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# Posted on 8/26/03; 2:56:38 PM

In theory this weblog post has Trackback enabled.

If you have a blogging tool that supports Trackback, please give it a whirl. (Ping it.)

Praise Murphy!

PS: It's not working. Jake is going to fix some stuff. Still diggin!

PPS: Now Jake says it works, and sho nuf it does. Hehaw.

# Posted on 7/16/03; 2:15:57 PM

"How you feel about the limitations of RSS probably depends on what you use it for. If you want a simple format that lets you notify subscribers when your site�s content is updated, and makes it easy to include a few lines of that content so they can decide whether or not it interests them, RSS 2.0 fits the bill perfectly. Its genius is its simplicity -- and simplicity, whether in furniture design or software design, is a high virtue."

# Posted on 7/11/03; 6:08:14 AM

On Saturday I leave Portland and head south to Silicon Valley. It's the first time I'll ever stay in a hotel there, after living there for 23 years. So the question most on my mind: where should I stay?

I want a Best Western type place, low cost, easy in easy out, air conditioning and most important, great Internet access for not much money. I'd like to stay in Palo Alto, reasonably close to Page Mill Road, or University Ave for easy freeway access.

Question: Are there any hotels/motels that meet my criteria? Help would be much appreciated. Please use the comment section below.

# Posted on 7/10/03; 8:52:45 PM

Suppose, hypothetically, you were going to release a spec under a Creative Commons license, and you wanted the terms to match, as closely as possible, the Copyright and Disclaimer on the RSS 2.0 spec. Which one would you use?

# Posted on 7/7/03; 1:53:41 PM

Now, all we need is a picture of Mr Safe.

And of course he needs a song too. Maybe something like "Don't cross the street in the middle in the middle in the middle in the middle in the middle of the blog. Teach your eyes to look out. Teach your ears to hear. Walk up to the corner and wait until the coast is clear."

I'm going to do a Google image search right now.

Try this one.

# Posted on 7/7/03; 6:54:43 AM

Chad Dickerson: "When I started using an RSS newsreader daily, some remarkable things happened that I didn't necessarily expect: I began to spend almost no time surfing to keep up with current technology information, and I was suddenly able to manage a large body of incoming information with incredible efficiency. My newsreader has become so integral that it's now sitting in my Windows startup folder along with my e-mail client and contact manager. I'm humming 'RSS Killed the Infoglut Star' when I fire up my RSS newsreader in the morning. "

# Posted on 7/3/03; 1:38:52 PM

"RSS, Real Simple Syndication, is currently in version 2.0 based on the Userland specification. This article will go over the uses of the XML dialect, the channel elements, and a few examples of RSS channels."

# Posted on 7/2/03; 8:35:07 PM

The problem: I subscribe to a feed at home but my aggregator at work doesn't know about it. And vice versa.

This is an RFC, a first implementation and a bootstrap for an XML-RPC-based network service that synchronizes subscriptions across different aggregators.

I posted it here so people could comment on it and ask questions in the comment section below.

# Posted on 7/2/03; 7:33:57 AM

Do you have a question for me about the politics of RSS?

I will do my best, time-permitting, to answer non-personal, respectful questions about the politics of RSS.

I've started by answering the first three questions I hear most often.

If you have a question, send me an email and I'll do my best to answer it in the FAQ.

# Posted on 6/30/03; 6:56:20 AM

About Echo, here's a tentative endorsement.

If and when it reaches closure, I will recommend to UserLand that they support the format, both for input and output, and I will help to the extent I can to write drivers for the software. I will continue to answer questions for the people working on Echo, and offer my opinion when it appears to be welcome, but will step back when it is not.

However I will also strongly insist, as a user, and major shareholder that UserLand continue to support RSS 2.0, for perpetuity. We made a commitment to our users to keep the ride as smooth as possible, and RSS 2.0 is an incredibly strong format, providing interop with lots of other software, and forms the backup format for Radio weblogs, and an interchange format with compatible weblog tools.

I will continue to recommend the format to all weblog tool and aggregator vendors, even plead with them to support it, even shame them into supporting it, because I feel, passionately, that it is essential for our nascent industry to not only provide a smooth ride for our users, and choice of tools, but to provide a smooth ride for content partners like the BBC, Christian Science Monitor, IDG, CNET, Ziff-Davis, Knight-Ridder, Apple, Microsoft, Cisco, Oracle, etc. All these organizations, and many more, have stood up and supported RSS. We must respect that.

But I can support Echo because it appears to be respecting the Roadmap in RSS 2.0. That's much appreciated. Thank you.

Onward!

# Posted on 6/26/03; 3:29:33 PM

An awesome application of RSS. Chris Pirillo has set up a set of dozens of feeds covering every product category on Amazon. You can subscribe to them to find about new stuff. This is so excellent. Right on right on.

# Posted on 6/25/03; 8:32:51 AM

"Over the years, people have asked me which version of RSS to use. I've always said it doesn't matter, they all do the same thing. But the question always annoys me, because while I've tried to pretend otherwise, the fragmentation of RSS really is a problem. I think it's part of the reason my two acquaintances aren't using RSS today."

# Posted on 6/25/03; 8:16:31 AM

Simon Willison is helping a friend get an RSS feed together for her weblog, and had some questions and had to guess because there is no FAQ. Of the three decisions he made, I strongly agree with two of them. Now for the third -- should he use link or guid to represent the permalink to the post? I believe he should use guid because that's what it was designed for. Link was designed for something else.

First, link has the easier name because it predates guid by three years, and its design is central to the initial design of RSS, to model items with three bits of data, title, link and description. Look at a News.Com story as the prototype for early, lizard-brain-level RSS. Every story they produce has all three items. My.Netscape presented each "channel" in a box, with TLD's. Now when weblogs started using RSS, almost immediately, not every post would have all three, in fact since Frontier was the main weblog tool at the time, and didn't support the common weblog-post model so familiar today, you might say that no weblog posts supported this model. It wasn't until Blogger came along in mid 1999 that TLDs were possible in weblogs. It wasn't until mid-Y2K that Manila supported TLD-type posts.

Anyway, I'm explaining all this background for a purpose, to say that, imho, link should be used only to link to the article being described by the post, it should only be used in the TLD context. I believe that was a very solid application and shouldn't be muddied. Of course many feeds these days take link seriously, like for example all 68 of the BBC feeds announced yesterday.

Now that said, Radio uses link the way Simon uses it. But then guid didn't exist when Radio shipped. Now that it does exist, I really feel strongly that people should use it, and let link be pure.

See also: Guids are not just for geeks anymore.
See also: RSS2-Support mail list.

# Posted on 6/25/03; 8:01:31 AM

FWIW, in RSS 2.0, I thought there should be a core-level post ID element, but I thought there was a pretty good chance, based on experience with the Blogger API, that each tool would have a different way of expressing it.

The compelling app for post ID's is backup and restore. If I'm using RSS to back up a weblog, and if I need to do a restore, the post ID's must be preserved, or when I regenerate the site after a restore, permalinks will break. Also since Radio and Manila are programming environments, developers may have created applications that depend on post ID's being preserved. The same is true of many other blogging tools.

Rather than put this in the core, I decided to put it in a namespace, specifically for Radio, and to revisit the issue after other blogging tools started using RSS 2.0 seriously.

# Posted on 6/25/03; 7:55:53 AM