Here's a quick tip to elude a few of the techniques spammers use to figure out which of the email address on their lists are valid, and to perpetrate other mischief: turn off execution of scripts and showing of remotely loaded images (or all images) in your email client. Either can alert spammers of the...
[read more]

"One name to rule them all, one name to find them, one name to aggregate them all and in our vocabulary bind them."

Now that RSS isn't the only game in town (or should I say, now that the people creating new formats aren't calling them all "RSS"), syndication formats need a single name with...
[read more]

Some of the variants of the little orange XML button use more subdued colors. For example, I've seen blue "RSS" buttons. That raises the question, is the orange button too loud? Does it yell, "I am the most important part of this webpage"? Does it detract from site design?

Nah, I don't think so. I...
[read more]

Yesterday I decided to make a logo for Info Bite. After a bunch of doodling on paper, I came up with the five balls logo that you see here. Here's an excerpt from the Info Bite List homepage:

The five balls in the logo represent five bites of information. They are arranged to represent a...
[read more]

I read a post at webproworld.com yesterday questioning the wisdom of forking Atom off of RSS "at a time when e-mail seems to be loosing its traction." Is having multiple standards a bad thing? Not necessarily, I think. From my response:

An analogy to elucidate my point of view on the subject is this: In...
[read more]

There's been plenty of discussion about whether the little orange XML button that people use to link to their feeds should be replaced with something else--something that suggests on its face what it's for. For Info Bite, the button could say "Bite Me". I posted last month a few musings about how Info Bite-related terminology...
[read more]

As I read the discussions, arguments, specs, histories, etc. of RSS and Atom, it becomes more and more apparent that the principals behind these formats are primarily focused on blogging. That's fine, of course. But I can't help but get the impression that decisions regarding the formats and APIs are being made in such a...
[read more]

I read an article at News.Com yesterday about Google "spurning" RSS in favor of Atom. Google, which acquired Blogger last year, is only allowing former paying customers who were already publishing their blogs in RSS format to use RSS going forward. New feeds can only be in Atom format.

I fully support their right to...
[read more]

I sat down this morning and composed version 1 of the mission statement for Info Bite List (the Info Bite file format):

"Info Bite List enables the publication and flexible use of collections and lists of data of many kinds while minimizing bandwidth requirements and promoting interoperability and flexibility through an extendable, XML-based format."

Perhaps...
[read more]

Saturday was the deadline for entries in the contest to choose a colloquial name for RSS (so "rename RSS" isn't quite accurate), and now it's time to vote. My personal favorite, as you might guess from this blog's name, is "Info Bite List". But part of me wants another name to be chosen so that...
[read more]