My first step into the world of RSS came when it occurred to me to that an RSS feed could keep one of my websites fresh without me having to generate new content. The challenge was to find an appropriate newsfeed. Had my site been tech-oriented, that would have been easy. But the site I...
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Ever since I built CaRP to import news onto one of my websites (I wanted a way to keep it fresh without having to do any work myself), I've been using RSS feeds more and more to shuttle data around my sites. I added code to output RSS feeds from my discussion forums. I set...
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Yesterday, NPR's Talk of the Nation talked about blogging. Unfortunately, RSS was mentioned only twice: once by a caller, and once by a guest. Neither mention gave much detail, and there was certainly no focus on it--the host asked no questions--and it dropped out of the program as quickly as it had entered. It's nice...
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Ah, the good ol' days, before I learned how complex the internet is. I remember the peaceful days of my youth last year when I started designing Info Bite List. RSS had a few problems. Atom had a few problems. I had some answers. Designing an alternate format was easy. The internet was my virtual...
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I've periodically wondered who all these people are who've banded together to build Atom. I knew it wasn't a corporate effort (though of course, many if not most of the members' corporate affiliations are related to RSS and now Atom). A few of the names were familiar from my experience with RSS and XML before...
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I read an article about RSS and Atom yesterday at New Scientist. It struck me as not having been written by someone familiar with digests, but rather cobbled together from what knowledge and impressions they were able to glean from a few conversations with some key players (Dave Winer and Anil Dash are the two...
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I was wrong. While Atom may be going to the IETF, now that they've approved the creation of the Working Group, it will certainly not be without further discussion. Over the weekend, there has been a flurry of discussion on the subject--people questioning whether a clear consensus has emerged from the community, people suggesting we...
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Tim Bray writes that "the IESG has approved the creation of the 'AtomPub Working Group'". While this doesn't technically finalize the decision over whether to go to the IETF, the general consensus seems to be that that's where we want to go, and I imagine we'll do so without further discussion. Thanks to the W3C...
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Okay, so the war isn't over yet, but the winner is going to be...not RSS 1.0, not RSS 2.0, and not Atom, but the user. In fact the user has already won, and will win more and more as the combatants improve and/or the tools for accessing them improve and/or more and better feeds become...
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It is generally presumed that an RSS or Atom feed is the counterpart of a blog, news site, etc., or is aggregated from other feeds that are. The current Atom format specification even goes so far as to require each entry to have a link pointing to an "alternate representation" of the entry. Digests certainly...
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