I’ve noticed over the last few days that one of my sites has been getting hundreds of hits a day from people searching for “katharine mcphee yellow dress”. I don’t have a site about American Idol, and I’ve never even typed the words “katharine mcphee” (and the first time I’d even copied and pasted the […]

I’ve just set up a 7 day email mini-course, 7 ways to turn RSS into R$$. When you register, you also get a free download of CaRP Free, an RSS to HTML converter for your website, and if you stay on the mailing list, updated versions will be sent to you as they’re released.
This is […]

The IETF Atom Working Group has been discussing a new Atom extension for creating threaded discussions between blog. The biggest bone of contention has been two new attributes for the link element which indicate the number of comments in a comments feed and the last time the comments feed was updated. There are two objections […]

Today, Sam Ruby started redirecting from all of the feeds from his blog to the Atom 1.0 version, and on the same day, changed the links in his Atom 1.0 feed to relative URLs. NetNewsWire (the feed reader that I use) promptly began failing to resolve the links correctly, and from the comments in the […]

Welcome to my new weblog, Alpha Gecko. This blog combines a number of old blogs into one (thus all of the content before the welcome entry). Why combine?

Many (most…maybe all) of my narrowly focused blogs were not updated often enough to live very well on their own.
I can easily create a place for entries that […]

It has again been suggested on the AtomPub mailing list that a link relation of “stylesheet” be used to point to an XSL template that could be used to transform a feed to some other format. This lead back to the question of what the link element was designed for. Unfortunately, we didn’t nail the […]

In response to user requests, I just released Moray, a script which uses CaRP and Grouper to filter and aggregate RSS feeds, and republish them in RSS 2.0 format. It’s a free download, and can be used with the free version of CaRP, but requires the commercial version of Grouper ($17.97 for a single user). […]

We finished up the specification for the Atom Syndication Format back in July, and now at last the process of getting an RFC number is complete. Atom 1.0 is RFC 4287–the first standards track syndication format specification! How long, I wonder, till Blogger switches from Atom 0.3 to Atom 1.0? Perhaps I’ll have to write […]

There’s something of an online lovefest underway for Chris Pirillo’s newly launched metasearch site, gada.be (pronounced “gotta be”, I believe). Since I can’t find anyone else mentioning this, I’ll blow my own horn. Unless things have changed since late last month, CaRP is the RSS processing engine under the hood. It’s one of the most […]

The Chordata RSS and Atom newsfeed directory is offering a new service as of today called “Linkback”. Website owners who would like to have their own newsfeed directory, but don’t want to create or maintain one, can send their customers to Chordata, and have Chordata link back to them from each newsfeed page. The link […]