40 posts tagged “rss”
2025
I was there at the first Atom meeting at the Google offices. We meant so well! And I think the basic publishing spec is good, certainly better technically than the pastiche of different things called RSS.
Alas, a bunch of things then went wrong. Feeds started losing market share. Facebook started doing something useful and interesting that ultimately replaced blog feeds in open formats. The Atom vs RSS spec was at best irrelevant to most people (even programmers) and at worst a confusing market-damaging thing. The XML namespaces in Atom made everyone annoyed. Also there was some confusing “Atom API” for publishing that diluted Atom’s mindshare for feeds.
— Nelson Minar, Comment on lobste.rs
2024
Matt Webb’s Colophon. I love a good colophon (here's mine, I should really expand it). Matt Webb has been publishing his thoughts online for 24 years, so his colophon is a delightful accumulation of ideas and principles.
So following the principles of web longevity, what matters is the data, i.e. the posts, and simplicity. I want to minimise maintenance, not panic if a post gets popular, and be able to add new features without thinking too hard. [...]
I don’t deliberately choose boring technology but I think a lot about longevity on the web (that’s me writing about it in 2017) and boring technology is a consequence.
I'm tempted to adopt Matt's XSL template that he uses to style his RSS feed for my own sites.
Footnotes that work in RSS readers. Chris Coyier explained the mechanism used by Feedbin to render custom footnotes back in 2019.
I stumbled upon this after I spotted an inline footnote rendered in NetNewsWire the other day (from this post by Drew Breunig):
Since feed readers generally strip JavaScript and CSS and only allow a subset of HTML tags I was intrigued to figure out how that worked.
I found this code in the NetNewsWire source (it's MIT licensed) which runs against elements matching this CSS selector:
sup > a[href*='#fn'], sup > div > a[href*='#fn']
So any link with an href attribute containing #fn that is a child of a <sup> (superscript) element.
In Drew's post the HTML looks like this:
<!-- Footnote link: -->
<sup id="fnref:precision" role="doc-noteref">
<a href="#fn:precision" class="footnote" rel="footnote">1</a>
</sup>
<!-- Then at the bottom: -->
<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<ol>
<li id="fn:precision" role="doc-endnote">
<p>This is the footnote.
<a href="#fnref:precision" class="reversefootnote" role="doc-backlink">↩</a>
</p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>
Where did this convention come from? It doesn't seem to be part of any specific standard. Chris linked to www.bigfootjs.com (no longer resolving) which was the site for the bigfoot.js jQuery plugin, so my best guess is the convention came from that.
“Wherever you get your podcasts” is a radical statement. Anil Dash points out that podcasts are one of the few cases where the dream really did work out:
“[...] what it represents is the triumph of exactly the kind of technology that’s supposed to be impossible: open, empowering tech that’s not owned by any one company, that can’t be controlled by any one company, and that allows people to have ownership over their work and their relationship with their audience.”
ooh.directory: A page for every blog. I hadn’t checked in on Phil Gyford’s ooh.directory blog directory since it first launched in November 2022. I’m delighted to see that it’s thriving—2,117 blogs have now been carefully curated, and the latest feature is a page for each blog showing its categories, description, an activity graph and the most recent posts syndicated via RSS/Atom.
2010
Twitter, reformatted. I wrote a Yahoo! Pipe to clean up Twitter’s RSS feeds—removing the username prefix and filtering out items that begin with “@” or “RT”..
2009
If you’re just linking to the stuff that people are all talking about on Twitter or that floats to the top of Hacker News, you may as well give up on your blog, as far as I’m concerned. Everybody already sees that stuff. You have to dig deeper to offer more interesting information, and an RSS reader is the best tool you can use for that purpose.
2008
Inside guardian.co.uk: Upgrading our RSS feeds. The Guardian now offers full-content RSS feeds of pretty much everything for which we have the necessary rights (no ads yet, but they’ll be added soon). Adding “/rss” to the URL in various places on the site will get you feeds for sections, subjects, contributors and more.
FriendFeed Blog: Simple Update Protocol. FriendFeed infamously poll RSS feeds on the 43 services they support millions of times an hour in an effort to keep their content as real-time as possible. SUP is a new proposal by FriendFeed for a sort of “master feed” of changes to a site—instead of hitting the Flickr feed for each of their users they would just poll Flickr’s SUP feed every minute or so to find out who had uploaded a new photo, and only retrieve the RSS feed for those users.
