Dan Olsen’s Weblog

Well, it looks as if RSS 3 is in the woodwork. You can see the first draft which is now online.

Technorati Tags: RSS

Longhorn Team RSS Blog : Our welcome from (and to) the community:

This blog entry on the Microsoft RSS team blog talks about adding lists to RSS. Here’s some of what it says:

The other main thing that Dean talked about is our interest in helping to bring the concept of “lists??? to RSS, since we see an amazing amount of user value in doing so. To help move that along, we posted a proposal on how to do this that contains the main features we think are important about lists.

(a) A way for the publisher to indicate to a client that the feed is a list. Consumers should then process the list in a slightly different way from normal feeds.

In the specification, we used a feed-level element called “cf:treatAs???, with the value of “list??? (“cf??? represents the namespace we’re using for these extensions — it’s defined in the specification).

(b) A way for the publusher to indicate to a client which of the elements on the items in the feed are interesting for the client to expose to the user for sorting and pivoting.

In the spec, we used a set of elements at the feed level which are structured like so:



    <cf:listinfo>

        <cf:sort>

            <element data-type=“date|text|number???>

                User-readable name for the element

            </element>

        </cf:sort>

        <cf:group>

            <element>

                User-readable name for the group.

            </element>

        </cf:group>

    </cf:listinfo>

Well, we’ve been hearing a lot of great feedback about these lists, including Phil Ringnalda’s comments which point out some concerns that he has with the way the spec re-uses element names which are technically defined in someone else’s namespace.

In Phil’s comments, Matthew Gertner, and Tim Bray suggest a different structure, which I’ll reproduce here:

    <cf:listinfo>

        <cf:sort name=“element??? ns=“namespace??? data-type=“date|text|number???>

            User-readable name for the element

        </cf:sort>

        <cf:group name=“element??? ns=“namespace???>

            User-readable name for the group

        </cf:group>

    </cf:listinfo>

I think this is better. It still keeps the basic idea of helping the consuming app to present useful information to its clients, and its easier for people to parse.

So… what do people think? This is an easy change to make, and if the community is in favour, I will make change the spec to this format.

The comments on this entry are also an interesting read.

Technorati Tags: internet, RSS, web, xml

I was just looking at the different information I can have come up on my opening page on my Blackboard account. I found that they had an option to have an RSS feed appear on my opening page. However, the feed is a feed that shows the status of Blackboard. So, Blackboard added RSS like I was hoping but not for the purpose I would like it for. I was a feed that gives me the latest announcements in all my Blackboard courses. I am predicting that Blackboard will get RSS feeds for my courses about the time I finish with my Masters degree. Figures.

Pat Chanezon has a post mentioning the new Atom access to GMail. The Atom access has not gone public yet but is available at https://gmail.google.com/gmail/feed/atom.

I have tried it out myself and it’s pretty cool to be able to see that I have new GMail by just having my aggregator open. You must have an aggregator that supports https and basic authentication as Pat states in his post. He also mentions that the entry is only about 80-90 characters and that you need to go to the site to see the full email. When you click on the link to the email it takes you to your inbox and not to the actual email message.

This could be the beginning to an answer of Dr. Windley’s post about a simple messaging dashboard

Phil Windley recently wrote about Del.icio.us on his weblog and how he is currently using it. One of the ways he is using it is for his CS 462 class which I am currently enrolled in. After reading his entry about Del.icio.us I wanted to see what the difference is between Del.icio.us and Furl.net. On the surface they seem like the same kind of service. However, the thing I found that Del.icio.us has and Furl.net didn’t have is the RSS feeds for each category. RSS is provided by Furl.net but it contains the n most recent pages you have bookmarked where n is the number of recent bookmarks you tell Furl.net to provide in the feed.

I have subscribed to our classes Del.icio.us RSS feed that Dr. Windley has created and it gives me useful resources in my aggregator along with the other news I get.

I am going to give Del.icio.us a try and see how I like it compared to Furl.net. I already know that I like the look of Furl.net better. I am assuming the look of Del.icio.us will evolve over time since it is still in it’s pre-pre-alpha version. In terms of functionality it looks like Del.icio.us might be better than Furl.net.

As I have been working on projects at work I have tried to keep a close eye on Phil Windley’s weblog. Before I was hired by Dr. Windley, I occasionally checked out his weblog to see some of the interesting articles he posted to his site. Now that I work for Dr. Windley I have kept closer tabs on his weblog because he posts quite a few articles that deal with issues involved in some of the projects he has me working on.

One entry that I found to be helpful and eye-opening was his entry titled Dive Into Atom with Mark. In this entry he points to a couple of articles by Mark Pilgrim on the issue of syndication feeds. Since Dr. Windley has me working on projects involving syndication feeds it was helpful to look at these articles and gain more of an understanding of where these feeds currently stand and where they may end up. For anyone wanting to know more about syndication feeds or would just like to read some good articles about them, I highly recommend these articles:

Articles:
The Atom API
Atom Authentication via WSSE
Normalizing Syndication Feeds