Wednesday, May 21, 2003
Open Content Syndication
Bill Kearney says aggregators should use Open Content Syndication (OCS) to store their subscriptions. I was aware of OCS because that is NewzCrawler's default format and I had to deal with it when I migrated from NewzCrawler a few months ago.
Why didn't I mention OCS? Partly because it seems tailored more for content producers than content consumers, but mostly because it makes heavy use of the http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns# namespace. Yes I know that isn't a good reason to ignore it but there you go. I doubt I'm the only one that looked at <rdf:RDF> and thought "no thanks I've got better things to do with my time".
I'm not dismissing OCS mind you. I'm just trying to understand how the cost of RDF complexity is justified for OCS.
7:39:48 PM
Neglect
I have started neglecting this site. I'm not going to worry about posting with Radio when I am away from the machine Radio is installed on. You should be using my new site anyway. You've been warned ;-)
6:58:32 PM
RSSConnect
PerfectXML.com now has a page where you can read RSS feeds/blogs - a simple Web-based interface to read RSS feeds. Team PerfectXML will be adding some features (such as adding blog entries to favorites, searching, and other customizations), till then enjoy the RSSConnect at http://www.PerfectXML.com/RSSConnect [sellsbrothers.com]
It looks great. I'd love to be able to use something like that for reading my news remotely. Of course I'd still want to use Luke Hutteman's excellent SharpReader when I'm at my primary machine(s). If they both supported a common subscription format and a common API for managing the subscriptions I'd be able to do that.
I wonder if RSSConnect uses a caching proxy or if it downloads the RSS every time someone requests a feed.
P.S. I'm in the process of updating my RSS feed so it supports ETag and Last-Modified properly. It doesn't look like it is possible to do it from an ASMX but I may be missing something simple.
6:53:03 PM
