Jeffrey A. Miller: The World in XML!

Thu, 05 Jun 2003 21:18:21 GMT

Why I don't grok (XML) namespaces. [Keith's Weblog]

Fri, 30 May 2003 14:39:33 GMT

Practical RDF: Sometimes you feel like RDF, sometimes you don't. (SOURCE:"burningb")-Excellent wine example clearly explains the difference between XML, RDF and ontologies and the uses of each!
<quote>
XML gives us the ability to record bits and pieces of data in a valid manner. RDF then builds on the data, piecing the bits and pieces together into complete statements. Ontologies then take these statements and builds machine-understandable inferential rules based around them. The result of all this working together is the wine scenario:
</quote> [Roland Tanglao: KLogs]

Tue, 13 May 2003 20:41:27 GMT

The SOAP/XML-RPC/REST Saga, Chap. 51. (SOURCE:"timb")-A lucid, easy to understand explanation of SOAP, XML-RPC and REST. Bravo, Tim!
<quote>
Today Dave Sifry of the excellent Technorati announced an API for the world. The API, as announced, is about as purely Webby a thing as you can imagine. Dave Winer pushed back, suggesting a more SOAP/XML-RPC kind of approach. This is maybe the single central issue in architecting Web apps right at the moment, so I think it's OK to take a few more whacks at the supine equine. Furthermore, I think the issue is simple enough that anyone who uses the web, not just geeks, ought to be able to understand it. So I've provided an introduction for the non-geeks who read ongoing, all three of them, and looked a little more closely at the Technorati situation.
</quote> [Roland Tanglao: KLogs]

Fri, 02 May 2003 04:28:09 GMT

Revisiting the Virtual Press Room.

Phil Wainewright

I've just subscribed to Phil Wainewright's archive of press releases at looselycoupled.com. (PR folk take note: I subscribed voluntarily to this feed.) An analyst and writer focused on Web services, Phil has built an application that publicists can use to post their press releases to his website, which in turn flows them out as an RSS feed. ... [Jon's Radio]

SharpReader

Fri, 18 Apr 2003 19:23:08 GMT

SharpReader is awesome.

Ok, SharpReader is freaking awesome. It supports categories, has multi-threaded updating of feeds, and the entry threading feature is amazing. It tells me when someone else I read refers to the post I'm currently reading. Really fantastic. Even more reason to include entire posts in your RSS feeds. People, you listening??

Hopefully I won't wind up hating SharpReader after using it for a little while like I did with the last RSS reader I tried. One good sign is that pieces of SharpReader have grown on me after using it for a little while. For example, the way it keeps old posts around. It works more like an e-mail client, where you have to explicitly delete old items, rather than having them expire in some way. At first I didn't like this. Syndirella kept a configurable number of old items around (I think it defaulted to 50). NewsDesk only kept items around that were in the current feed. After using it though, I think SharpReader does it the best, because posts simply stay around for as long as you want them to. Seems like the best plan to me, even though you do have to explicitly delete old posts (but there are a lot of keyboard shortcuts to help you delete a lot of old posts at once ).

Ooh, cool. It exports feeds in the OPML file in the same order as they appear in your SharpReader window. Makes sense, right? Now I don't have to sort my OPML file before displaying it. In fact, now I shouldn't!.

[Keith's Weblog]

Since Keith seems so intent on promoting entire posts in RSS, I hope he doesn't mind me posting his entire post. :-)

Wed, 16 Apr 2003 18:04:29 GMT

The semantic blog. I've long dreamed of using RSS to produce and consume XML content. We're so close. RSS content is HTML, which is almost XHTML, a gap that HTML Tidy can close. In current practice, the meat of an RSS item appears in the <description> tag, either as an HTML-escaped (aka entity-encoded) string or as a CDATA element. As has been often observed, it'd be really cool to have the option to use XHTML as well. Then I could write blog items in which the <pre> tag, or perhaps a class="codeFragment" attribute, marks regions for precise search. You or I could aggregate those items into personal XPath-aware databases in order to do those searches locally (perhaps even offline), and public aggregators could offer the same capability over the Web. [O'Reilly Network] ... [Jon's Radio]

RSS aggregator trends

Fri, 11 Apr 2003 12:54:48 GMT

I'm not sure how these statistics were compiled, but this article at Curiouser and curiouser! breaks down the top 40 aggregators by mindshare, download size, and number of (users?). Several popular aggregators appear more than once because they are tracked by version number.

Our friend Syndirella #2 in the mix, but NetNewsWire heads up the pack. Go figure, a Mac Os X application is the leader by almost double! Are the majority of bloggers Mac users?

