NewsMonster OS X version ETA tomorrow. I heard that the OS X version of NewsMonster, the RSS aggregator/reader was finished so I went to the site and paid for it. Kevin A. Burton, the author was on the #joiito IRC channel so I told him. He told me that there was another bug left in the OS X version that he needed to fix. He offered to give me my money back. I told him just to hurry up with the OS X version. He promised he would do it tomorrow. ;-) Very excited about trying NewsMonster...

[16:15] burtonator | I will fix sifry's bug tonight... then OSX tomorrow

[Joi Ito's Web Lite] 
9:24:24 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Dr. Web verordnet. Dr. Web heute: "Wie man einen Newsfeed in die eigenen Seiten einbaut und damit Content Syndication betreibt", anhand des OpenSource-Readers und -Parsers MagpieRSS, und "XML Datei selbst gebaut - Einen RSS Feed kann man sich einfach selbst basteln und ihn händisch pflegen." [Industrial Technology & Witchcraft] 
8:57:54 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Echo location.

Foolishly Tossing My Hat into the Ring on Echo ... Here's What I Want.

Foolishly Tossing My Hat into the Ring on Echo ... Here's What I Want

Ok.  I've followed this discussion from afar.  And since I couldn't even find where the Wiki* was to add this idea, here's what I'd like: Post Level Geo Urls.

As Richard Soderberg has done his best work to convince me of the importance of this, I have to start by giving credit to him.  Anyway ... What I want is a zip code / latitude / longitude / gps coords that can be applied to a single post.  Why?  Because blogs are a great way to capture off the cuff knowledge, feedback, etc.  Long time readers may recall my troubles with the furnace in my current residence at 124 Langley Road in Newton MA.  What I'd ***love*** is the ability to (in a standards compliant way) tag my blog post with this data.  Then some future poor sod who rented this place could take advantage of my troubles and ask intelligent questions like "Fixed the furnace yet you pathetic excuse for a landlord"?.  As blogs become less and less about purely digital stuff and more about the real world, this is increasingly useful.

Or how about this -- "find me anything about what's happening within a 25 mile radius of Reading, PA ?".  If coordinate approaches became standardized, I could do this in a hot second.  Well maybe a day or three.

And if you think the fact that I woke up w/o hot water today and on restarting my furnace, I then found thick smoke filling my basement AGAIN has anything to do with this then you would be 1000% correct.  Necessity is indeed the mother of invention but I suspect that Rage is invention's father.

*Note: I didn't try very far.  I did find an RSS profile wiki but is that the same as Echo ?

[The FuzzyBlog!]

Neat idea.  A collated feed of increasingly local information could be really useful and fun.

I think the RSS profiles idea has been subsumed into the Echo initiative.

[Curiouser and curiouser!] 
8:43:39 PM      comment []   trackback []  



OSPedia: Open Source Wiki. OSPedia - The Open Source wiki. [Meerkat: An Open Wire Service: O'Reilly Network Weblogs] 
4:00:04 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Video of my Reboot Talk Now Online. My current stump speech is called "The Open Source Paradigm Shift," and I delivered a version of it at Reboot in Copenhagen a couple of weeks ago. Nikolaj Nyholm has put up the entire talk in QuickTime video, along with the talks from Dan Gillmor, Ben Hammersly, Meg Hourihan, Cory Doctorow, Marc Canter, Scott Heiferman, and Jason Fried. If you have bandwidth and time to download 50 meg a pop, these are all worth a watch. Of course, you will miss the real heart of Reboot, which is the interactive processing by the audience of this input. For that, you'll have to go to Copenhagen for next year's conference. [Meerkat: An Open Wire Service: O'Reilly Network Weblogs] 
3:54:02 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Building A (Serious) Home Network From Scratch. Casey Lang-Vie writes "THG are running an article that outlines how to build a home network from scratch. I wish I'd read this before I attempted - now I have ... [Slashdot] 
3:51:28 PM      comment []   trackback []  



pmachine-Kekse. Für die Chroniken und die anderen pMachinisten: wer nach dem Update auf pMachine 2.3 Probleme mit Cookies bekommt (einloggen, Kommentare), sollte in config.php mal $use_session_id = 1; probieren. [Industrial Technology & Witchcraft] 
2:49:42 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Comments and Replies on RSS.

These are some of the comments and replies which I thought deserve being hoisted up into a post.

Optional Core Elements

"Don: Those "core" elements are *optional*. There's not anything wrong with not using them and the spec says absolutely nothing about it being wrong. Using Dublin Core -- the ISO-Standard which is *not* related to RSS 1.0 -- in RSS 2.0 is perfectly valid usage, as any RSS validator will tell you." - Tomas

"Tomas, have you wondered *why* those elements were made *optional*? Anyone who browsed through the RSS discussions will know that those elements were made *optional* for user's convenience, and not for RSS 1.0 crowd to lay Cuckoo's Eggs within RSS 2.0." - Don Park

Frozen means Unmeltable?

