Category Archives: Feed aggregators

Sam Ruby posted a long and interesting writeup on the differences between RSS and Atom, and what tool builders need to worry about. “[I]f you want to support any version of RSS completely, you essentially need to support all of them.” “If you can’t generate unique ids for entries, then perhaps Atom is not the format for you.” “Atom has more required elements than RSS. Atom adds type attributes to titles and links to resolve the ambiguity described above. It has separate elements for summary and content.”…

Kendall Grant Clark, faculty research associate in the University of Maryland’s semantic web lab, wrote an interesting XML.com article about the courtship of Atom and who’s courting whom. FOAF plus Atom (or FOAF plus your favorite RSS flavor) is to the Semantic Web what home pages were to the Web. A machine-readable description of a person, plus a machine-readable version of that person’s web space, is enough Semantic Web for us to do really great things, whether or not the hard KR stuff ever amounts to anything at all. This idea is exactly what I was trying to get Technorati…

Minutes from today’s W3C Atom discussion in New York City are posted on the W3C site. Eric Miller, W3C: “In the past 6 months, RDF support has gotten stronger. At the same time, I’ve talked with Tim Berners-Lee, and he has said this will not be done by fiat.” Sam Ruby: “I would like to see more pull from W3C. Work on W3cCharter. IETF is a black hole. I’m not thrilled with them. But it has an external perception of being open.”…

I have three newsfeed readers open, subscribed to the same feeds, and each program presents each channel, and the items within, notably differently. I examined the default configuration of each application. The traditional model is an alphabetical listing of all channels in a group. Channels with unread items are highlighted, and the number of unread items displayed. Ranchero Software’s NetNewsWire follows this model. A modified model orders the channels by their latest item’s publish date. Graham Parks’ Shrook follows this model. Freshly Squeezed Software’s PulpFiction displays items chronologically, without the navigation through channel listings. The item’s creator appears before the…

There will be an Atom Community Meeting on Wednesday, June 2, at Sun’s offices in either Menlo Park or Santa Clara. Time to prepare for the August IETF meeting….

Dave Winer writes more and invites more comments regarding the issues raised in the Wired article. I have had some ideas regarding more community sharing of news feed resources. How can aggregator developers better publish their users subscriptions and activities? Would the end user be willing to have their data published? Share Your OPML is a start. What if aggregators had Share Your OPML functionality built-in? Locally stored and placed online as well. Most users have some online space available, either through their ISP, personal site, MSN, .Mac, etc. You have the dateModified field defined in the head. Expand the…

Ryan Singel of Wired News wonders if RSS readers will clog Web servers. The solution is HTTP status code 304 Not Modified. See section 10.3.5 of the HTTP 1.1 specification for more details. “If a cache uses a received 304 response to update a cache entry, the cache MUST update the entry to reflect any new field values given in the response.” Date is a new field value. If no date found (clockless origin server) you use client date….

Opera 7.50 beta 1 is now available. Opera Mail now supports RSS newsfeeds. Integrates with Opera address book so you can see custom avatars for weblog publishers and even their IRC nicks. You can also add the blog publisher as a contact direct from the RSS reader. Supports CSS Level 2 revision 1 with few exceptions. “Newsfeeds” added as access point in the e-mail panel RSS 0.9x, 1.0 and 2.0 are supported Clicking RSS links automatically adds newsfeed to Opera Mail Auto-detection of RSS file (link rel=”alternate”) displayed in navigation bar…

Sony Music has artist RSS feeds for artists such as Beyonce Knowles, Five For Fighting, Jessica Simpson, and Nas….

Nick Bradbury posted a new FeedDemon beta last night. Aggregate your RSS feeds!…