Sunday, May 18, 2003
Extensible Subscription Format
On a slightly related note Matt Griffith asks for functionality that's been in RSS Bandit since version 1.0. The primary reason I started work on RSS Bandit was because aggregators didn't provide a portable way to serialize feed information besides scanty OPML files. Maybe more news aggregators should use the feed list format described my Building a Desktop News Aggregator article. [Dare Obasanjo]
Excellent. It looks like a very good start. But RSS Bandit doesn't like this:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<feeds xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" refresh-rate="3600000" proxy-server="http://desktop" proxy-port="83" xmlns="http://www.25hoursaday.com/2003/RSSBandit/feeds/" xmlns:sub=http://schemas.mattgriffith.net/Subscriptions/>;
<feed category="Mine">
<title>matt.griffith</title>
<link>http://mattgriffith.net/BlogxBrowsing.asmx/GetRss?<;/link>
<stories-recently-viewed/>
<sub:priority>3</sub:priority>
<sub:notifyOnUpdate>true</sub:notifyOnUpdate>
</feed>
<categories>
<category>Mine</category>
</categories>
</feeds>
Also, I'm probably missing something but it doesn't look like a feed can belong to more than one category.
I would love to see the community work to design a common extensible Subscription format. Then we could define an API for saving and retrieving the subscriptions to a central store. Anyone else interested?
P.S. RSSBandit holds a lock on the import file when an exception is thrown during the import.
10:03:24 PM
ISubscription
Attention LazyWeb. Let's create an ISubscription interface along the lines of the IBlogExtension interface. Here's the idea:
I visit a web page. If the page supports RSS Autodiscovery my browser's 
toolbar button is enabled. I click the RSS toolbar button and it runs all the ISubscription plug-ins I have installed. The plug-ins are passed the Uri of the page and the Uri of the RSS feed.
I have some ideas how this could be implemented for IE using COM and/or .NET interfaces. But I'd also like to think of ways to enable non IE browsers and non-COM/.NET plug-ins. Comments?
12:38:35 PM
