into the other. While aggregators <I>could</I> offer users the choice, within a single feed, of long or short variants of that overloaded thing we call &lt;description&gt;, I doubt this will&nbsp;matter to enough people to get off the ground.&nbsp; </FONT></P> 5/20/2002; 11:11:12 AM http://radio.weblogs.com/0100887/categories/rss/2002/05/20.html#a257 <FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>Sam continues to provide an excellent perspective on moving RSS forward:</FONT> <b>...</b> <P><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>Sam continues to provide an excellent perspective on moving RSS forward:</FONT></P> <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> <P><EM><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>&nbsp;I really would like to see the day where compatibility to the spec was as important as "works with the current version of the software provided by the spec author"</FONT></EM></P> <P><EM><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>... as a contributor to a SOAP toolkit, I don't want SOAP to be defined in this way. </FONT></EM></P> <P><EM><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>Meanwhile, here is the perspective of an </FONT></EM><A href="http://bitworking.org/2002/05/20.html#a147"><EM><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>author of another aggregator</FONT></EM></A><EM><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>. [</FONT></EM><A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0101679/"><EM><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>Sam Ruby</FONT></EM></A><EM><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>]</FONT></EM></P></BLOCKQUOTE> <P dir=ltr><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>Thanks Sam, especially for that pointer to </FONT><A href="http://bitworking.org/2002/05/15.html#a142"><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>Aggie</FONT></A><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>.</FONT></P> <P dir=ltr><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>In Radio, the path of least resistance at this moment is to clone the RSS writer and add in experimental tags. The&nbsp;better way (in my view) is to replace the RSS writer with a modularized writer that compartmentalizes experimentation according to&nbsp;the&nbsp;RSS 1.0&nbsp;spec which was designed for that purpose. A Radio hacker is free to do either or both of those things. I've done the first, and plan to do the second unless (hopefully) somebody else gets there first.</FONT></P> <P dir=ltr><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>In either case, it seems to me, the gating factor is whether and how the UI exposes custom tag creation to the user, a la the Categories feature in Radio now, and whether and how the UI enables the user of the aggregator to work with extended metadata. </FONT></P> <P dir=ltr><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>Coming back to the lawyers-and-asbestos angle, it's worth noting that the ability to solve the problem already exists. The .92 spec supports categories; categories can be created in the UI; categories can be routed as complete XML feeds. Although I completely agree with the points being made about extensibility and namespaces, I don't think these issues are preventing lawyers from today organizing their communication around topical feeds. Rather, I think what's stopping them is&nbsp;Sam's&nbsp;</FONT><A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0101679/2002/05/16.html#a488"><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>observation</FONT></A><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2> about the general lack of appreciation for the most basic uses of RSS. </FONT></P> <P dir=ltr><FONT size=2>There's a mom-and-apple-pie aspect to metadata collection. Everybody's for it -- at least insofar as they imagine a neatly-tagged semantic web made available for them to use. When they realize it's their job to do all that neat tagging, though, enthusiasm (rightly) wanes. If we had lots of people using software that made metadata collection seem natural and effortless, I don't think it'd be hard to sort out issues of extensibility and namespace collisions. Those would be good problems to have, in other words.</FONT></P> Sam Ruby 5/19/2002; 11:41:45 PM http://radio.weblogs.com/0100887/categories/rss/2002/05/19.html#a256 <FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>On the always-thorny question of how to extend RSS, I guess I'm for a first-things-first aproach.</FONT> <b>...</b> <P><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>On the always-thorny question of how to extend RSS, I guess I'm for a first-things-first aproach.</FONT></P> <P dir=ltr><A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0103705/2002/05/09.html#a99"><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>Rory Perry</FONT></A><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>:</FONT></P> <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> <P><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif><FONT size=2><EM>If the WV court has an XML feed for recent opinions (which we do), the lawyer in New Orleans could subscribe to that feed and watch for orders and opinions regarding asbestos mass litigation.</EM> </FONT></FONT></P></BLOCKQUOTE> <P><A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0101679/2002/05/19.html#a498"><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>Sam Ruby</FONT></A><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>:</FONT></P> <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> <P><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif><FONT size=2><EM>If we want Internet-scale standards (whereby the likes of Rory Perry can create discipline-specific extensions), we need to get to the point where everybody has equal opportunity to create modules.</EM> </FONT></FONT></P></BLOCKQUOTE> <P dir=ltr><FONT face=Verdana size=2>I am not religious about this stuff.&nbsp;I see no problem with Rory and his legal pals agreeing on some tags (like &lt;asbestos&gt;) which they'll use by mutual consent. The immediate bottleneck is getting software into their hands that enables one user to pop such a tag into a feed, and another user to discriminate based on the tag. And then getting them to the point where they can actually experience that.