A new version of the Atom sydication format working draft is online. There are element changes such as a change in the publish date and updated tags, and new category support. The new draft also adds a length attribute to link elements, enabling podcasting and other applications. Format freeze is supposed to happen Monday, January 17….
Category Archives: Feed aggregators
Technorati cosmos within NetNewsWire
I wrote an AppleScript for NetNewsWire that allows a user to subscribe to the Technorati cosmos for any individual item within NetNewsWire. Users now have a quick and easy way of staying informed about the latest information related to items of interest from the convenience of NetNewsWire. You do not even have to be online to subscribe to the cosmos! This code is the second AppleScript I have ever written — the first was to export my feeds as OPML and FTP the to my server. I almost did not submit it to the Technorati developers’ contest but I won…
Attention.xml export for NetNewsWire
Attention.xml is an open standard to track attention metadata such as what you read and what you would like to learn more about. So far there has been a lot of talk around the idea and what it could mean for synchronization, resource discovery, and social networking. Technorati and Steve Gillmor have talked about the idea but there has been no implementation to show how you could use this open format with existing applications such as web browsers and feed aggregators to make sense out of your daily activity. Until now. I wrote an AppleScript that exports all of your…
Opera version 8 beta
Opera released a beta version of its Opera desktop application last week. The new version features improved RSS handling including address bar support similar to Apple’s plans for Safari RSS. A user can choose between RSS feeds declared as alternate links of type application/rss+xml. After you subscribe to one or more feeds a Feeds menu appears showing your subscriptions and unread items per feed. The Opera RSS browser treats each RSS item as a mail message, complete with the e-mail address of the item’s author. I did not check to see which RSS element is pulled here but I…
Forbes on RSS
Forbes has a brief article about RSS feeds changing the business landscape. Some inaccuracies in the article: “Instead of searching for information, you get RSS to push it to you.” RSS is a pull technology, not push. A user requests the data and is sent a response. “Technorati.com is now monitoring more than 5 million RSS-enabled blogs.” Technorati claims to watch over 5.2 million weblogs, but Technorati builds its database primarily by parsing HTML. Technorati is not a RSS-based searcher as the article claims….
Tiger adds default RSS reader option
The next version of Macintosh operating system, 10.4 code named Tiger, defines a default RSS reader at the system level. Preferences in the current early start kit allow a user to define the time between feed updates, the color annotation of a new article, and when to remove stored items. Hopefully this means aggregators will be able to share a common feed storage location. Update: MacNet took down at the request of Apple Legal. The preference pane showed a drop-down boxes to select the default RSS reader, choose an update interval, highlight new items, and the length of time to…
Bloglines adds international flavors
Bloglines is now available in Spanish, Japanese, traditional Chinese, French, German, and Portuguese. Mark should open up the interface and allow users to add their own launguages like Google’s interface….
Adam Bosworth’s ISCOC talk
Adam Bosworth gave a keynote presentation at the International Conference on Service Oriented Computing in New York yesterday. Lots of good content covering programming languages, information overload, the need for simple technologies to warm people up to a bigger idea, and how the experts will still create the complex technologies while the simple methods coexist. “You want to see the future. Don’t look at Longhorn. Look at Slashdot. 500,000 nerds coming together everyday just to manage information overload. On the difference between RSS 1.0 and 2.0: There was an abortive attempt to impose a rich abstract analytic formality on this…
Feed update scheduling
I want to be able to define in my feed aggregators when a feed or feed group should not be checked for updates. When I attend a conference or I am at work I am focused on groups of feeds. Please only update those groups automatically until after 6 p.m. Monday through Friday. I know audio from Fresh Air will not be available until 4:30 p.m., so there is no use in teasing me at 10 a.m. while I wait for the audio. Similar to ttl each aggregator could use skipHours or skipDays as the default and not let me…
Firefox Live Bookmarks has a new icon
I just downloaded Mozilla Firefox 1.0 RC1 and noticed the new orange icon for Live Bookmarks. It looks like the broadcasting icon in iCal (pictured above)….