I’ve been pondering the nature of RSS, the lightweight syndication and feed format which is a heavy contender for the most talked-about XML format these days (uh, I suppose this post goes some way to help the cause too :-).
So what about RSS? What makes it so appealing? Well, a big reason is of course [...]
I’m doing my bit for the weblog community domino effect. Mark, and others, have added <link/> tags to their weblog HTML, to point to the RSS feeds for the respective weblogs. I think this is a good idea, so have done it too in this, my Blosxom-powered weblog.
I do remember sitting in on an [...]
Well, a little evening hack while watching Inspector Morse has produced a minimalist script wget.pl - a tiny wrapper around the wget command so that you can be more polite when retrieving HTTP based information - in particular RSS feeds.
The idea was sparked by Simon’s post about using HTTP 1.1’s ETag and [...]
If you want to avoid a stint in Accident & Emergency in-patients, and a bandaged ankle, don’t bolt down the stairs at Clapham Junction station two at a time and then miss your footing before you get to the bottom.
Ouch.
Ahem.
Since writing the previous entry, some more thoughts have drawn themselves to my attention. There are advantages that HTTP does have over email. Built-in authentication for one thing. I’ve only used basic authentication, but what about digest? Moreover, Jabber goes one better and has a framework for identity.
Actually, talking about HTTP headers with basic [...]
I’ve been pondering the term “Web Services”. While I completely understand and agree with all the reasonings behind the term (the ‘original’ services were accessible via web clients, HTTP is the underlying and ubiquitous transport, blah blah blah), I’m wondering whether “Web Services” is the best term to use.
While the current rush of implementations use [...]
Ok, further to my initial Panopticon/Jabber experiments, I’ve extended the panpush.pl script to respond to jabber:iq:browse requests. As the script starts, and receives the initial gush of data from the Panopticon port, and as it receives further pushes, it stores the data on the avatar icons, and makes this data available as results [...]
I was just chatting to Morbus in the Emerging Tech. Conference IRC channel (#etcon on irc.openprojects.net) and he mentioned his Amphetadesk news aggregator had a ’subscribe to this’ feature for RSS URLs similar to the Radio Userland coffee-cup feature I’ve already included in the My Feeds section.
So Morbus told me what the links [...]
I’ve just updated the ‘jabberconf‘ Blaggplug from 0+1 to 0+1b. This new version escapes the entities transferred as text to the Jabber conference room, stopping any XML-related chundering on Jabber’s part.
Everything that goes around, comes around. What thing links my old University (UCL), Jeremy Bentham, (whose preserved figure sits in UCL’s South Cloisters), and this year’s Emerging Technology Conference?
Why, the Panopticon, of course. An architectural figure, envisioned by Bentham, which allows one to see but not be seen. “The Panopticon” is [...]