</FONT></P> <P dir=ltr><FONT face=Verdana size=2>For a while now I've been sending out RSS channels with things like &lt;pubDate&gt;, &lt;blurb&gt;, and &lt;fullitem&gt;. Nobody's complained, so apparently it's not breaking any existing aggregator. Thanks to the new ability, in Radio, to replace the RSS writer, I can -- and indeed will -- replace my feed with RSS 1.0, using Dublin Core metadata and possibly defining a module to account for the variant elements (long vs short description) in my feed. </FONT></P> <P dir=ltr><FONT face=Verdana size=2>The phrase "Internet-scale" always worries me a bit, though. Until and unless the likes of Rory and friends can start bootstrapping the process of creating and consuming customized feeds, there's no scaling issue to worry about. If and when namespace collisions start to become a problem, then people will be in a position to see the value in modularized readers and writers. At which point,&nbsp;it shouldn't be hard&nbsp;to transition to them. </FONT></P> <P dir=ltr><FONT face=Verdana size=2>But do people need modularized readers and writers to even get to first base? Or do they just need to find out what it feels like to hit a few singles, using the simplest tools? Given <A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0101679/2002/05/16.html#a488">Sam</A>'s (and <A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0100887/2002/05/16.html#a248">my</A>) surprise that even the most basic use of RSS is still relatively new to many bloggers, I'm inclined to take things one step at a time.</FONT></P> <P dir=ltr><FONT face=Verdana size=2></FONT>&nbsp;</P> 5/10/2002; 9:46:51 AM http://radio.weblogs.com/0100887/categories/rss/2002/05/10.html#a231 <FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>Jenny writes:</FONT> <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> <P dir=ltr><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2><EM>What I do see as the bigger issue is that this provides a path for further news aggregator development in </EM></FONT><A href="http://radio.userland.com/"><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2><EM>Radio</EM></FONT></A><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2><EM>. I'm not knowledgeable enough to know what it means for RSS news aggregation in general, but&nbsp;I believe quite strongly that some form of&nbsp;aggregation will become part of our everyday information lives in the future, so I welcome any and all roads that lead to that day. [</EM></FONT><A href="http://www.theshiftedlibrarian.com/2002/05/10.html#a1766"><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2><EM>The Shifted Librarian</EM></FONT></A><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2><EM>]</EM></FONT> <b>...</b> <P><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>Jenny writes:</FONT> <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> <P dir=ltr><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2><EM>What I do see as the bigger issue is that this provides a path for further news aggregator development in </EM></FONT><A href="http://radio.userland.com/"><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2><EM>Radio</EM></FONT></A><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2><EM>. I'm not knowledgeable enough to know what it means for RSS news aggregation in general, but&nbsp;I believe quite strongly that some form of&nbsp;aggregation will become part of our everyday information lives in the future, so I welcome any and all roads that lead to that day. [</EM></FONT><A href="http://www.theshiftedlibrarian.com/2002/05/10.html#a1766"><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2><EM>The Shifted Librarian</EM></FONT></A><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2><EM>]</EM></FONT></P></BLOCKQUOTE> <P></P> <P dir=ltr><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>I believe the same. It's important&nbsp; to note that Radio's aggregator&nbsp;is one way forward, but not the only way. I just grabbed a copy of </FONT><A href="http://www.disobey.com/amphetadesk/"><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>AmphetaDesk</FONT></A><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2> and -- omigosh -- it's written in Perl! I had no idea! It ships as a compiled executable for Windows, Mac, and Linux, but the source is all Perl and is available. The app runs Radio-style, shoveling script-written pages into a local webserver for browser consumption.</FONT></P> <P dir=ltr><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>This presents a bit of a dilemma for me. I've made my peace with UserTalk, but I'm much faster and more competent in Perl. So it's tempting to do aggregator experimentation in AmphetaDesk. But then, it can't be so easily shared with the Radio community, many of whom will (rightly) prefer not to download and install an extra kit. But, this is a good problem to have: a choice between two viable options.</FONT></P> <P dir=ltr><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>In any case, the point is that you're right, Jenny. All sorts of different groups will have reasons to tweak both the production and the consumption of RSS. For both writers and readers of RSS, there's daylight ahead. </FONT></P> 5/9/2002; 12:06:33 PM http://radio.weblogs.com/0100887/categories/rss/2002/05/09.html#a229 <FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>The RSS writer in Radio is now officially user-extensible. "<EM>Before generating the RSS, we check user.radio.callbacks.writeRssFile,</EM>" Dave </FONT><A href="http://scriptingnews.userland.com/backissues/2002/05/09#aSmallChange"><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>writes today</FONT></A><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>. Excellent. This will open the floodgates for all sorts of useful metadata experimentation. We'll see Radio UserLand sites emitting RSS 1.0, and others extending RSS .9x. It's not the format that matters to me, it's the experimentation.</FONT> <b>...</b> <P><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>The RSS writer in Radio is now officially user-extensible. "<EM>Before generating the RSS, we check user.radio.callbacks.writeRssFile,</EM>" Dave </FONT><A href="http://scriptingnews.userland.com/backissues/2002/05/09#aSmallChange"><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>writes today</FONT></A><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>. Excellent. This will open the floodgates for all sorts of useful metadata experimentation. We'll see Radio UserLand sites emitting RSS 1.0, and others extending RSS .9x. It's not the format that matters to me, it's the experimentation.