libram1111 | 3 Sep 2003 18:39
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RSS - A Primer for Publishers & Content Providers

EEVL, the Internet guide to engineering, mathematics and computing 
has recently published an 'RSS - A Primer for Publishers & 
Content Providers'. 

http://www.eevl.ac.uk/rss_primer/

It has been written principally for a non technical audience and 
explains what RSS is, why it's worth doing, and the various means of 
producing RSS. It will be a useful resource for introducing the 
benefits of RSS to content providers and contains a section which 
addresses some of the common concerns that they may have.

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Julian Bond | 8 Sep 2003 09:29
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Scraping sites with code

Somebody has just told me that Google News look for PHP in the user 
agent and return 403 forbidden if they find it. It seems likely that 
they also look for other auto-generated code names.

FWIW http://www.google.com/robots.txt also bans robots from all the main 
directories.

I wonder how many other sites that routinely get scraped to produce RSS 
do the same thing.

For those of you using gnews2rss.php, coding round this is easy and left 
as an exercise for the php programmer. Using Curl or looking at the 
documentation for fopen() will solve the problem.

Meanwhile isn't it about time Google produced RSS themselves as an 
alternate output format from Search and News Search? Way back in June a 
senior Google person told me it was coming soon.

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Julian Bond | 10 Sep 2003 23:25
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Blogger Pro goes free

http://rss.com.com/2100-1032_3-5074041.html?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=news

"A Google representative said the formerly paid services will be rolled 
out in the free version in the next few days, but that syndication and 
posting by e-mail will take longer to offer."

Real soon now, all those blogger site will have RSS without jumping 
through hoops.

WooT!

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Roy M. Silvernail | 11 Sep 2003 12:27

Re: Blogger Pro goes free

On Thursday 11 September 2003 04:59, Julian Bond wrote:

> http://rss.com.com/2100-1032_3-5074041.html?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=news
>
> "A Google representative said the formerly paid services will be rolled
> out in the free version in the next few days, but that syndication and
> posting by e-mail will take longer to offer."
>
> Real soon now, all those blogger site will have RSS without jumping
> through hoops.
>
> WooT!

Maybe not Woot just yet.  From the announcement email Evan Williams sent to 
Blogger Pro users:

"Don't worry - nothing you paid for is going away. Your subscription is still 
valid, and you will continue to have access to features like RSS and 
post-via-email that are still not in the free version."

Free is good, but all those paying customers will be pretty upset if they 
don't get something for their money.

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Jeremy Zawodny | 12 Sep 2003 22:48
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RSS Auto-Discovery 2.0

I'd like to suggest that we start thinking about the next level of RSS
Auto-Discovery.  I've written up some initial thoughts and rationale
here:

  http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/000967.html

Do others think this would be helpful and relatively easy to spec out
and implement.  Are there other (better) ideas floating around?  I've
not seen much discussion on the topic...

Jeremy
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Mark Fletcher | 12 Sep 2003 23:05
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Re: RSS Auto-Discovery 2.0

Jeremy Zawodny wrote:

>I'd like to suggest that we start thinking about the next level of RSS
>Auto-Discovery.  I've written up some initial thoughts and rationale
>here:
>
>  http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/000967.html
>
>Do others think this would be helpful and relatively easy to spec out
>and implement.  Are there other (better) ideas floating around?  I've
>not seen much discussion on the topic...
>  
>
I guess I'm not sure how this would work for sites that host many 
individual blogs. Would each blog have their own OPML file or would it 
be a site wide thing, or does it matter?  Of your two thoughts (a file 
at a specific place or a link tag), I'd definitely vote for the link tag.

While we're on the subject, it'd be nice to have a standard, machine 
readable way for people to specify their blogroll. We'd love to be able 
to display someone's blogroll along with their syndicated items in 
Bloglines. I have seen some people specify an OPML file for their 
blogroll using a <link> tag, but I'm unaware of any standard for this.

Thanks,

Mark
--
Mark Fletcher
Bloglines
(Continue reading)

Jeremy Zawodny | 12 Sep 2003 23:06
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Re: [aggregators] Re: RSS Auto-Discovery 2.0

On Fri, Sep 12, 2003 at 02:05:03PM -0700, Mark Fletcher wrote:
> Jeremy Zawodny wrote:
> 
> >I'd like to suggest that we start thinking about the next level of RSS
> >Auto-Discovery.  I've written up some initial thoughts and rationale
> >here:
> >
> >  http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/000967.html
> >
> >Do others think this would be helpful and relatively easy to spec out
> >and implement.  Are there other (better) ideas floating around?  I've
> >not seen much discussion on the topic...
> >  
> >
> I guess I'm not sure how this would work for sites that host many 
> individual blogs. Would each blog have their own OPML file or would it 
> be a site wide thing, or does it matter?

