RSS

After trials, tribulations, false starts, wearing of sack cloth and much gnashing of teeth (and the blood of one dead chicken) I have successfully moved my weblog. For the past week I have been posting only at the new location. It works as expected. All is well.

New Home page.
New primary RSS.

Most of the archives will remain here in order to preserve as many links as possible, but I ran out of disk space and had to delete some of the early ones to keep the site under 40MB. All the archives are at the new site. Eventually I will come back here and put in re-direct meta-tags for both web browsers and RSS aggregators to automagically load the new location. In the meantime, if you have subscribed to a particular Category -- i.e. Patento.absurdium -- you can re-link to it via the Category links on the left.

Many thanks to:

Mark Pilgrim for design guidance and CSS creation
Erin Clerico at Weblogger.com for site hosting and comments configuration
Brent Ashley and Matt Mower for technical assistance
the entire Userland discussion group for moral support.

(drum roll please)

Now, on with the show.......................

Friday, October 25, 2002

Beta: RSS Explorer

3:05:41 PM

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Long DG thread on the nifty new RSS Explorer. Winer has been up late again.

From the RSS Explorer page you can view lists of subscriptions from other Radio users. Each channel or "feed" has a checkbox to the left of its name. If it's checked, you're already subscribed. You can choose to subscribe or unsubscribe by clicking on the Subscribe button to the right. To see a different list, choose a name from the popup menu, below, and click on the View button. [...]

Phil Wolff has already posted a Wish List.

This could be very cool, but I'll let some of the brighter lights sort the beta issues before I dive in.

myRadio Updated for Redirection

2:58:26 PM

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Mikel announces an important update to myRadio to handle the RSS Redirection feature.

myRadio is a nice tool. I still bounce back and forth between it and Mark Paschal's Kit.

Get the myRadio update.

Bootstrap: How To Redirect an RSS Feed

2:52:10 PM

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I'll be moving this weblog in the near future -- to www.terryfrazier.com -- so matters of redirection are important to me.

Dave Winer has been working on making Radio's News Aggregator automagically recognize the redirect command and has posted these instructions to the Userland DG.

Thursday, September 26, 2002

P2P Radio -- Rock On

10:21:47 PM

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Another fine and useful app for P2P, the Pirate-to-Pirate software with no redeeming social value. Here's a quote from the article:

For the PeerCast team, they see their goal as advancing the technology of online music distribution, in lieu of the music industry's reluctance to do so. "We're based in Japan. The Japanese tend to embrace new technology rather than hiding from it like the music and movie conglomerates have done in the West," says Goddard. "We have to find a better way to publish music. At the moment the people who control that appear to have no incentive to move forward. So if they can't, then the rest of us are going to have to do it for them."

Now, if someone could just get Doc to fix his weblog so his RSS feed didn't repost every article, every time, in one long, continuous post.

Meanwhile the Great Workaround continues. Dig
Internet Radio the P2P way, by Howard Wen. And thanks to Hanan for the link. [ Source: Doc Searls Weblog]

Monday, September 09, 2002

RSS Tutorial

2:20:35 PM

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Nicely done tutorial on RSS -- explains what, how, and why in plain English. Not too techie, not too wordy. Also covers some background info about copyright, content control, etc.

Introduction to RSS. Mark Nottingham has written an excellent introduction to RSS titled RSS Tutorial for Content Publishers and Webmasters. RSS is, if... [ Source: Column Two]

Saturday, August 31, 2002

RSS and E-mail is not Either/Or

11:19:57 PM

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Ok, I'm going out on a limb here, but Jerry Michalski complains that Radio doesn't have a mail list feature, yet his weblog doesn't have an RSS feed -- at least I couldn't find it.

[...]First, Weblogs offer only one distribution model: People have to come read your blog at its Web address. Why can't people read each entry as it is posted, if they would like to, as they can with e-mailed newsletters? It is somehow strange that Dave Winer's Radio Userland Weblogging software doesn't allow its users to do what Dave does every day with Scripting News, which is post to his broadcast list and his Weblog. (You can syndicate Weblogs with Radio and use XML for other nifty features, but it's not a mailing list.)
This weakness isn't that hard to fix. I've been an advisor to Pyra (the company behind Blogger) for some time, and Ev -- surviving considerable nagging from me -- has added a post-to-e-mail feature in Blogger Pro. Excellent.

In fact, I'm creating two lists for this one Weblog. The first list, Sociate, is a broadcast list for people who want to see new items quickly, but don't want the e-mail traffic of a discussion list; the second, Sociate-Talk, includes all the outbound posts of the first list, but is meant for people interested in the discussion. [...][Sociate]

He clearly knows about RSS, as he mentions weblog syndication, but he doesn't seem to understand RSS. (Yes, yes. For Pete's sake, I know I have no business telling Jerry Michalski what he does and doesn't understand.)

Jerry's right that Radio needs an e-mail list option. But he's got the reason wrong. I'd also like an e-mail option. Just because I prefer RSS doesn't lower the vast number of people who still use e-mail as their primary comm channel. There is no reason to force them into a new channel if they aren't ready. You don't get user adoption through force. Adding e-mail support is simply a matter of enabling as many readers as possible. This is especially important if weblogs are going to be widely used in corporate settings.

But Jerry really needs to get on the syndication bandwagon. Weblogs do not have a single distribution model. The syndication feature is one of the strongest attributes. I prefer to get my regular notices via RSS. I get them every hour, and that's close enough to as they happen for me. It's a different channel, but it fits perfectly within the mode of his "broadcast list". More importantly, by getting his posts in my Aggregator, I can scan them with other sources of info that are not limited to e-mail. That's what I want. RSS may not have reached the Tipping Point yet, but I'm sure I'm not alone.

So I've taken matters into my own hands. Jerry, here's your RSS feed. It's crude. I did it with Mark Paschal's Stapler, but I'm about as skilled as a three-year-old with a chainsaw -- and just about as dangerous. I could learn Swahili in less time than it would take me to learn regular expressions. But it's a start. You take it from here.

Update: Roland Tanglao writes:

Jerry Michalski' - There more to blogging than Radio and Blogger: Manila will send emails and bulletins!.
-Radio gets all the press! People forget that Manila is very powerful. Manila wil post each entry as it is posted to an email list (or any email addresses you specify) and its bulletin feature allows you to send email to every member who wishes to receive the email once a day or as often as you wish. [...] [Roland Tanglao's Weblog]

I should also mention Conversant, another Frontier-based product that supports numerous I/O options.