</FONT></P> <P><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>In that vein, I've heard from a few folks who are working the other side of the street, looking for ways to enhance the aggregators that read RSS channels. I think this is fertile ground for innovation. Personal aggregators are still quite new, and we have a lot to learn about how we want to use them.</FONT></P> 5/8/2002; 8:46:07 AM http://radio.weblogs.com/0100887/categories/rss/2002/05/08.html#a225 <FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>Jenny's </FONT><A href="http://www.opinionpower.com/Surveys/19406942.html"><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>poll</FONT></A>&nbsp;<FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>reminded me that RSS truncation shouldn't be an either/or choice. So I'm experimenting with some extra tags in my RSS feed. </FONT> <b>...</b> <P><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>Jenny's </FONT><A href="http://www.opinionpower.com/Surveys/19406942.html"><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>poll</FONT></A>&nbsp;<FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>reminded me that RSS truncation shouldn't be an either/or choice. So I'm experimenting with some extra tags in my RSS feed. </FONT></P> <P><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>The </FONT><A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0100887/rss.xml"><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>basic feed</FONT></A><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2> continues to send truncated descriptions.&nbsp;It&nbsp;adds a [fullitem] tag that has the complete text of the item. Of course no newsreaders use this yet. But I want to make sure that sending this extra tag won't cause problems. In Radio it seems not to, but I want to see if&nbsp;AmphetaDesk, NewsIsFree, Meerkat, and others are OK with it. If not, please let me know!</FONT></P> <P><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>I've also added a [pubtime] tag, just to see if I can. As Sam Ruby keeps pointing out in another context, <A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0101679/2002/02/20.html#a146">extra information</A> shouldn't be a problem so long as the required core elements are present.</FONT></P> <P><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>There's also&nbsp;a </FONT><A href="http://www.w3.org/2000/06/webdata/xslt?xslfile=http%3A%2F%2Fradio.weblogs.com%2F0100887%2Fgems%2FlongFeed.xml&amp;xmlfile=http%3A%2F%2Fradio.weblogs.com%2F0100887%2Frss.xml&amp;transform=Submit"><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>long-format feed</FONT></A><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2> which is just an XSLT transform of the basic feed.&nbsp;In that version, [description] is the complete item, and [blurb] is the truncated description. So now there's choice. You can subscribe to either the basic feed with short descriptions, or the long-format feed with long ones.</FONT></P> <P><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>The next step would be to experiment with the news aggregator. Given a feed containing both short and long items, it ought to be possible to let the user toggle between them, perhaps even on a per-channel basis.</FONT></P> 4/11/2002; 7:50:36 PM http://radio.weblogs.com/0100887/categories/rss/2002/04/11.html#a189 <FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>Paul Holbrook takes a different approach to RSS truncation. He presents the entire&nbsp;lead paragraph, like so:</FONT> <b>...</b> <P><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>Paul Holbrook takes a different approach to RSS truncation. He presents the entire&nbsp;lead paragraph, like so:</FONT></P> <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> <P><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2><EM>on firstPara(description, adrpost) {<BR>&nbsp;return (html.getOneTagValue(description,"P"))}&nbsp;</EM></FONT></P> <P><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2><EM>The description is stored in HTML, so getOneTagValue conveniently does exactly what I want.</EM></FONT></P> <P><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2><EM>Of course, if the first tag in my description isn't a P, this won't do what I want it to do.&nbsp; I'll work on that another time.</EM>&nbsp;<EM>[ </EM><A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0106188/2002/04/11.html#a40"><EM>Paul Holbrook's Radio Weblog</EM></A><EM> ]&nbsp;</EM></FONT></P></BLOCKQUOTE> <P dir=ltr><FONT face=Verdana size=2>I'm trying it now...yup, that's the ticket. Thanks, Paul!</FONT></P> <P>&nbsp;</P> <P>&nbsp;</P> 4/11/2002; 2:16:56 AM http://radio.weblogs.com/0100887/categories/rss/2002/04/11.html#a186 <FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>I'm really enjoying my ability to scan a lot of sources in my Radio news aggregator. What slows me down, though, are the channels with long or irregularly-formatted descriptions. One of the worst offenders is the </FONT><A href="http://www.newsisfree.com/HPE/xml/feeds/29/1929.xml"><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>Privacy Digest</FONT></A><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>.&nbsp; I want to scan that channel, but the cluttered format of its descriptions makes it really hard to do so.</FONT> <b>...</b> <P><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>I'm really enjoying my ability to scan a lot of sources in my Radio news aggregator. What slows me down, though, are the channels with long or irregularly-formatted descriptions. One of the worst offenders is the </FONT><A href="http://www.newsisfree.com/HPE/xml/feeds/29/1929.xml"><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>Privacy Digest</FONT></A><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>.&nbsp; I want to scan that channel, but the cluttered format of its descriptions makes it really hard to do so.</FONT></P> <P><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>By contrast, take a look at </FONT><A href="http://www.newsisfree.com/HPE/xml/feeds/29/1929.xml"><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>Eric Snowdeal</FONT></A><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>'s feed. Although it's mildly disconcerting that the truncation doesn't respect word or sentence boundaries, the effect -- especially in the aggregator -- is to make this feed much more easily scannable.</FONT></P> <P><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>For my own reading convenience, I may wind up pulling feeds out of Radio's aggregator database and reformatting them. But on the flip side, I've been feeling kind of antisocial about dumping these longish essays into an RSS feed that I myself wouldn't want to read.