rss

So many feed readers, so many bizarre behaviors

So many feed readers, so many bizarre behaviors:

So many feed readers, so many bizarre behaviors

It’s been well over a year since I started serving 429s to clients which are hitting the feed too often. Since then, much has happened, and most of it is generally good news.

I’ve heard from users and authors alike of feed software. Sometimes the users have filed bug reports and/or feature requests and have gotten positive results from the project (or vendor). Other times, the authors of such software have gotten in touch, did some digging, found a few nuances of how their libraries work, and improved the situation.

Some of them are trying but are still not quite making it right.

Here’s some of what’s been going on.

[Facinating how we keep looping around…]

Scripting News: One way is always better than two

Scripting News: One way is always better than two:

It’s not mentioned in the Wikipedia page on RSS that I had a format that does what RSS does, a year before it existed, but I gave it up so that Netscape and UserLand would build on the same format, RSS.

[I can attest to this. I don’t remember the context, but Dave and I had a conversation about the two formats. His was, from my perspective, clearly better*. I think he had already made up his mind about the situation (we only talked formats, not the larger context of what he was trying to accomplish and with whom), but I didn’t know it at the time. Still the “Scripting News format” was being used by Dave back then.]

[* My perspective was as a developer who had a native desktop editor for blogs. The very first I believe. It was beautifully simple to use. I miss it a lot. But it was written as a personal project, not a business, and I chose an environment and language that didn’t last. It also led to the creation of Really Simple Discoverability, the XML format I created to make it easier to use editors with blogs. Allez!]

Interesting that Edit This Page came up the day before or so. One of the things I loved about using “Archipelago”, the editor I had written and mentioned above, was exactly this feature. There was a link on every page of the blog, and if you clicked it the magic was performed to open that page in the editor. No matter how long ago that page was created you didn’t have to go searching for it in order to edit it, the link was always there. Days like this make me feel that so much was lost along the way to today. The open web is making a bit of comeback these days… who knows? Maybe we’ll catch up with the past.