I don't know if it matters...

> While we're on the subject, it'd be nice to have a standard, machine 
> readable way for people to specify their blogroll.

Oh, god yes.  I had forgotten about that.  Very good point.

Jeremy  
--

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(Continue reading)

Jeremy Zawodny | 12 Sep 2003 23:22
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Re: [aggregators] RSS Auto-Discovery 2.0

On Fri, Sep 12, 2003 at 02:14:27PM -0700, Troy Hakala wrote:
> As an aggregator author, we'll do anything that becomes a standard 
> and we'd certainly welcome this. And from a quick look, it seems simple 
> enough. But the real work here is getting content-creators to use it. 
> Very few sites (in my experience) use the current auto-discovery 
> method.

I suspect that most sites don't do it today because:

  1. They don't know it exists.  How man RSS info sites explain the
     benefits of adding the link tag?

  2. It's difficult to see a direct benefit.  Yes, some aggregators
     will notice it, but it's less tangible that putting the orange
     button on a page. 

  3. It's really only half a solution.  The current system doesn't
     work so well for larger sites, as I describe.

But I'm not sure what the real reasons are.  However, if "we" can
agree on something, you can expect us to advocate it in the hope of
swaying more traditional publishers too...

> It seems to me that the weblog software authors are the ones to talk
> to about implementing it, then the rest will follow (hopefully).

Hmm.  I see it the other way around.  Weblog software authors are
doing a much better job today than more traditional content creators.
Again, RSS is about more than weblogs.  The weblog community has done
a very good job so far.  It's the other guys we need to think about.
(Continue reading)

Joe Gregorio | 13 Sep 2003 03:03
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Re: RSS Auto-Discovery 2.0

Jeremy Zawodny wrote:
> I'd like to suggest that we start thinking about the next level of RSS
> Auto-Discovery.  I've written up some initial thoughts and rationale
> here:
> 
>   http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/000967.html
> 
> Do others think this would be helpful and relatively easy to spec out
> and implement.  Are there other (better) ideas floating around?  I've
> not seen much discussion on the topic...
> 
> Jeremy

Interesting idea. I would rather not see the use of OPML, but
rather would like to see multiple link tags on the same
page, by loosening the restriction on title. We already
have the type="" attribute to indicate that the link
is for an RSS feed, so you could provide multiple
link tags on a page and set an appropriate title for
each one. When subscribing the user can be prompted
with those title for which feed they want to subscribe to.
For example, a top story that fell into both the
science and technology categories might have the following
link tags:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Technology" 
href="http://rss.news.yahoo.com/rss/tech">
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Science" 
href="http://rss.news.yahoo.com/rss/science">
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Top Stories" 
(Continue reading)

tappnel | 13 Sep 2003 16:55

WSIL? Was Re: RSS Auto-Discovery 2.0

(Cross posted.)

I think whatever becomes of this directory format be inclusive of many of the formats 
that feeds exist in RSS x.9x, 1.0, 2.0, Echo in addition to Web services. 

From my own experience and others the OPML/blogroll formats are all over the place. 
(See Meg Hourihan recent post on the subject for more: http://www.megnut.com/
technology/007388.asp) There really was never a specification to my knowledge. Being 
frozen and not supporting proper (read: determinable) extensibility, I'm not in favor of 
pursuing anything based on OPML or existing "blogroll" formats.

Joe's link tag idea[1] seems fine, but it doesn't seem scalable. Won't I have to repeat all of 
that information in every one of my HTML pages? Won't that be a major pain for some 
like Yahoo that could have hundreds of these? Perhaps I'm reading it incorrectly.

While everyone is throwing out ideas I figured I may as well unearth this one for some 
additional food for thought:

WSIL meets RSS. 
http://www.mplode.com/tima/archives/000170.html

WSIL is Web Services Inspection Language. It seems right in line with what we are talking 
about here. WSIL may not exactly be the ticket since its an under utilized and seemingly 
abandoned specification -- then again wasn't that the case for RSS?

Here is a topline of the case I made then:

* I have asserted that RSS syndication feeds are Web services and perhaps the most 
widely deployed Web services across the Internet. 

(Continue reading)


Gmane