</FONT></P> <P><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>So for now, I've changed this line in system.verbs.builtins.radio.weblog.writeRssFile:</FONT></P> <P><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>add ("&lt;description&gt;" +&nbsp;adritemcache^.text + "&lt;/description&gt;")</FONT></P> <P><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>to this:</FONT></P> <P><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>local (s = adritemcache^.text);<BR>s = string.replaceAll( s, "&amp;lt;"&nbsp;&nbsp; , "&lt;" );<BR>s = string.replaceAll( s, "&amp;gt;"&nbsp;&nbsp; , "&gt;" );<BR>s = string.replaceAll( s, "&amp;quot;" , '"' );<BR>s = string.replaceAll( s, "&amp;apos;" , "'" );<BR>s = string.replaceAll( s, "&amp;amp;nbsp;" , " " ); <BR>regex.subst("&lt;[^&gt;]+&gt;", "", @s);<BR>add ("&lt;description&gt;" + string.firstSentence(s) + "&lt;/description&gt;")</FONT></P> <P><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>Radio's string.firstSentence seems like just the ticket. A lead sentence is supposed to be special. Knowing that&nbsp;it's all a reader of your RSS feed might see (after the title) makes it even more so.</FONT></P> <P><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>Of course, it's completely non-kosher to hack into a system script that can be overwritten by UserLand at any time, as happened most recently a few days ago:</FONT></P> <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> <P><EM><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>4/7/02; 9:55:21 AM by DW {<BR>&nbsp;Do the macro processing or descriptions unconditionally, and in-line instead of calling radio.string.processMacros, which was only processing the descriptions if it contained "&lt;%". This broke shortcuts. Prior art is the Manila-Blogger Bridge Tool, which unconditionally processes macros.}</FONT></EM></P></BLOCKQUOTE> <P dir=ltr><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>Nevertheless, you've got to love the openness of a system that makes it possible, and easy, to do this non-kosher thing.</FONT></P> <P><IMG src="http://radio.weblogs.com/0100887/images/my/rssFirstSentence.jpg" border=1 < P></P> 4/4/2002; 3:44:32 PM http://radio.weblogs.com/0100887/categories/rss/2002/04/04.html#a171 <FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>Tony Bowden </FONT><A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0106165/2002/04/04.html#a6"><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>writes</FONT></A><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>:</FONT> <b>...</b> <P><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>Tony Bowden </FONT><A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0106165/2002/04/04.html#a6"><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>writes</FONT></A><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>:</FONT></P> <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> <P><EM><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>Having a wiki output OPML won't work, as it requires creating structure that isn't there. Having a wiki input OPML, on the other hand, might produce much more useful results.</FONT></EM></P></BLOCKQUOTE> <P dir=ltr><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>Going the other way, RSS is a great connector. I just introduced myself to </FONT><A href="http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?SunirShah"><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>Sunir Shah</FONT></A><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2> the other day. I was going to suggest that MeatballWiki offer an RSS feed of its RecentChanges when I looked again and lo, it </FONT><A href="http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?action=rss"><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>already does</FONT></A><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>. Even nicer would be to include the first diff in that feed, so that somebody scanning a lot of feeds can make better choices about what to read. <A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0100887/2002/03/08.html#a121">Heads, decks, and leads</A>. The Wiki naming style makes for nice heads, and some items in the feed have nice decks (short descriptive tags) as well. The first diff would make a nice optional lead.</FONT></P> <P dir=ltr><FONT size=2>The model according to which Wikis federate is something that the blogging community could profitably study. <A href="http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Main/PeterThoeny">Peter Thoeny</A>&nbsp;explained it all to me once. Now I want to look into all that again. </FONT></P> <P dir=ltr><FONT size=2>Here's a <A href="http://www.byte.com/documents/byt20000427s0001/">column</A> from two years ago that compares Wiki and newsgroup collaboration</FONT>. It ties together several of these themes. </P> 3/19/2002; 9:47:36 AM http://radio.weblogs.com/0100887/categories/rss/2002/03/19.html#a150 <FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>Mike Krus asks:</FONT> <b>...</b> <P><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>Mike Krus asks:</FONT></P> <DIV id=Enclosure><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2></FONT></DIV> <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> <P><A name=a168></A><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2><EM>I wonder if you can write a aggregator driver in Radio8 which overwrites the default one for RSS? I'm not at home so I can't try... </EM></FONT></P> <P><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2><EM></EM></FONT> <P><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2><EM></EM></FONT> <P><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2><EM>But if you could, I'm sure Jon would find it </EM></FONT><A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0100887/2002/03/16.html#a144"><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2><EM>useful</EM></FONT></A><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2><EM>. He could write a driver which strips the description field or cuts it at 100 chars or something when the feed is read into the aggregator. [<A href="http://www.newsisfree.com/blog/">Too Much News</A>]</EM></FONT></P></BLOCKQUOTE> <P dir=ltr><FONT face=Verdana size=2>Could do, but you'd have to deal with the multiple (and now growing) set of inbound drivers, for RSS .9x, 1.0, and now other stuff. Also, you might want to keep all the content locally for offline use. I still see this as best handled&nbsp;in a single option for outbound RSS production. </FONT></P> <P dir=ltr><FONT face=Verdana size=2>BTW, an interesting