| WebSeitz/wikilog |
| RSS |
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| last edited by BillSeitz on Jun 24, 2009 5:06 am |
RSS is an XML standard originally designed for providing summaries of new content from a website "channel".
RSS for this site is at rss.xml - but it contains little info other than the list of pages. At the moment I believe in reading at-the-source, but I'm always chewing on it...)
It is currently most heavily used for WebLog aggregation - an Rss Aggregator can be either a single-use package which aggregates the blogs on that user's subscription list (Publish And Subscribe), or a shared server which provides any of a number of features.
All User Land tools generate RSS channels automatically.
BlogGer does not. Blogger Pro added it in May'02.
Live Journal has turned it back on. 500k blogs, 200k+ updated in last month. Using RSS 0.91.
Movable Type also has it, and it's turned on by default.
There's also a couple apps that will "scrape HTML" to generate RSS.
Also see MeatballWiki:RichSiteSummary and AbbeNormal:WikisWithRss
Mark Pilgrim's "What is RSS" article is a great intro, including some PyThon code and comparison of the different versions. Once I get around to an RSS output for this wiki, I'll probably use v2.0 (for the per-item date info) (hmmm, I wonder whether PeerKat supports it?.
Comparison of required/optional elements across versions
Validators:
There are scalability issues associated with heavy use of Rss Aggregator software - see Publish And Subscribe.
What more "interesting" kinds of processing could be done on RSS repositories to make the BlogWeb more "emergent"?
Enterprise Collaboration Ware may generate RSS feeds (AppLog) so that updates can be browsed easily by various parties, integrated with other sources. At that point I would see a greater reason for an aggregation system. On the other hand, it may make more sense to read within the Collaboration Ware, where the security model is already defined.
There's an ongoing controversy over who "controls" the RSS spec. At the moment, Dave Winer de-facto shepherds 0.91 (see esp. "Timeline" section) and 0.92 but there's also a 1.0 which conforms to RDF. Dave fought this direction as an increase in complexity (and a lack of backward compatibility). But it was adopted, at least by some people, and they kept the name. Which is horribly confusing.
Some other perspectives:
[Dan Libby], Aug'00, Introducing Myself primary author of RSS 0.9 at Net Scape.
[Dan Brickly], Nov'00, historical debt declares "[RSS1].0" and "RSS-Classic" as agreed-to names of the forks (which I think is lame). Good [CDF]/[MCF] background.
Mark Pilgrim's outsider's history of the forking from Jul-Nov'00.
Aaron Swartz has a compatibility chart
Is anyone aware of any reasonably accurate population stats on # of sites (a) by version of RSS and (b) by tool used to generate it? (Actually, a snapshot of such stats from the time that 1.0 hit the radar would be even better...)
Syndic8 has a stats page which shows [RSS1].0 being used in 23% of the feeds (in Feb'03); v0.91 has 50%, v2 has 12%. (Though their percentages don't seem to align with their raw counts. Maybe it's related to some sites supporting multiple versions?)
Syndic8 also shows [Headline Portal Engine] as being the lead toolkit, followed closely by Radio Userland.
Does "Radio Userland" include other User Land apps, like Userland Manila sites?
[HPE] is a PHP package. Its [Source Forge] page says Please consider this project dead!
Conversely, stats from 1 or more high-traffic sites with RSS support (Slash Dot?) on breakdown of hits to the RSS file by RSS-reader User Agent would be very cool. (You'd probably have to count # of [IPs] instead of # of hits, since some readers might default to reading more frequently.)
I think I'm going to try to quickly hack together an RSS feed for this Wiki Weblog, even though I'm already playing with a newer version of the underlying code.
Feb28'03
just going to include wikiname/[URL] for each item, no content (to avoid rendering issues - that's why this is a hack)
look at mix of feeds out there, decide on v0.91. Here's Dave Winer's spec and sample
look at mix of [URLs] for people's RSS, decide it doesn't matter, I just need to make sure I have an image and a link tag to point to it.
not clear on how much content to include, will probably just pick 10-20 latest items, then seek feedback.
note that Dave's spec says an image is required for a channel, but the couple samples I've looked at don't have it, so I'm not going to worry about it.
for items, just need [URL] and title, description is optional.
argh, can't get into that folder on my zopesite, something is broken!
for now, put at http://fluxent.com/fluxent/webseitz/career/rss.xml - it validates! (with 1 manually-included item)
Plan
make a DTML method to deliver rss.xml, just put in header info and maybe one hard-coded item, then run against validator
add DTML code to auto-generate 3 entries. Validate.
auto-generate 10-20 entries, validate.
try converting to rss v2
want to start including some content, include per-item date and author (esp for IRC bot, aggregator across Team Wiki spaces, etc.)
Nov18, 2003
it only takes tiny tweaks to 0.91 to make valid 2.0
argh, author has to be an email address rather than a Wiki Name
full content:
hack: just take the straight Smart Ascii
can't just include full content of a blogbit because if someone appends a comment it has crummy HTML inside it.
so maybe I should give up an render the full content to HTML and then escape it. Actually Dave Winer's feed doesn't have the description escaped. Argh, not going to bother for now...
Nov19
establish that Meatball Wiki/UseMod uses RSS v1/RDF for its feed; likewise Moin Moin
Nov25
item pubDate: argh, have to figure out right format for lastEditTime
author - having validated, now as last hack go ahead and put my last_editor value in, even though it's not strictly valid since it's not an email address. We'll see if anyone's system chokes on it.
auto-discovery - hmm, what's right way to handle multiple link tags?
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