"Don, none of the specific 5 points Ben mentions are resolvable because they would all need changes to the spec, and that's frozen.  In an ideal world perhaps these and other changes could be included in an RSS 2.1, but this isn't an option." - Danny

"Danny, the spec is not frozen even if Dave say it is because he is not really in full control of it. If he was, we wouldn't have all this argument.  [snip]  If you think you can change the world as a person, changing a spec should be easier than changing the world. If you really want something wholeheartedly, you shouldn't know how to stop going after it nor stop short of begging for it. If Dave seems like an unstoppable force, it is because he throws his whole being into it and not like some intellectual college debate." - Don Park

"The spec can be changed, and even rewritten. I think that's what Rogers Cadenhead's group is doing. The people who want to see theselves stopped by the spec are lawyers not developers. If they were writing apps they would have been done with this kvetching a long time ago." - Dave Winer

"My understanding of the situation is that Dave will not prevent people from refining the spec itself for clarity and encourages people to add namespace-based extensions to RSS 2.0 that *supplements* without *replacing" the core elements.  Knowing Dave, I will even go further and guess that Dave will embrace good ideas and incorporate them into the core spec.

What was done can be undone. The man who wrote the word 'frozen' is still around, thankfully, so taking that word and using as an absolute truth against the man who wrote it originally makes zero sense to me." - Don Park

Thanks to Danny, Tomas, and Dave for the guest appearance.  The star of the show is, of course, yours truely.  I particularly like the Cuckoo's Egg bit.  Joy of writing is appreciating one's own words like a baby without a diaper discovering a new toy, warm and soft, when he turns around.  Until the next episode of "As the Bowel Churns", goodbye.

[Don Park's Blog] 
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Escaped HTML discussion. An update on yesterday's position, based on feedback. ... [Sam Ruby] 
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Watch Your Six.

Ben of Six Apart explains why Six Apart has pledged support for Echo.  Unfortunately, his list of reasons are mostly resolvable technical complaints against RSS.  For example, Ben writes that Dublin Core elements are technically superior.  I'll agree with that.  If you would like to use Dublin Core, use it to supplement the existing elements, meaning add them alongside <pubDate> and <author>.  Even better, I would insert them under a single element.  That is how RSS is supposed to be extended.

While I understand his enthusiasm for Echo, I don't think attacking your bread-and-butter format in favor of a format that hasn't even been defined yet makes much business sense.  Just saying that the Echo is a good project and Six Apart will implement it if and when it becomes available should have been more than enough.

Ben, Echo is no excuse to stop enhancing and supporting interoperability of RSS.  Since I doubt this was your intention, please make this clear because your list of RSS problems seems to imply that RSS is a deadend for Six Apart.  If you need an MT template that uses Dublin Core without being funky, I can help you with that.

[Don Park's Blog] 
5:38:58 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Replacing the orange XML icon. We haven't quite worked out how to publicise them yet, we need to persuade our graphic designers that the orange XML lozenge is a beautiful complement for their delightful layout. [Kevin Hinde at BBC News Interactive] The orange button was fine for weblogs, but on websites with corporate design it's not going to work. … [Sjoerd Visscher's weblog] 
4:49:36 AM      comment []   trackback []  



The difference between RSS and Echo. In the recent heated debates about Echo (I'll call it that for now) the prevailing comment is that Echo is a replacement of RSS because of political issues. While this is not entirely untrue, there are actually big differences between Echo and RSS. I'm going to address the main difference for each version of RSS. … [Sjoerd Visscher's weblog] 
4:48:30 AM      comment []   trackback []  



I updated the XML-RPC spec to remove the word ASCII from the definition of string type, and changed the copyright dates from 1998-99 to 1998-2003. [Scripting News] 
4:47:18 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Forward Motion.

There has been a great deal of forward motion in the Echo project today. Looks like the discussion about escaping HTML has come to a conclusion. Other areas that have settled seem to be Author and PermLinks. Things are looking very good for Echo, while at the same time I'm amazed at the resiliency of the wiki for hosting this kind of discussion. Full steam ahead.

[BitWorking] 
4:44:57 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Expandable/Collapsible Content. Sometimes content itself, not presentation or navigation, brings a subtle usability challenge. When page text is unavoidably long and complex, the mass of material can lead to confusion through a loss of context. Join Author Michael Matti as he presents a solution to this problem. 0627 [WebReference News] 
4:44:30 AM      comment []   trackback []  



HTML Utopia: Chapter 3: Digging Below the Surface, Pt. 2. This chapter completes our look at the "mechanics" of CSS: the background you need to have to work with the technology, which covers six topics. To learn more, read on... By Sitepoint. 0630 [WebReference News] 
4:44:11 AM      comment []   trackback []  



iTunes Playlist to Blog. While messing around today I wrote a little Python script to post an iTunes playlist to a Metaweblog API enabled blog (like MovableType). I'm toying with the idea of using it to auto-post a top 25 list of songs once per week or something. The script is available here. Here's... [Artima MacOS X Buzz] 
4:22:07 AM      comment []   trackback []