RasterWeb!

Let’s have fun!

(or something like that…)

Did you know that An item must not include both foo and bar?

That means <pubDate> and <dc:date> can’t be used together. Which really seems to mean that you can use namespaces to extend RSS 2.0, but there might be conflicts, and to resolve the conflicts you can either remove the namespace’d element or remove the core element. Now, my understanding as of the last few days was that we should always present the core elements, and if needed, add in namespace’d elements.

I tried that, and it didn’t work.

Honestly I’m not sure why it doesn’t work. Is my understanding wrong? Is the validator wrong? Who knows?

Anyway we continue to attempt to learn more about all this, and we happily present feeds in 0.91, 1.0. and 2.0 formats. The 0.91 is almost as old as the Netscape Network thingy, and the 2.0 appeared last year (following Mark’s lead) and the 1.0 came about a few months back when pudge went all nutzo over people/places that provide a feed that is not a 1.0 feed. (Morbus created a simple 2.0 -> 1.0 conversion script for that, this is all XML right, and it should be trivial to convert between formats right?)

In summary: All is well in the RSS world…

Just testing some RSS 2.0 stuff, ignore this…

Is there an aggregator that supports the ability to receive an IM from blo.gs that would then trigger the aggregator to grab the feed for that site if it was X number of minutes old?

As it stands now, a site gets updated, and if they ping blo.gs, then blo.gs sends me an IM telling me the site has updated… but why tell me? Why not tell my aggregator to check if the feed it currently has cached is X number of minutes old, and if so, download the fresh version. Heck, my aggregator could then alert me that it’s got new stuff waiting.

That seems more efficient than my aggregator checking all feeds for an update once per hour, and me having to pay attention to IM’s from blo.gs

I’ve been using nttp//rss lately, and I’ve uncovered a nice little feature. (Oh that word ‘feature’ is always trouble, as it’s sometimes interchangeable with the word ‘bug’ depending on your perspective.)

See, nntp//rss stores each item in an RSS feed as an item that you can read in your newsreader. Well, I noticed that occasionally you’d see double, meaning an item would appear twice – or so it seems. Reading the title of two items would make you think they were the same, but reading the contents would make you realize that you were getting the original post, and a version that was later edited.

Many of us edit posts for various reasons, such as fixing mispellings, adding a note via <ins> or getting rid of something via <del> perhaps, but there are some people out there who write something, sometimes without thinking first, or sometimes just plain stupid. Well, now we can easily do a diff between posts, and see how people alter what they wrote, perhaps changing the entire tone in the process. Is there anything wrong with changing something you wrote to say something quite different? I’ll let you decide that.