Some site managers didn't use tables because it isn't in the common-denominator definition of HTML. Those guys look reallly good now. It's possible to make a great website without using tables.[Dave Winer, 1995]
Finally, those of us who use tables are part of a mass of people who learned to develop websites that way. It's impossible to get us to change. If that's your cause I'm not on board. I made a decision a long time ago to accept HTML as it is, I called it a crock, but what a great crock it is. [Dave Winer, 2002]
Steve, you should be checking your referrers page, hourly. Every half-hour would be better. That way you would be checking it more often than me, and that would make me feel better. :-)
Hi, my name is Joe, and I am a referrer log junkie.
The really amazing part of working with .NET is the executable size. My aggregator program compiles into an 8K executable. Sweet.
One of the last problems I ran into in processing RSS was Radio. It appears that Radio does not turn bare &'s into entity references. This means that if you are a Radio user and post a message with an & in it and don't type it in as an entity reference, i.e. &, then the resulting RSS feed will not be well-formed XML.
The first phase of news aggregator is complete. I now have a command line tool that reads a list of addresses of RSS news feeds out of an OPML file, pulls all the news files off the internet, merges them into a single XML file and then transforms that file into HTML using XSLT. All told about 4 hours of programming so far. I will keep all the grungy parts of RSS vs RDF vs ScriptingNews format for a later post. The next thing to add it the user interface.