Yahoo Groups in RSS

Wed, 09 Apr 2003 17:01:58 GMT

I haven't had much luck with this so far, but it appears that you can subscribe to your Yahoo Groups as an RSS feed by using a query string similar to this one:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/iccm/messages?rss=1

In the above example, the "iccm" part would be replaced with whatever your desired group name is. I haven't gotten this to work with all of the groups, but it appears to work for at least the radio-dev group. Ironic isn't it?

I hate getting tons of email that just collect and then I never read them. This way I'll only have recent items in my RSS aggregator.

Tue, 08 Apr 2003 15:36:26 GMT

.NET RSS Aggregators. Rick wonders if anyone would notice when he releases his .NET RSS aggregator. I've wondered the same thing about SharpReader. When I started SharpReader, there was just Aggie (that I knew of). Soon after, I read Jeppe Cramon was starting on FeedExpress, which has since been released. Then came Syndirella, Beaver and NewsDesk, so SharpReader is just YA3PDNA. Is it... (97 words) [SharpReader category of Luke Hutteman's public virtual MemoryStream]

Tue, 08 Apr 2003 15:31:24 GMT

Syndirella development ceasing.

Syndirella development is basically over

... I'm really, really tempted to give up Syndirella development. And this is one of the reasons why. SharpReader today has just about everything that I wanted to implement in Syndirella in the next 2-3 months.

Interesting. Now if he can only get the darn thing working on Windows 98

But does SharpReader not detect when the content of a given item changes?

[Keith's Weblog]

Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI)

Wed, 02 Apr 2003 16:28:16 GMT

Dublin Core Metadata Initiative. Sounds very "heady," but I'll keep the link.

GoogleBoxing

Tue, 01 Apr 2003 17:59:48 GMT

Display the result of a Google query on your blog in a special box by using the Google API. You can integrate Radio UserLand and Frontier by using Google Glue. The Google API is a web service.

InfoPath and OneNote

Mon, 31 Mar 2003 01:24:17 GMT

First look at InfoPath.

The next version of Microsoft Office is, among other things, a family of XML editors. I have discussed the XML modes of Word and Excel (see XML for the rest of us and "Exploring XML in Office 11"), and described the newest member of this family, InfoPath 2003, a tool for gathering XML data (see "Ten things to know about Xdocs"). Now that I've had a chance to work with InfoPath, its role and value are becoming clearer. [Full story at InfoWorld.com] ... [Jon's Radio]

Cool!!! I'm getting pretty stoked about the new products in the Office family. I've been drawn back to Office recently as a worthwhile development platform for small personal solutions like web publishing (not FrontPage, either--we're talking Word-to-XML conversion), mail filtering, Outlook add-ons, Excel XML export, and more.

But as for the new stuff, XML is a major part of the strategy. OneNote is a different kind of product and fills in the other gap that I see in the personal productivity suite for the power user. Note taking made natural.

Maybe by summer of 2003, I will find that the combination of products in Office 2003 will make my Notebase idea somewhat unnecessary.

I'll try to post some links to product info pages later.

Drupal

Fri, 21 Feb 2003 23:45:49 GMT

URLs are what matter.

You know, I've realized that the only thing that's really important to me is meticulous control over my url-space. That's the only thing that really matters. As long as your URLs stay constant, you can rip out your backend as many times as you want and it doesn't matter. So, I might just say screw it all, move over to Drupal, and set up a simple gateway that'll translate named URLs into Drupal nodes. Hmmmm...

[Keith's Weblog]

Drupal seems to be built PHP, XML, and perhaps other technologies. Need to read more here.

My Feature Request for Syndirella

Mon, 17 Feb 2003 01:30:54 GMT

Another problem is feed update error handling...I'll need to make sure that fatal errors (like 404 errors) are reported as message boxes and not as status bar notiications. [yole's devblog]

One thing I noticed is that, behind a proxy server, I couldn't find a way to specify credentials for background updating.

BottomFeeder

Mon, 17 Feb 2003 01:11:07 GMT

James Robertson pointed me to BottomFeeder - another free news aggregator currently on the market. The interesting part about BottomFeeder is that it is written in Smalltalk, which is not quite a common language nowadays.

[yole's devblog]

Good bits here

Mon, 17 Feb 2003 01:03:20 GMT

An important achievent today: My.Yandex, the only RSS syndication service in the Russian Internet that I'm aware of (maybe the only one that exists), now exports its list of feeds in the OPML format. This is especially exciting because this finally makes Syndirella useful for Russian users...

So tomorrow I'll implement my part of the agreement with Yandex - support for importing OPML files from HTTP sites, with the possibility to preview the feeds and select the ones that should be imported. This will, of course, open the doors to other major RSS feed directories like MoreOver and NewsIsFree.