Flickr Developer Blog: API Responses as Feeds (via) Flickr API calls that return a “standard photos response” (e.g. flickr.photos.search and flickr.favorites.getList) can now output eight different feed formats as well, including Atom, RSS flavours, geoatom, geordf and KML. Error codes are returned as X-FlickrErrCode HTTP headers.
Film + Food & drink | guardian.co.uk (via) The Guardian’s publishing system supports tag intersections based on the URL; this page shows all film stories that also mention food. There’s even an RSS feed.
RSS Duplicate Detection. “Detecting duplicate items in an RSS feed is something of a black art”. I hadn’t realised quite how involved such a basic function of an aggregator could be.
2007
Updates to template_utils. James Bennett’s Django template_utils library now provides tags for consuming external RSS and Atom feeds. Combine with template fragment caching for an instant mashup written just using templates.
Does the idea of redefining the role of the Internet browser appeal to you? Do the terms HTTP, RSS, Microformats, and OpenID, excite you? If so, then this just might be the opportunity for you.
If you write a spec, write a validator alongside. How much pain could have been spared with early versions of RSS if we'd had a common, agreed upon validator. In short, it's the test suite that ultimately decides the spec.
— Joe Heck
Feedwhip. Create an RSS feed or e-mail alert for changes made to any Web page.
Google AJAX Feed API (via) Simple cross-domain proxy to allow JavaScript to access any publically addressable syndication feed, with the same logic as Google Reader providing normalisation.
Triplr. Ultra simple GET-based web service for converting RSS / Atom / RDF / Microformats+GRDDL to HTML / ntriples / RDF / RSS / JSON / Turtle. Small pieces, loosely joined.
Badge Any RSS Feed With Yahoo! Pipes. Smart hack from Kent Brewster. Uses Yahoo! Pipes’ JSON output plus a few lines of JavaScript to create a badge from any RSS feed.
Pipes. New Yahoo! service for combining and remixing Atom/RSS feeds using a really sophisticated drag-and-drop UI.
2006
HOWTO: Adding an RSS feed to a Subversion Server. Using post-commit hooks and some Python.
DeWitt Clinton: On RSS and Atom. Atom is lossless.
2004
RFC 3229: Delta encoding in HTTP (via) A solution to the RSS bandwidth problem?
Photo Matt: RSS Bandwidth Usage. Matt makes the case for RSS scaling just fine if you’re smart about it.
The myth of RSS compatibility [dive into mark]. Sometimes I think Mark’s raison d etre is to upset Dave Winer
2003
PHP Library Tips
Kellan Elliott-McCrea (author of the popular Magpie RSS parser): A Few Tips for Writing Useful Libraries in PHP. Kellan makes the interesting observation that PHP encourages a culture in which most development occurs in the context of either full applications or C extensions, with few people devoting themselves to releasing libraries.
Clearout
- Tristan Louis’ RSS to Necho convertor puts paid to the idea that the success of one format will be detrimental to the usefulness of the other.
- O’Reilly’s RegExp Power series (part one and part two) demonstrate some powerful tricks for use with Perl compatible regular expressions.
- Norman Walsh explains Content Negotiation and some of the pitfalls with modern browser implementations.
- So that’s what happened to Digitiser. See also a Digitiser Tribute and a Mr Biffo interview from 2001 for background information. I cuss you bad.
- George Orwell: Politics and the English Language
- Clay Shirky: A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy. The title is misguiding; this is an essay about how online groups behave and how to look after them.
- A Java HttpClient Class.
- Some good stuff on Boxes and Arrows: Ten Quotable Moments: Challenges and Responses for UI Designers and Views and Forms: Principles of Task Flow for Web Applications (Part 1).
- Inside our notions of “document” and Inside our documents II—the Runoff model.
- 5 days worth of XSLT observations from Simon St. Laurent: One, Two, Three, Four, Five.
- Windows programming with open source tools: Minimalist GNU For Windows and Win32 Programming with GNU C and C++.
More thoughts on RSS
I helped Natalie set up an RSS feed for her (home brewed) weblog last night. Explaining what RSS was was easy. Explaining what she needed to put in her feed took a little bit longer. All she needed to do was provide a feed of entries, each with a title, the full body of the entry, the date it was posted and a permalink to the archived entry. In working out how to do this, we identified the following steps:
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