RSS Advisory Board

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Latest Articles in this Channel:

09/28/06--02:51: Greg Smith at Podcasting and Portable Media Expo (chan 2282002)

RSS Advisory Board member Greg Smith has a booth at the Podcast and Portable Media Expo Sept. 29-30 where he'll be demonstrating the FeederReader PDA RSS reader and podcasting client.




10/03/06--15:08: James Holderness and Paul Querna Join RSS Advisory Board (chan 2282002)

James Holderness and Paul Querna have joined the RSS Advisory Board.

Holderness is a software developer working on the Snarfer RSS reader for Windows whose past projects include the WebFerret search utility and Delrina CyberJack Internet application suite.

He's also an active participant on the board's RSS-Public mailing list who contributed to the RSS Profile, a set of best practice recommendations for RSS in ongoing development.

Querna is a software engineer at Ask working on Bloglines, one of the most popular web-based RSS readers.

He's also a member of the project management committee for the Apache web server and formerly a developer of voice over IP communications systems at BitStruct.

Welcome to the board!




10/11/06--05:21: RSS 2.0 Element History (chan 2282002)

The documentation for the RSS.NET library, an open source library for reading and writing RSS feeds, includes a version comparison table showing when elements were introduced to RSS.




10/19/06--05:30: Support Trackback in RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0 (chan 2282002)

New documentation has been published for the Trackback namespace, a way to support the trackback protocol in RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0.




10/26/06--08:28: New Real Estate Listing Namespace for RSS 2.0 (chan 2282002)

The real estate search engine Propsmart, created by the same team that developed BookCrossing, has launched an RSS 2.0 namespace for representing real estate properties in a feed.

Propsmart allows data feed partners to provide bulk property data by sending us a data file or providing a web data feed. ...

The feed should be provided as a URL, which we will crawl on a regular basis. The accepted format of the data feed is RSS 2.0.

They've been responsive to feedback. When I contacted the company about a couple of minor nits that prevented the feeds from being valid last week, they were quick to correct the problems.




11/02/06--08:31: Take an RSS 'Lessonette' (chan 2282002)

Keith Martin has written an RSS "lessonette", a short tutorial that brings newbies up to speed with syndication. "Newer revisions of the RSS standards are both more capable and more complex, but this is a good way to get a feel for how things work. You can produce perfectly good RSS feeds using nothing more than this information."




11/29/06--07:00: Niall Kennedy's Advice for Feed Publishers (chan 2282002)

Self-described "feed syndication geek" Niall Kennedy has written a set of feed publishing best practices for Atom and RSS publishers. He includes advice on software libraries and promotional efforts.




12/01/06--18:29: Feed Autodiscovery Wiki Launched (chan 2282002)

Robert Sayre has used the RSS Advisory Board's autodiscovery specification to create a Feed Autodiscovery wiki that covers the technique for Atom, RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0. The public's encouraged to edit the reference.




12/06/06--09:36: FeedGhost Reader Released for Windows (chan 2282002)

BinaryComponents has released the first version of FeedGhost, a new feed reader for Windows XP and Vista users that offers Outlook- and newsriver-style reading, synchronization across several computers and search capabilities. The program costs $20 a year.




12/06/06--18:17: Large Enclosure Issue in Internet Explorer 7 (chan 2282002)

In an under-the-hood article on how Microsoft's RSS Engine handles enclosures in Internet Explorer 7 and Windows Vista, program manager Walter vonKoch offers an important note: If you're publishing a podcast or another enclosure larger than 15MB, Microsoft only will download it from servers that support partial downloads with the HTTP Range header.




12/07/06--06:51: Roxio Releases RSS MediaTicker (chan 2282002)

Roxio has released a new version of MediaTicker, a free Windows application that displays feeds and digital photos newsticker-style across any edge of the desktop. Images in feed items are displayed in the ticker.




12/14/06--09:34: RSS Tip: Offer Full Text Feeds (chan 2282002)

Tom Markiewicz of EvolvePoint is writing a 12-part series for web publishers to make the most of their RSS feeds. His first tip: Offer full text feed content.

Markiewicz writes:

If given a choice, most readers of feeds choose full text feeds. Why? Because full text capitalizes on the main benefit of feeds to users – convenience. Users of feeds become loyal readers of publisher content because it now becomes much easier to stay up to date and read all the content coming from their favorite publishers. In the long run, a long list of loyal subscribers and regular readers in much more valuable than the short term additional page views.




12/14/06--14:27: Vote: RSS Autodiscovery Specification Published (chan 2282002)

The proposal to create and publish an RSS Autodiscovery specification has passed the RSS Advisory Board with members Matthew Bookspan, Rogers Cadenhead, Jason Douglas, James Holderness, Eric Lunt, Randy Charles Morin and Jake Savin voting in favor and no one voting in opposition.

Both Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 and Mozilla Firefox 2.0 support autodiscovery, an effective way for publishers to let readers know that their sites offer a syndicated feed.

If you're using one of these browsers or another that supports autodiscovery, you might have noticed an orange icon on the right edge of the address bar when you load some pages.



This icon, the common feed icon, indicates that the site offers a syndicated feed. You can click it to subscribe to the feed in the browser's feed reader or another reader such as Bloglines, NewsGator Online or Google Reader. The board's web site uses autodiscovery to publicize our RSS 2.0 feed.

Comments and corrections regarding the new specification can be made on the board's RSS-Public mailing list.

Note: An earlier version of the same proposal passed on Nov. 27 with Bookspan, Cadenhead, Douglas, Holderness, Lunt, Morin, Paul Querna and Savin voting in favor and no one voting in opposition.




01/13/07--17:06: Site Offers Flashy RSS Readers (chan 2282002)

The web publisher's gadget collection Darren's $5 Script Archive offers several graphical Flash-based RSS readers that you can reuse on your own site (demo).




02/14/07--07:28: RSS Reader Triggers Airport Security (chan 2282002)

Josh Hallett made an unusual discovery at Atlanta's airport: Running an RSS reader looks like hacking to the airport's pay wifi service.

If you are using the paid wifi in the terminal and you open up a desktop-based RSS reader like NetNewsWire, the network assumes your flurry of RSS-grabbing activity is a suspicious event. About 10 seconds after opening my RSS reader I was presented this message in my browser: "Anomalous Behavior Detected -- Request Blocked."

Yep, I was blacklisted. The 'system' assumed that my machine was infected with a worm or virus. In the end I was able to experience around a minute of my paid wifi service.