[yole's devblog]

File under: OPML, Syndirella, RSS News Sources

Notebase is on the way..

Mon, 17 Feb 2003 00:58:54 GMT

Yet Another Geek Anniverary - the BBS. The TEXTFILES.COM BBS Timeline: 1978 - Snowed in during the Great Chicago Snowstorm of 1978, Ward Christensen begins preliminary work on what would eventually become CBBS (Computer Bulletin Board System), the first Bulletin Board System Read more about it at... [Heal Your Church Web Site]

Yeah! I got it! Snowed in...some great creation emerges. Well, that settles it! I'm off to code my next great invention. It may take a year, but it will happen, Lord willing.

Meta Keyword Tags are Dead and Syndirella is Alive and Well

Sat, 18 Jan 2003 23:41:17 GMT

Thanks to Dean for including this tidbit from one of my favorite sources: Search Engine Watch.

Apparently, nearly all significant search engines ignore the <META NAME="keywords"> tag. It's a "spam magnet" and has been largely dismissed since the 1997-1998 time frame with regard to its importance in search engine relevance. I was once badgered by so-called expert when building a site (in mid 2001) because I didn't include the META keywords tag. The site won't be promoted properly, blah, blah, blah. Well, I think the most important factors are keyword usage in page titles and content, search engine submission, and external links leading to your site. Except for Inktomi, the major search engines don't use the META keywords tag. So it's virtually dead, unless you have some other purpose for your own Million Dollar Markup.

If you're interested, here's a few other things you can do with a META tag. The article taught me something new today. Some META tags (the ones that use the HTTP-EQUIV attribute) correspond to headers found in HTTP messages (see IETF RFC 1945, section 4.2). Some web servers translate the values stored in the META tags (the HTTP-EQUIV kind) into the HTTP headers when they deliver content to the browser.

Dean also noted the arrival of an open source, Windows-based desktop news aggregator called Syndirella by Dmitry Jemerov. Excellent! I like the idea of the ability (more research required here) to scrape regular web pages for news. This means that I might be able to digest the Search Day newsletter from Search Engine Watch without visiting the page directly. Maybe.

I was using email subscriptions to get most of my news in the past, and I possess many dedicated mail folders for particular sources that fill up with unread messages. Pretty useless.

So, as I move along in my blogging adventure, RSS collected by a news aggregator seems to be a much be better solution. If I miss six months worth of news, I don't have six months worth of news staring me in the face during my next session--only recent, relevant stuff.

Now, Syndirella goes one step better. Instead of having an extremely long web page to read, Syndirella carves up the news into each feed and allows in-client reading without bouncing all over to other windows. It still feels a little clumsy and basic, but my hat is off to Dmitry for creating such a useful tool and releasing it as a free, open source product.

Not only that, but it's written in C# running on the .NET framework. I was wondering what the most effective way to distribute a .NET desktop application over the web would be. The Framework is a 20MB+ download for those that don't already have it. That's a long wait for a lot of users. But Dmitry is doing it. He warns the user about the size of the download and gives instructions about where to acquire it. This seems to be the best way I've seen so far, short of mailing out a CD. No, I don't want to do that.

Which came first, the Chicken or the Acronym?

Sun, 05 Jan 2003 18:21:57 GMT

I'm a little peeved. I can't imagine how a technology such as RSS could bear so many different names. Did someone say "Hey, I think we should invent a technology called RSS. What do you think it should stand for?" Supposedly, RSS was developed jointly by UserLand Software and Netscape. Would someone please tell us which of the following names RSS really stands for?

Dave Winer and company think that it stands for Really Simple Syndication.
Jon Udell and other notable folks think it stands for Rich Site Summary.
I think I saw another mention of RDF Site Summary somewhere as well.

Stop it already! Duke it out and declare a winner! But can we have a definitive answer? Thanks to Sam Ruby for the great background details.

Sat, 28 Dec 2002 04:25:37 GMT

What are schemas for?.

Contracts: agreeing on formats
Tool building: know what the data will be before the first instance shows up
- Database integration
- User interface tools
- Programming language bindings
Validation: make sure we got what we expected

Source: Noah Mendelsohn [PPT, page 9] [Sam Ruby]

Wed, 25 Dec 2002 13:37:02 GMT

Editors' Newswire for 24 December, 2002. Newswire stories, including: C|Net: Bring on the Web services war; Short intro to Datatyping in RDF/XML; Raptor RDF Parser Toolkit 0.9.7; List of alternative formats to XML; Python XML tools for DOS. [xmlhack]

Some good stuff on XML. Return to read.