Following up on my idea of using short-lived feeds to cover breaking news, as Sam Ruby points out, after a feed disappears, some aggregators don’t stop trying to download them. This wouldn’t cause a site that had only published a few short-lived feeds much trouble. But if a major news site started publishing short-lived feeds [...]

The breaking news today about a man, possibly connected with terrorism, being shot by police in London, sparked a thought about a possible use for RSS and Atom feeds: very short-lived feeds for breaking news.
My wife heard the initial news of the London incident on the radio, and I went to CNN.com to see if [...]

Atom 1.0: “It’s cooked and ready to serve. There are a couple of IETF process things to do, but this draft is essentially Atom 1.0. Now would be a good time for implementors to roll up their sleeves and go to work.”
Thus Tim Bray announced the imminent completion of our work on the Atom feed [...]

I released a new product last weekend, Tetra, that integrates with my RSS to HTML conversion script (CaRP) to put RSS newsfeeds into a DHTML (JavaScript) scroller. Tetra supports AJAX, enabling dynamic updating of the scroller’s contents without requiring the webpage to be reloaded. A large number of feeds could be aggregated into one scroller, [...]

RSS feeds were originally used to point to content on websites, and did not carry anything more than a title or brief introduction to the content. It was natural to assume that syndication of feeds–republishing of them by third parties–was allowed and even desired, because it drove traffic to the publisher’s website. But the way [...]

While listening to a podcast about how RSS feed readership is measured, an idea for improving measurement of readership of feed and also web pages occurred to me. One of the things that makes it difficult to accurately measure traffic to any internet resource is that there may be proxy servers between the resource and [...]

David Megginson posted today about The case against easier feed subscriptions, noting that if it’s too easy to subscribe to a feed, it will also be too easy to sneak a subscription into someone’s feed reader and use it for illegitimate purposes. The response I posted was as follows:
“Good point! The approach I’d favor [...]

People have always tended to see the world in their own image. However advanced our powers of empathy may become, our own opinions and perceptions remain more prominent in our consciousness than those of others. Lately, I’ve noticed that the illusions in my world seem to be growing stronger–more completely crowding out the part of [...]

A long time ago in an IETF working group not so far away, there was a big discussion over whether an Atom feed is really just an Atom entry that contains other entries. At the time, I wrote a long email on the subject, but kept putting off sending it, so it’s been languishing in [...]

Tim Bray sent a message to the Atom Working group mailing list today declaring that, other than changes to the last draft that consensus has already been reached on, the Atom format is, for all practical purposes, done. There are a few more steps to be completed before it’s official, as Tim notes:
“Note that this [...]