Many people are predicting a bandwidth crunch as RSS usage accelerates. Already, I've heard stories from people of how subscribers to their RSS feeds have pushed their bandwidth usage up so high that they either have to pay huge amounts for extra bandwidth or take the feeds offline. What can we do to stave off...
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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...
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"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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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Last night while playing games with friends, I had a movie idea: show the adventures of a female version of Indiana Jones. Naturally, her name would be a state: Carolina, Dakota, Virginia...then I came up with Georgia, and realized that rather than Georgia Jones, it would have to be Sweet Georgia Jones. The name evoked...
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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...
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TV producers love to "push the envelope", and as a result, the moral quality of television programming has gone way down in my lifetime. There's not much outside of the News Hour with Jim Lehrer that isn't offensive these days. The "Hootergate" incident during the Super Bowl, if it was intentional (which wouldn't surprise the...
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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...
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