www.intertwingly.net

Halley's Comment No More?

What happened to Halley?

Feed explorations

All LiveJournal test users now have Atom feeds.  Here is an example.  I happened to pick one that was in Russian, demonstrating the use of UTF-8.  Also notable is that issued dates don't have time zones - something that LiveJournal doesn't track for this particular field.  I'm particularly looking forward to the point in time when LiveJournal starts exploring the serialization of threaded comments.

Simon Fell's Atom feed demonstrates explicitly marking the namespace on every item.  More interestingly, he makes use of xml:base to have relative urls in links, ids, and even content.

Gordon Weakliem has created feeds for Amazon.com, and is exploring issues with dates and times.

Python 2.3

Simon Willison: After numerous alphas and betas, Python 2.3 has been released. Python.org has highlights of the release, while A.M. Kuchling's What's New in Python 2.3 goes in to a bit more detail.

Sweet!

Technology is a Ratchet

Clay Shirky: What both optimists and pessimists believed, however, deep down, was that their opinions mattered.

Question: in this context, won't rules alone  amount to little more than organized opinions?

Custom System Development

Joe Gregorio: I am pleased to announce the formation of my company, BitWorking, Inc., a custom system development company able to provide tailored software for Windows Desktop, Embedded and Web Services applications.

Dinner on Thursday?

Tomorrow, the wiki will be six weeks old.  It has been joined by a weblog, an mailing list, and an irc channel.

This coming week is time for some good, old fashioned, face to face discusssions.  I'm going to meet with various weblogging related people who reside in or near the greater San Francisco bay area.  My agenda is pretty full, but I have reserved Thursday night(the 31st) for a webloggers dinner.  Leave a comment if you are interested.

Adam Bosworth

Adam Bosworth: I've been planning to start a weblog for quite some time but, unsually for me, I've suffered from writers block at the thought that this would be so public. Well it is time to tough it out  Subcribed!

quickSub

Jason Brome: quickSub - making RSS and ATOM feed subscription easier for your readers!

NewsGator HTTP report card

Congratulations to Greg Reinacker for being the first to publish proper HTTP support results.  Two problems each were found in NewsGator and the tests themselves, all have been fixed.  Users of NewsGator should see the improvments in an upcoming 1.3 release.

Bravo!

Paul Festa

Tim Bray: I just got a call from Paul Festa of C|Net, who’s working on a story about Pie/Echo/Atom.  I got a similar call late yesterday.

Better Messaging

Sean McGrath: The real beauty of messaging is the tremendous scope it provides for intervention in message flows. Where you can intervene, you can transform and Transformation is the only truth.

I agree.  However, I would like to add that once you accept that, you can go on to produce better models, ones that are more suited to transformation.

For starters, it helps if the messages are cleanly and thoroughly specified.  And adopt the use of a common set of data types when possible.  And ones that don't obscure structure with XML escaping.

Signing Comments

Simon Willison has joined a discussion on signing comments.  This is a topic that has fascinated me for some time, but I haven't done anything about... yet.

Having signature authenticating web service would also be valuable in a posting API.

Well Specified Web

Mark Pilgrim has been busy capturing the rationalle for - as well as actually implementing - a simple yet comprehensive test suite for the transport transfer level semantics of well behaved and bandwidth friendly HTTP based aggregators.  Bravo.

Stealing Bandwidth

I had two separate individuals including images from my site in their weblogs instead of hosting the images on their own site.  One has now ceased.  Thanks.  The other hasn't gotten the message yet.

Please don't do that.

The SSF Wiki

Rogers Cadenhead: Here's the new wiki, which contains the current RSS 2.0 specification: http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/ssf/ Feel free to add comments.

Atom Mailing List

Joe Gregorio: A new mailing list has been created for discussing Atom. It is being graciously hosted by IMC, the Internet Mail Consortium.  Special thanks to Paul Hoffman of IMC for setting up the list.

Seeking common ground

Luke Hutteman: If the advisory board were to vote on possibly unfreezing the RSS 2.0 spec, this may really change some things. Only then could they truly move RSS forward and possibly add some of the extensions that Atom is talking about. It might even allow the Atom project to be folded into the RSS standard so that we can keep a single all-encompassing spec. Now that would truly be a step forward.

RSS Moves a Step Forward

Dan Gillmor: in a vote yesterday -- about whether to create a new RSS validator -- Simmons and Udell were the majority saying no.

There clearly is a lot of RSS news today, and I'll let it settle down before commenting on the rest of it, but this seemed safe to  comment on now.

So... apparently there won't be a third RSS validator.  But... will the UserLand validator become maintained again?

To reaffirm statements made previously:

• I fully intend to continue to contribute to the feed validator, tracking to any consensus that emerges as to revised RSS specifications, profiles, and best practices.
• This validator is open source.  Others are welcome to contribute to it and/or create derived works of their own based on this code.

Feedback on feeds

A look at two high profile and widely deployed necho/atom feeds: Blogger and TypePad, and some thoughts  on the implications of escaping and mime types. ...

Two paths

Dave Johnson: That really sucks. Not the part about Andy being wrong, that happens all the time.  heh.

This is a complex issue.  Some lessons learned along the way:

• A shim of dual licensed code doesn't avoid section 6.  Links are transitive.
• Simply shipping unassembled components on a single CD doesn't invoke section 6.

An example of something that does solve the issue: JDBC.

Now that the denial phase is over, there are two paths to chose from.