coincidence this morning. Mike's NewsIsFree reported a new channel, <A href="http://www.newsisfree.com/sources/info/3215/">Nasa Liftoff</A>. It's available as Nasa's <A href="http://liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov/Content.xml">non-RSS XML</A>, and also as <A href="http://www.newsisfree.com/HPE/xml/feeds/15/3215.xml">synthesized RSS</A>. This is slightly misleading, though. Really, there are three channels:</FONT></P> <P dir=ltr><FONT face=Verdana size=2><A href="http://www.w3.org/2000/06/webdata/xslt?xslfile=http%3A%2F%2Fradio.weblogs.com%2F0100887%2Fgems%2Fliftoff.xml&amp;xmlfile=http%3A%2F%2Fliftoff.msfc.nasa.gov%2FContent.xml&amp;transform=Submit">Nasa Liftoff</A></FONT></P> <P dir=ltr><FONT face=Verdana size=2><A href="http://www.w3.org/2000/06/webdata/xslt?xslfile=http%3A%2F%2Fradio.weblogs.com%2F0100887%2Fgems%2Fscience.xml&amp;xmlfile=http%3A%2F%2Fliftoff.msfc.nasa.gov%2FContent.xml&amp;transform=Submit">Nasa Science</A></FONT></P> <P dir=ltr><FONT face=Verdana size=2><A href="http://www.w3.org/2000/06/webdata/xslt?xslfile=http%3A%2F%2Fradio.weblogs.com%2F0100887%2Fgems%2Fspacecal.xml&amp;xmlfile=http%3A%2F%2Fliftoff.msfc.nasa.gov%2FContent.xml&amp;transform=Submit">Nasa SpaceCal</A></FONT></P> <P dir=ltr><FONT size=2>What's scary here is that I just created those three feeds by cloning a <A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0100887/2002/03/18.html#a147">local file</A> twice, and changing two words. (I'm expecting someone&nbsp;will show me how I could have used the W3C XSLT service in parameterized way, in which case, this would have reduced to cloning an&nbsp;URL twice and changing two words.) Once Radio upstreamed those changes, I had added value</FONT><FONT size=2>&nbsp;to Nasa's news offering -- value that is instantly available to all RSS readers.</FONT></P> <P dir=ltr><FONT size=2>Rael said it nicely: <A href="http://www.oreillynet.com/~rael/archives/2002_03_06.shtml#000123">blog locally, publish globally</A>. And when publishing can also mean rewiring global infrastructure, you can start to see what's behind the Web services hype. </FONT></P> 3/18/2002; 8:42:13 PM http://radio.weblogs.com/0100887/categories/rss/2002/03/18.html#a147 I read today about a <A href="http://radio.userland.com/discuss/msgReader$12018?mode=topic&amp;y=2002&amp;m=3&amp;d=18">new Radio driver</A>&nbsp;to pull&nbsp;<A href="http://liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov/HostOurContent.asp">NASA announcements</A>&nbsp;into the news page, and it made me wonder about an XSLT alternative. The Liftoff channel, in the right column, is the result of my wondering. As I am not an XSLT expert, I record here for my own future benefit as much as yours how I got to the solution. <A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0100887/stories/2002/03/18/anXsltTutorial.html">Full story...</A> <b>...</b> <P>I read today about a <A href="http://radio.userland.com/discuss/msgReader$12018?mode=topic&amp;y=2002&amp;m=3&amp;d=18">new Radio driver</A>&nbsp;to pull&nbsp;<A href="http://liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov/HostOurContent.asp">NASA announcements</A>&nbsp;into the news page, and it made me wonder about an XSLT alternative. The Liftoff channel, in the right column, is the result of my wondering. As I am not an XSLT expert, I record here for my own future benefit as much as yours how I got to the solution. <A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0100887/stories/2002/03/18/anXsltTutorial.html">Full story...</A></P> 3/16/2002; 8:32:28 PM http://radio.weblogs.com/0100887/categories/rss/2002/03/16.html#a144 <FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>Marc Barrot comments on the </FONT><A href="http://radio.userland.com/discuss/msgReader$11975?mode=topic&amp;y=2002&amp;m=3&amp;d=16"><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>new driver architecture</FONT></A><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2> for RSS aggregation:</FONT> <b>...</b> <P dir=ltr><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>Marc Barrot comments on the </FONT><A href="http://radio.userland.com/discuss/msgReader$11975?mode=topic&amp;y=2002&amp;m=3&amp;d=16"><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>new driver architecture</FONT></A><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2> for RSS aggregation:</FONT></P> <P dir=ltr><EM><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2></FONT></EM> <P dir=ltr><EM><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2></FONT></EM> <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> <P dir=ltr><EM><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>This is a really cool feature. It opens up Radio's aggregator to new syndication formats, or to alternate formatting of existing formats, the first very clever answer to a current on-going issue with rss syndication, cf </FONT></EM><A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0100887/2002/03/11.html#a131"><EM><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>here</FONT></EM></A><EM><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>, </FONT></EM><A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0100887/2002/03/13.html#a133"><EM><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>here</FONT></EM></A><EM><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>, and </FONT></EM><A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0100887/2002/03/15.html#a142"><EM><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>here</FONT></EM></A><EM><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>. </FONT></EM></P></BLOCKQUOTE> <P dir=ltr><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>I think it answers a different (and more interesting) question: how can non-RSS formats flow into the news page? Phil Wolff, in the same DG thread:</FONT></P> <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> <P dir=ltr><EM><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>Does this mean I can syndicate/aggregate XML DTDs completely unrelated to news/blogging (with appropriate code, of course)? For example, job listings, resumes, RFPs, etc., defined elsewhere?</FONT></EM></P></BLOCKQUOTE> <P dir=ltr><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>Yes. And this <EM>is</EM> interesting, to the extent that XML formats of the multiple-item-per-file flavor exist, or can be easily produced -- say, from databases, using increasingly popular SQL-to-XML features. </FONT></P> <P dir=ltr><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>It's worth noting that a UserTalk driver in Radio is not the only (and maybe not the easiest) way to assimilate such non-RSS formats into Radio.