Categories
Social Media

Bang bang bang

From the department of you’ve got to be kidding I give you RSS 3.0:

Welcome to the RSS Version 3 Homepage. This site strives to create expanded and complete standards for syndication of online content – more specifically, it aims to recompose the RSS Version 2.0 standard due to underdocumentation and lack of concern towards modern necessities. Our goals are to provide at least one complete standard for common use under the Attribution/Share Alike Common License.

Brought to you by Slashdot–the organization that has conclusively proven that there is no tire so old or bald that it can’t be ridden on one more time.

Best response, from post at Danny’s given by David:

*bang* *bang* *bang* (head against desk)

A close second in Slashdot:

Basically, it’s all a bunch of pointless dick-waving.

Categories
RDF Social Media Weblogging

Really simplifying syndication

My move to simplify my syndication has not met with unqualified success.

The folks at Bloglines were able to delete all of the many different syndication feeds for my site. Unfortunately, rather than move existing subscriptions over, they just deleted them, which means about 250 people are now no longer subscribed to my site. This would be a minor inconvenience to these folks to re-subscribe, except I’m not sure how many will notice that my site is gone from their lists.

I mean, that’s like throwing your own funeral and no one comes.

The .htaccess redirects also caused some interesting results at times. Wordform uses WordPress’ syndication functionality, and the only way to change the number of syndication feeds I support–as well as the default format–is to write a fairly complicated plugin or directly hack the code. As it is, I’ve had to add some of the functionality back in to allow feeds for categories, which means people could subscribe to one feed three different ways: through the static index.rdf file I generate, directly through the program, or attaching /feed/ at the end of my site.

This is something Bloglines should look into: providing a user interface for users to control feeds, and be able to ‘redirect’ a subscription for one feed URL to another feed URL. Bloglines can’t seem to distinguish that the three different feed URLs are to the same feed.

As for forcing people into providing many feeds, that’s something weblogging tool developers should look into: it isn’t efficient to have sites provide many different feeds. Let your users pick a feed that suits their needs, and give them the option to just display the one feed. The same format should work, then, for category feeds, comment feeds, and the main feed.

For myself, I prefer RDF/RSS because the format fits in with my other metadata use. But for others who are into podcasting, they may want to use the iTunes version of RSS 2.0. And still others who like the precision and flexibility of Atom, give them the Atom format. It’s too late to try and focus on one and only one syndication feed format — the three variations each have too wide a distribution. However, aggregators can support all of these main feed types, and people shouldn’t have to worry about keeping each and very version and variation of feed type alive at their site. It’s messy. It’s inefficient. It’s XML overkill.

Eventually if RDF/RSS dies out, which I don’t think it will, I’ll just add support for whatever syndication format best suits my purpose and redirect my index.rdf file to it. Yes, I know — crufty URL, and I should have just stayed with http://weblog.burningbird.net/feed/ as a way of designating my one and only feed. Then I wouldn’t have to do the redirects I’ve done, and may have to do in the future. I knew this. But no, I stuck with index.rdf, anyway.

Sometimes I just get pig-headed, mule-brained, heels-dug-in stubborn. I am a tech, after all.

Categories
RDF Social Media

What planet are you on?

Dan Brickley writes about refining his site so that Planet RDF only picks up those posts that are RDF-related. His concern about Planet RDF matches my concern about Planet Identity:

Planet RDF is now taking that category feed (thanks Dave!), which allows me to vent freely on other things without worrying too much about cluttering up a predominantly tech-oriented site. That said, I find the glimpses into people’s non-tech lives to be part of the charm of the site.

I have restricted most of my RDF writing to Practical RDF, specifically because I know there are people who are only interested in the RDF writings. However, it’s a pain to maintain multiple weblogs. So much so that I am definitely not going to continue it with a separate weblog for identity, semantic web, and so on. Instead, I’ve created separate categories for RDF and Identity (in addition to others) and have tied the RDF syndication feed into the Burningbird RDF category, and will ask Pat from Planet Identity to pick up my Identity feed only.

(I’ve also discontinued Practical RDF, but will continue Tinfoil, which does display a different view of the data — photo only.)

I do agree with Dan, though, about the glimpse into the non-tech lives. I would hate to do without my Sparql updates. But I write about technology only about 30 percent of the time — too little to add my general feed to tech-specific syndication sites.

Categories
Connecting Media Social Media

Stop

Stop. Stop right now.

I won’t point to the sites, and I won’t repeat the exact words. But now is not the time to point to a ‘wiki’ setup to collect information about the bombs in London, and smugly say how much better it is at covering the news than the New York Times.

Now is not the time to point to each other, almost in joy, because, to paraphrase, “we’re covering the story better than the BBC”.

Now is not the time to bring up the incriminations of why this happened and use it as fodder and ammunition in this stupid oneupmanship that characterizes too many of the popular web sites.

Write on our shared sorrow for the people in London. Or write on flowers and trips to Maine and life in general, because life is good. Life is good. But not this. Don’t use this event to promote weblogging.

You’re all pathetic, and you make me ashamed of writing to this weblog. Sorry, got just a wee bit angry. I forget sometimes that we all have different ways of dealing with tragedy.

Categories
Social Media Weblogging

I’d call you smart

AKMA asked what tag I would apply to him from Dan Gillmor’s HonorTags. I do grow tired of offending people with my plain speech, but to use less now would ruin a fine and longstanding streak, so I’ll go for broke.

I would if I could try to find something urbane and witty, not to mention delicously snarky about ‘HonorTags’, but just looking at the word makes me cringe. Three years ago if someone had derived something like an HonorTag, we all would have jumped on and had a fine old time, because it would have been a joke; just like Googlewhacking and all the other silly memes.

But this was real, and no joke. What pill did we swallow to take us here?

AKMA I would call you a man of honor, today, tomorrow and even into next week. However, I won’t tag you, like you’re a cow and I’m a cowboy holding a hot iron. I won’t even tag Wonderchickenfree spirit that he is though like Dave, I miss him and Jonathon.

(Life happens. Sometimes it just happens elsewhere.)

I wouldn’t tag my worst enemy, so why would I do something like that to a person I admire?

There’s a place for us, Somewhere a place for us… Damn, I just cannot get that song out of my head.