Ok, which specification is right? Userland's RSS 0.91 specification says that the item element's description element has a maximum length of five hundred characters. However, there is no mention of this in the Netscape spec.

Now, I'm using Peter Drayton's RSS 0.91 XML schema which abides the Userland mandated five hundred character max. However, Radio itself does not seem to abide by this rule when emitting the description element. Another problem is that Radio does not emit a title and/or link element unless the post actually has one associated with it. The specification states that these two elements must always be present. Again Peter's schema is in line with this, which is causing me problems during validation.

For now, I'm working around the description problem by changing the description element from type String500 to xs:string. To work around the title and link element issues, I've added a minOccurs of zero to both elements. Everything seems to work now, but damn do I hate such loose specifications. I think the sooner we all get to the RDF/RSS 1.0, the better off we'll all be.

Drew has some good suggestions for the BlogToaster, expect to seem them implemented soon. [Simon Fell]

Cool, thanks Simon! ;)

I have a very beta version of blogToaster up and running, feel free to give it a go [you need MSN Messenger]. Add "toaster@zaks.demon.co.uk" as a new contact, and start a chat session, enter "add http://www.pocketsoap.com/weblog/" and hit enter, repeat with all the URL's of the weblogs you want to get notified about. enter "list" to see the list of URL's you've registered. When BlogToaster picks up a change from weblogs.com of a URL you've registered, it'll send you a message. [Simon Fell]

Definitely cool stuff. A couple feature suggestions if I may? ;) You may have already thought of these, or perhaps even have them implemented already, but here goes:

• "import" command: takes a url to an OPML file as a parameter. This would enable scenarios where I manage my subscriptions via some other mechasim, like Radio, then I can call "import http://radio.weblogs.com/0104813/gems/mySubscriptions.opml" and have my entire list of subscriptions registered for me automagically.
• "removeAll" command: removes all my previously registered blog urls. This would essentially make it easy to clear all existing subscriptions and re-import them. I suppose if you wanted to get fancy you could implement import as a delta, removing any existing subscriptions that are no longer in the newly imported subscription list.

Also, I don't know if it really matters in this application's case, but this isn't technically a .NET alert. The alert system is an entirely different beast than the IM system. It actually handles things like location detection and device independant message delivery. For example, if you're not logged into Messenger, but would like to receive the message anyway, the .NET alert system can automatically send the message to a registered mobile device. All of this is transparent to the application that actually sends the alert. I don't have the specifics of the program, but IIRC it's a closed beta right now. The list of third parties does seem to be growing though. My company is going to use it to notify you when your documents are delivered. However, a major difference is that while this IM approach is free, Microsoft charges (or will be charging) third parties that want to hook into the alert architecture.