&nbsp;While not a huge fan of XSTL, transforming a non-RSS XML format into RSS .91, .92, or 1.0 (any of which Radio can already consume) is a really good use for XSLT. Note that Radio need not directly support XSLT in order to have the use of it. Web-service-based XSLT engines are available.</FONT></P> <P dir=ltr><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>But to each his own. As the Perl folk say, There's More Than One Way To Do It. </FONT></P> <P dir=ltr><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>In any case, this new feature deals with <EM>consumption</EM> of feeds by Radio. And it aims to broaden the universe of such feeds, which is a really good idea.</FONT></P> <P dir=ltr><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>My questions were, instead, about tuning the <EM>production</EM> of feeds. One option,&nbsp; as Rahul suggested,&nbsp;is to offer to truncate long descriptions. I think that could&nbsp;look something like this.</FONT></P> <P dir=ltr><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>In system.verbs.builtins.radio.weblog.writeRssFile, change from:</FONT></P> <P dir=ltr><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>add ("&lt;description&gt;" + adritemcache^.text + "&lt;/description&gt;");</FONT></P> <P dir=ltr><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>to:</FONT></P> <P dir=ltr><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>desc = descriptionTrim (adritemcache^.text);<BR>add ("&lt;description&gt;" + dec + "&lt;/description&gt;");</FONT></P> <P dir=ltr><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>where descriptionTrim reads a value from a Pref:</FONT></P> <P dir=ltr><FONT face=Verdana,Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif size=2>Truncate RSS Description? 0&nbsp;means no,&nbsp;&gt;0 means yes and specifies the length</FONT></P> <P dir=ltr><FONT face=Verdana size=2>As a general rule, I believe RSS is best used for notification, not bulk transfer. Readers of RSS feeds will benefit when writers can streamline such notifications, relying on the linking power of the web for follow-ups. Writers of RSS feeds, as we've said, can do this streamlining now, at the cost of some extra work -- writing a separate story, then blogging a link to it with a short leading blurb. In practice, I'm sure this will rarely happen. The truncation option, requiring no effort of the writer,&nbsp;should help writers notify readers, and readers assimilate&nbsp;lots of diverse&nbsp;notifications, with a minimum of friction.</FONT></P> 3/15/2002; 3:22:37 PM http://radio.weblogs.com/0100887/categories/rss/2002/03/15.html#a142 Rahul Dave wrote to suggest a simple solution for making items easy to scan in RSS readers: truncate the [description] to a few hundred characters. Today I subscribed to a <A href="http://www.deftone.com/blogzilla/">channel</A> that does this. Look how elegant the effect is: <b>...</b> <P dir=ltr>Rahul Dave wrote to suggest a simple solution for making items easy to scan in RSS readers: truncate the [description] to a few hundred characters. Today I subscribed to a <A href="http://www.deftone.com/blogzilla/">channel</A> that does this. Look how elegant the effect is:</P> <P align=center><A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0100887/images/my/blogzilla.jpg"><IMG alt="click to enlarge" src="http://radio.weblogs.com/0100887/images/my/blogzilla.jpg" width=400 border=1></A><BR><EM>Rahul's idea put into practice</EM> </P> 3/13/2002; 8:21:24 PM http://radio.weblogs.com/0100887/categories/rss/2002/03/13.html#a135 Glad to see you <A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0104487/2002/03/13.html#a34">figured it out</A>. And, thanks for the tiny XML icon (<IMG src="http://radio.weblogs.com/0100887/images/my/tinyXML.jpg">), Marc.&nbsp;Remember to update your <A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0104487/categories/tools/">older pages</A> too, at some point. You can do this with Radio-&gt;Publish in the GUI app. <b>...</b> <P>Glad to see you <A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0104487/2002/03/13.html#a34">figured it out</A>. And, thanks for the tiny XML icon (<IMG src="http://radio.weblogs.com/0100887/images/my/tinyXML.jpg">), Marc.&nbsp;Remember to update your <A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0104487/categories/tools/">older pages</A> too, at some point. You can do this with Radio-&gt;Publish in the GUI app.</P> <P>&nbsp;</P> 3/13/2002; 8:53:33 AM http://radio.weblogs.com/0100887/categories/rss/2002/03/13.html#a133 Marc Barrot writes: <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> <P><EM>As of tonight's Radio.root update, when one supplies a title but no link, Radio automatically provides the link to the post's permalink (Jon, does this answer your </EM><A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0100887/2002/03/11.html#a131"><EM>questions</EM></A><EM>?). </EM> <P><EM></EM> <P><EM></EM> <P><EM>This way, the title is always rendered correctly when displayed in the News aggregator page. </EM> <P><EM></EM> <P><EM></EM> <P><EM>Every day, Radio keeps getting better and better ! [<A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0104487/2002/03/12.html#a32">s l a m</A>]</EM> <b>...</b> <P dir=ltr>Marc Barrot writes: <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> <P><EM>As of tonight's Radio.root update, when one supplies a title but no link, Radio automatically provides the link to the post's permalink (Jon, does this answer your </EM><A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0100887/2002/03/11.html#a131"><EM>questions</EM></A><EM>?). </EM> <P><EM></EM> <P><EM></EM> <P><EM>This way, the title is always rendered correctly when displayed in the News aggregator page. </EM> <P><EM></EM> <P><EM></EM> <P><EM>Every day, Radio keeps getting better and better ! [<A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0104487/2002/03/12.html#a32">s l a m</A>]</EM></P></BLOCKQUOTE> <P dir=ltr>The near-realtime pace of development is absolutely exhilarating, and yes, Radio is dramatically better day by day. What I'm about to say should <EM>not </EM>detract in any way from these accomplishments which, in fact, have got me on the edge of my seat wondering what's next. (And have got me sitting here writing this, instead of doing what I planned to do when I booted up today...)</P> <P dir=ltr>But no, this doesn't completely answer my questions. Nor could it, because the questions go to a wider context, and cannot be answered only in Radio by UserLand.