Archive | June, 2003

I spent last night explaining, in 30 seconds or less, RSS and blogging and XML and VFP consumption of RSS and news aggregators and RSS production – whew! – and I’m pleased to see the discussion heat up again here (in the blogosphere) again today. Here’s a sample of the links I’m trying to keep up with:

Fixing RSS’s public-relations problem. Yesterday I spoke with two acquaintances, both of whom have decades-long track records in the high-tech biz, and neither of whom has ever used an RSS newsreader. When I mentioned RSS as an alternative to mailing lists, both said the same thing: “But I don’t have time to visit 30 different websites in order to find things out.” Of course, that is exactly the problem that RSS solves. And has been solving, for me, since 1999.
… [Jon’s Radio]

Post IDs.

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.

[Scripting News]

The lizard brain of RSS.

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.

[Scripting News]

BusinessWeek features a set of articles on what Web Services are, how they work,and predicts their possible success. Link via CapeBlog and Webservices.org.

Apple harvest yields computers, OS. The company says its new G5 machines are faster than any Windows-based PC on the market, but some are questioning that claim. Also: Putting a price on Panther, Apple’s new operating system. [CNET News.com]

Eric Kidd asks where his future is, where the industry will be in 2031, and what to do next?. I’ve been pondering the same question, although my timeline is a little shorter.

“He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.”

Thomas Jefferson, in Writings of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 6, H.A. Washington, Ed.,1854, pp. 180-181.

From Miles at TinyApps.org via David Weinberger’s Joho The Blog

Made it back without incident. Glad to break that string of bad luck!

Abe Lempel, Jacob Ziv and Terry Welch
Discovered a neat algorithm to squelch
CompuServe incorporated it into the GIF
Good programmers soon caught the drift
The format was published, free and open
Many useful things started to happen
Then Unisys Corp purchased the rights
And changed the terms on LZW overnight
The useful algorithm was off limits
Ransom to corporate greed and profits
On June 20, 2003, the LZW patent expired
Shame on Unisys for what has transpired
Someday Unisys books will be in arrears
While the ideas of LZW survive the years

Funny. From Slashdot.

David Pogue previews the Treo 600 for the New York Times. The good news: the best phone-PDA combination to date. The bad news: “to date” is a bad phrase, as it’s not due out until the fall. A little FUD to depress sales for the summer, both on competitors and on Handsprings’s earlier models.

Looks gorgeous.

I’m traveling back to the client this afternoon. Hooking up with Andy Kramek in Detroit and sharing the flight from there. I guess I’m learning to make this more of a routine practice and less of an event. I’ve got checklists and To-Do lists and bags of stuff. I’ve been pretty good the last few trips in remembering all the important stuff, and only needing to pick up minor stuff like toothpaste or sunscreen.

Three day turnaround from DevCon to Knoxville is just barely enough time to unpack, do the laundry, pay bills, monthly bookkeeping, repack and throw a combined birthday/Father’s Day party. Sleep? Oh, darn. Knew I forgot something…