RSS/Atom activists wish that news feeds become the most popular format for spreading information as far, quickly and accurately as possible. They expect the feeds to be displayed in so called Aggregators, software applications or web sites dedicated to browsing through a large amount of information in an efficient manner.
Enter prototypes such as activeRenderer. Look at the left side bar on this page, notice the activeRenderer News column, a rendering of that site's RSS feed. I just inserted an rssBox macro in the page's template, as described here.
Since I'm also the publisher of activeRenderer News, I passed rssBox a local file:// url to the feed. But there's nothing preventing me from passing a remote url instead.
What if I had specified Scripting News' RSS feed? Readers would have the additional benefit of browsing through Scripting News' latest from my site. Good for them... and me. But was Scripting News' RSS content ever published with this purpose in mind? There's a copyright notice for the content of s l a m. Should Dave send me a cease and desist letter ? :-)
There's a lot more to syndication than what we are taking more or less for granted. As we push the limits of publishing technologies forward, we are going to be encounter new and interesting issues. A good place to discuss those may be the rss-user group on Yahoo.
I've run into unexpected problems when readying the next 2.1.1 minor update of activeRenderer: I'm overhauling the installation / uninstallation process to go along with the newly implemented outlining styles for weblog categories, and it's an even worse nightmare than I thought it would be :-)
I should have finished the testing by Friday though, Murphy willing...
[image] [image] This week's featured publisher, Gerald Gleason, doesn't use Radio Userland to publish his weblog. He doesn't use Movable Type either. Yet, look at the navigation lighthouse that forms the left side of the page: you'll recognize a familiar outline structure, with a nautical twist :-)
[image] Gerald has put activeRenderer's javascript code to work, and produced wonderful looking 'nautical' replacements for the 'standard' outline wedges.
[image] With his authorisation, I'll soon include those picts as part of a 'nautical' style for outline wedges. Alternate sets of wedges with specific styles are scheduled to show up in the next 2.2 version of activeRenderer.
There are currently 3 mailing lists / Yahoo groups devoted to the activeRenderer Radio tool, quite a lot really :-)
I didn't realize until Monday that Gwénaël - can't think of a worst firstname to type into an HTML editor, Gwénaël :-), went through the trouble of translating all of activeRenderer's documentation into French.
Wow, that certainly took some work, I'm really grateful, and so should all French, Canadian and Belgian activeUsers. I didn't find any Swiss in activeRenderer's registration database :-)
Auf Deutsch Übersetzer herzlich willkommen... Apply within.
[image] Philip Cubeta's Wealth Bondage self styled online bordello is packed with interesting links neatly origanized in no less than 3 activeRolls.
I wish I had half of Phil's imagination and writing talent. Wealth Bondage is currently the number 2 source of referrals to the activeRenderer site. I apologize to all WB visitors: the techy stuff you find here must feel pretty boring :-)
This is a major release, with the beginning of our journey down the non-English publishing road, the first two steps being support for accented characters encoded with 'iso-latin-1', 'utf-8' or 'macintosh' sets, and a host of new macro parameters so that default English mentions on the HTML rendered pages may be replaced by other languages equivalents.
Next step involves the full localization of activeRenderer: Gwénaël is still working on it, it's a painstakingly long task, but I'm confident he will succeed eventually.
aR 2.1 also comes with an updated outlined aggregator view, and a host of bug corrections: to all patient bug reporters, thank you kindly.
Details are available in the ar-announce mailing list.