</P> <P dir=ltr>Consider, again, how all this looks from the perspective of&nbsp;someone scanning in an RSS aggregator, using a <A href="http://www.oreillynet.com/meerkat/?_fl=minimal&amp;_de=0&amp;_ca=0">titles-only</A> mode to streamline the display. And on another axis, consider two different communities of practice: news, and blogs.</P> <P dir=ltr>The news style is: heads/decks, where the heads link to external stories. Here, the decks are useful, but optional -- if the head did its job and took you to the story, the author doesn't mind that you skipped the deck.</P> <P dir=ltr>The blog style is (optionally, of course): heads/stories. Here if the head does its job, the link takes you to the story. The author would very much mind if you skipped the story.</P> <P dir=ltr>Since the synthesis of these two communities of practice in an RSS reader is a compellingly powerful breakthrough, my question remains: how to harmonize them? </P> <P dir=ltr>Here's the scan mode I'd like to be able to define for my RSS reader:</P> <P dir=ltr>- If the [description] is really a short, optional, news-oriented deck, show it along with the title. </P> <P dir=ltr>- Or if the [description] is a blog-oriented story, but is&nbsp;a short-form blurb, not a long-form story, then show it along with the title.</P> <P dir=ltr>- But if the [description] is a blog-oriented long-form story, then hide it.</P> <P dir=ltr>I would not, at this point, presume to suggest any metadata tweaks for this purpose, though they are not hard to imagine. I only invite people inside and outside the Radio community, as they both write and aggregate blog-oriented and news-oriented items, to&nbsp;think about&nbsp;what the&nbsp;right synthesis might be.</P> 3/11/2002; 10:31:22 PM http://radio.weblogs.com/0100887/categories/rss/2002/03/11.html#a131 A <A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0104487/2002/03/11.html#a26">tip</A> from Marc Barrot: control the link's style using a CSS class. <b>...</b> <P>A <A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0104487/2002/03/11.html#a26">tip</A> from Marc Barrot: control the link's style using a CSS class. </P> <P>Hmm. Not quite what I'm looking for. Two reasons:</P> <P>1. The title shouldn't be a link at all in the HTML, if the link only refers to the self-same item.</P> <P>2. To get the <A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0100887/rss.xml">XML</A> to include the permalink, I had to publish the item, capture the permalink, then republish to update the&nbsp;Link field of the posting form.</P> <P>(Another minor glitch is that a <A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0100887/2002/03/10.html#a127">pre-title-feature permalink</A>&nbsp;jumps to the beginning of an item (which may include an inline title), but a <A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0100887/2002/03/11.html#a130">post-title-feature permalink</A> jumps past the title.)</P> <P>What's slightly tricky here is to accommodate some rather different use cases into a common approach. Consider:</P> <P>a)&nbsp;Marc writes an item, titles it, and defaults to the permalink.</P> <P>b) Jonathon writes an item, titles it, and links elsewhere.</P> <P>c) Shelley reads both items in HTML. No problem.</P> <P>d) Jon reads both items in an aggregator, in titles-only mode. </P> <P>Problem. I'd&nbsp;want Marc's link to take me to the text of his item, and it does. But I 'd also&nbsp;want Jonathan's link to take me to the text of his item, and it doesn't, I miss his item.</P> <P>Here's an example of an RSS reader in <A href="http://www.oreillynet.com/meerkat/?_fl=minimal&amp;_de=0&amp;_ca=0">titles-only mode</A>. Clearly, the normal behavior is b) for news-oriented RSS. Are there even extant examples of a)? And how could the two coexist in a titles-only headline viewer?</P> 3/10/2002; 6:15:32 AM http://radio.weblogs.com/0100887/categories/rss/2002/03/10.html#a123 <STRONG>Bootstrapping the knowledge network</STRONG> <b>...</b> <P dir=ltr><STRONG>Bootstrapping the knowledge network</STRONG></P> <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> <P dir=ltr><EM>In the first stage, the tools encourage a degree of commentary and reaction to what you find or create (in </EM><A href="http://dijest.editthispage.com/klogs/"><EM>k-logging </EM></A><EM>mode). However, it also encourages a degree of stream of consciousness style. Progress, in that it can represent a contemporaneous record of the contextual issues that were top of mind. Problematic, in creating new content that eventually needs to be revisited and processed at a level once removed from the moment.</EM> [<A href="http://www.kellogg.nwu.edu/faculty/mcgee/htm/blog/">McGee's Musings</A>]</P></BLOCKQUOTE> <P dir=ltr>It's true that I'm impatient for knowledge networking to reach critical mass. I thought the singularity would&nbsp;occur years ago, and I was wrong.&nbsp;I hope it's happening now, and while I could be wrong again, it's clear that something has changed. People are doing what I spent years of my life and hundreds of pages of my book advocating. They are migrating communication that is not necessarily private and interpersonal into spaces that are public and group-oriented. This behavior lays the foundation for all else that may follow. </P> <P dir=ltr>We want nothing to interfere with the evolution of this behavior. In particular, we don't want burdensome rules and complex protocols to slow things down. The lesson of HTML, vis-a-vis SGML, must never be forgotten. At the same time, we would like -- if possible -- not to foreclose options unnecessarily. </P> <P dir=ltr>It's been a while since I reviewed the <A href="http://www.oasis-open.org/cover/rss.html">forked path of RSS</A>. In <A href="http://backend.userland.com/rss092">RSS .92</A> even the title of an item was made optional, which seems heretical to a metadata maven (like me) but makes sense when you are trying to bootstrap flow. <A href="http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rss-dev/files/specification.html">RSS 1.0</A>'s approach, which requires item titles (as .91 did), and provides optional modular extensibility for arbitrary metadata, makes a different kind of sense.</P> <P dir=ltr>I would say that RSS .92 (what Radio uses, BTW) is about promoting flow, and RSS 1.0 is about not foreclosing future options.</P> <P dir=ltr>There was hot controversy surrounding these differing approaches. But nobody outside the relatively narrow world of users of RSS-oriented software heard a word about it. Just as well, as it turns out, because until there is a reason to care, people won't.