Sunday, 18 May 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>https://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.

05/18/2003 21:03:42 (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)  #    Trackback