Archive | July, 2003

I like the idea of RSS as a web service. For slower, close-enough-to-real-time news feeds such as the FoxPro feeds I’m hosting at http://www.tedroche.com/RSSFeeds.html, hourly refreshes are good enough. For more of an on-demand site such as Amazon, with thousands of different requests, real-time response via and XML web service transformed to an RSS feed is the right answer.

Now, is there a way to transform the RSS 2.0 feeds that I’m producing to display the other dialects of RSS that a requestor might be interested, such as 0.91, 0.92 or 1.0? Or is there a core commonality that I could produce and then transform (on the fly through XSL, or more programmatically) to generate the desired feed? I don’t want to discourage traffic by not providing information in the format requested. I’ve already run into one aggregator site that was interested in 1.0 only.

Here are some clues a Google search gave me:

radio.weblogs.com/0100887/stories/ 2002/03/18/anXsltTutorial.html

http://www.ecommnet.co.uk/articles/bloggerRDF.asp

Here’s the opposite effect, consuming different RSS feeds via XSLT:

http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2003/01/02/tr.html

I’ve seen this phenomenon at the last couple of FoxPro conferences: folks with laptops can be tuned in or way out of the presentation. At DevCon, I blogged the keynote live and made my one and only appearance on the Radio Top 100 blog list. OTOH, some folks tune out and miss the whole thing. Of course, they could do that with Solitaire, too. But now, with IM, they can join in a conversation… interesting. NY Times: In the Lecture Hall, a Geek Chorus. Mr. Aral discovered that he was not alone. The next day in the auditorium, which was outfitted with a wireless link to the Internet, a group of people booted up their laptops, opened their IM programs and spent the next three hours happily exchanging notes during the presentations. Link via Tomalak’s Realm