phil ringnalda

RSS as a thousand separate collaborative weblogs, one per subscriber.

After the last time, I told myself that I’d never design another RSS module, and certainly not another one that attempts to do the right thing in both RSS 1.0 and 2.0, but it looks like I was lying to me: following along with RSS Blog Browsers and backups meant I needed a namespace for […]

Since Bill mentioned supporting the RSS syndication module, I’ve been looking at the way it is actually used, and I have to say that I hope no aggregator I use supports it, at least not until people start using it right. mod_syndication borrows three elements from Ian Davis’s OCS format: updatePeriod, updateFrequency, and updateBase. In […]

Dave Winer annouces that Radio now supports the RSS 0.9x/2.0 skipHours element. I admit I can’t count, even with my shoes off. Having been incredibly dense at best in almost every single message I’ve ever sent to any RSS-related mailing list, I wait to find out how I’m being stupid this time.

A random assortment of RSS links, mostly quite old, posted more for my convenience than for your benefit.

A perfectly valid RSS item about RSS best practices takes three aggregators and two browsers to read.

Brent asks “should RSS aggregators and newsreaders parse (expand) relative URLs in RSS items?” (Before anyone else heads down the wrong track, he doesn’t mean in <link> or <url>, just in HTML in <description> or <content:encoded>) His first inclination is to say “no”, most of the people leaving comments say “no”, but Aaron Swartz says […]

At last, the cabal reveals their secret project: a new RSS validator, particularly designed for RSS 2.0. My 2.0 feed does validate, after a bit of wrestling with the dates. Mark’s Movable Type RSS 2.0 template skates around the problem of producing RFC822 + four digit year dates in MT, by using dc:date (which uses […]

Ever wonder why I ramble on about things that I clearly don’t understand, throwing out ideas that won’t work, reinventing wheels right and left? Here’s why: every once in a while, it jars loose a good idea someone had long ago, and ten thousand web servers breathe a sigh of relief. Barely related: is there […]

And they said RSS 1.0 isn’t confusing. (Note to self: never, ever, skip the space between RSS and the version number.)