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This site is no longer maintained.
My current weblog.
Wednesday, September 04, 2002RSS 0.94 Uptake
Syndic8 is showing several early adopters of RSS 0.94. All are using the pubDate element, several have a category element for the channel, but so far only Scripting News is using GUID, without the isPermaLink attribute and without a LINK element.
My latest thought is that LINK should also have an isPermaLink attribute.
PS: Syndic8 provides all sorts of RSS statistics.
Pocket Blog Direction
The port of Pocket Blog to the .NET Compact Framework is mostly on hold at this point. I find myself working around too many of the CF's bugs and limitations, which is very frustrating. I don't want the CF version of PB to degrade into an ugly mess of difficult-to-maintain work-arounds... I already have that with the eVB version.
When a new Beta is released I will re-examine the problems I am having and decide if it is worth continuing. If not, I'll wait for the full release.
In the mean time I am thinking about how to better integrate Pocket Blog with various weblog software and APIs. The Blogger API and MetaWeblog API are established standards. Pyra has been extending Blogger, Movable Type has several extensions and does not implement the full MetaWeblog API. On the Radio Userland front, I wonder how PB could work with liveTopics.
Rather than shoe-horn all of this stuff into PB itself, I'm thinking of switching to a plug-ins architecture. Using the object-oriented capabilities that .NET offers, PB would provide base objects that represent a weblog post and the editor interface. Individual plug-ins would inherit and extend these objects to account for metadata required by a particular API. They would also manage communications with the server. Ideally, plug-ins would allow themselves to be extended by other plug-ins: a plug-in for Movable Type would only implement functionality specific to MT, the rest would be inherited from the MetaWeblog API plug-in.
I like this concept because it allows Pocket Blog to grow incrementally: new APIs will not require a new release of PB and could be supported by others (particularly in areas that don't interest me, like the LiveJournal API).
More on RSS 0.94
Dave Winer pointed out that RSS has always been limited to HTTP and FTP URIs (see Semantic Differences), and that he hasn't changed it because he hasn't heard of compelling uses of other URI types.
The CMS that I built for my previous employer required the use of HTTPS, that's a real-world requirement for another URI type. I can envision uses of RSS revolving around NEWS and RTSP, but I can't really say that they are compelling or likely to occur "in the wild."
I'm still nit-picking over the use of story vs. a more generic term like item or syndicated content. Fetch Retriever can syndicate non-web content using RSS.