</P> <P dir=ltr>The progress that Jim McGee cites in his posting is becoming a reason to care. Once enough people do care, the problems he cites can be addressed. Maybe you could say that RSS .92 is the booster rocket, and RSS 1.0 the payload.</P> <P dir=ltr>I don't think the boost phase would be compromised by enabling&nbsp;(not requiring) Radio&nbsp;writers&nbsp;to exercise the titling option in RSS .92, and then enabling Radio readers to&nbsp;scan titles (from .91. 1.0, and perhaps .92 sources). But in truth, it can wait. Until we get ourselves into orbit, it won't matter. </P> McGee&apos;s Musings 3/8/2002; 9:59:36 AM http://radio.weblogs.com/0100887/categories/rss/2002/03/08.html#a116 <STRONG>Still tinkering</STRONG> <b>...</b> <P><STRONG>Still tinkering</STRONG></P> <P>A non-Radio user wrote, complaining about the unexpected result of clicking on the coffee cup. So, I've made the cup's ALT text instructions more explicit, and have added back a direct link to the RSS channel. </P> <P>Is there a coffee-cup-sized version of <A title="Click to see the XML version of this web page." href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0100887/rss.xml"><IMG height=14 alt="Click to see the XML version of this web page." src="http://radio.weblogs.com/0100887/images/xml.gif" width=36 border=0></A>?</P> 3/7/2002; 8:37:20 PM http://radio.weblogs.com/0100887/categories/rss/2002/03/07.html#a115 <STRONG>Mike Jamison spots the flaw in the RSS display</STRONG> <b>...</b> <P><STRONG>Mike Jamison spots the flaw in the RSS display</STRONG></P> <P>Mike wrote to point out that, while the coffee cups should link to the RSS channel, the titles should link to the homepage of each channel, not also to the RSS channel as I had been doing.</P> <P>He's absolutely right. This bothered me too, but I didn't know where to find the second link. Well, duh, I didn't look very hard. It's just another slot in the table. So now, <A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0100887/stories/2002/02/24/enumeratingInboundNewsFeeds.html">the updated script</A> uses both links.</P> <P>Thanks, Mike!</P> <P>I guess there is still one glitch. If you are not a Radio user and just want to capture the XML, you have to grab the coffee-cup link and reduce it from:</P> <P><A href="http://127.0.0.1:5335/system/pages/subscriptions?url=http://www.newsisfree.com/HPE/xml/feeds/74/874.xml"><a href="http://127.0.0.1:5335/system/pages/subscriptions">http://127.0.0.1:5335/system/pages/subscriptions</a>?<BR><a href="url=http://www.newsisfree.com/HPE/xml/feeds/74/874.xml">url=http://www.newsisfree.com/HPE/xml/feeds/74/874.xml</a></A></P> <P>to:</P> <P><A href="http://www.newsisfree.com/HPE/xml/feeds/74/874.xml"><a href="http://www.newsisfree.com/HPE/xml/feeds/74/874.xml">http://www.newsisfree.com/HPE/xml/feeds/74/874.xml</a></A></P> <P>Probably, it's not worth cluttering up the display with another element just to carry the bare RSS URL. </P> <P>Ideally, the one-click-subscribe wants to be application-neutral, of course.</P> 2/24/2002; 1:22:29 PM http://radio.weblogs.com/0100887/categories/rss/2002/02/24.html#a88 <STRONG>Displaying&nbsp;subscriptions</STRONG> <b>...</b> <P><STRONG>Displaying&nbsp;subscriptions</STRONG></P> <P>The widget below my calendar&nbsp;displays the RSS feeds to which I'm subscribed in Radio. It's a Web service, although at the moment (since I'm blocking inbound access) it can only be used locally, like so:</P> <P><FONT face=Geneva,Arial,Sans-Serif>&lt;%params = {}; xml.rpc ("127.0.0.1", 5335, "radio.subs", @params)%&gt;</FONT></P> <P><FONT face=Arial>or, equivalently,</FONT></P> <P><FONT face=Arial>&lt;% ["xmlrpc://127.0.0.1:5335/"].radio.subs () %&gt;</FONT></P> <P><FONT face=Arial>or, in fact:</FONT></P> <P><FONT face=Arial>&lt;% ["soap://127.0.0.1:5335/"].radio.subs () %&gt;</FONT></P> <P>The script is <A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0100887/stories/2002/02/24/enumeratingInboundNewsFeeds.html">here</A>. It's an experiment in transparency. I'm revealing not just what I might say that I read, for example in a static blogroll, but what my&nbsp;aggregator database shows&nbsp;that I actually do read (or at least scan). </P> <P>This might be a little too intimate for most people to want to do. It might even be too intimate for me to want to do, at least for a global audience. I'll see how that feels. </P> <P>In any case this is clearly&nbsp;something that smaller teams of people might want to do in order to pool knowledge resources. And that's the beauty of having the implementation be a Web service. The same code that's used to render the global homepage can be used in a point-to-point kind of way.</P> <P>Part of this experiment is about getting RSS URLs to be more visible, and more easily transferable. Note that some of these feeds are courtesy of <A href="http://www.newsisfree.com/">NewsIsFree</A>. I think this is an acceptable non-commercial use. If I hear otherwise, I'll desist. <BR></P> 1/15/2002; 9:45:05 PM http://radio.weblogs.com/0100887/categories/rss/2002/01/15.html#a6 Now I want to recategorize the posting, having decided that the newly-created RSS category is more appropriate than the original Radio category. <b>...</b> <P>Now I want to recategorize the posting, having decided that the newly-created RSS category is more appropriate than the original Radio category.</P> <P>Well, fair enough. Radio did not remove:</P> <P><A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0100887/categories/radio/rss.xml"><a href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0100887/categories/radio/rss.xml">http://radio.weblogs.com/0100887/categories/radio/rss.xml</a></A></P> <P>but did add:</P> <P><A href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0100887/categories/rss/rss.xml"><a href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0100887/categories/rss/rss.xml">http://radio.weblogs.com/0100887/categories/rss/rss.xml</a></A></P> <P>Meanwhile, I am categorizing this item both ways: under Radio and RSS.</P> <P>&nbsp;</P> 1/15/2002; 9:35:45 PM http://radio.weblogs.com/0100887/categories/rss/2002/01/15.html#a3 Trying the category feature. This item categorized under Radio. And, the category is set to render as HTML. I think this means that: <b>...</b> <P>Trying the category feature. This item categorized under Radio. And, the category is set to render as HTML. I think this means that:</P> <UL> <LI>The item will appear on the homepage, with an URL like /categories/radio/itemname. <LI>The item will appear in an RSS feed dedicated to the category.</LI></UL> <P>Let's see.</P>