When I first wrote an RSS generator, I was gutted to discover that the specification wanted RFC822 dates -- and the parser I was testing on required this.
It looks as if ISO8601 has won out though -- if I pick an arbitrary feed I see ISO8601 dates. Has the spec changed?
(for the puzzled, RFC822 is "Sat, 06 Jan 2000 12:00:00 GMT" -- hassle to build, hassle to machine-read. ISO8601 is "2000-01-06T12:00:00" -- much better.)
If you're not prepared to do it properly with an XML library, then:
Grab somebody else's RSS feed. Look at it -- the meaning will be immediately obvious. Replace their variable content with template placeholders. Write code to place your content in the template. Have this run whenever you post, placing the output at a static HTML page on your site.
Or, give up on your homebrew blog code, and become a WordPress hacker.
Is it just me, or are 99% of the podcasts out there completely braindead
You're slamming the medium when your real beef is with the content. Saying "I hate podcasts" because 99% of them are rubbish is like saying "I hate MP3s" because 99% of those are rubbish.
On any medium, there's a lot of dross around. Buy a CD at random, and the chances are you won't like it. Go to a random web page, it's likely to be dross.
This was the problem with the old mp3.com -- I'm sure there was great stuff on there, but it was diluted with mediocre stuff, and there was no layer to sort the wheat from the chaff.
With a lot of traditional media, we have an infrastructure that wades through the surfeit of available material and picks out the best for us. That infrastructure includes music radio, newspaper and magazine reviewers, word of mouth, etc. Sometimes it lets us down -- the system might completely overlook a great new novel or band -- but at least it does something, and we can tune our exposure to the system by listening to that DJ whose choices we usually enjoy, or reading the film reviews in the organ that we usually agree with.
Podcasting -- and non-label bands who publish straight to MP3 -- need that kind of promotional path. It's nice to see that this is actually happening. Say what you like about Adam Curry's Daily Source Code podcast, but it gets a lot of listeners, and he frequently plays promos for other podcasts, or describes and recommends podcasts he likes or things his listeners should check out. That's a start. He has said that what needs to happen is for other high profile podcasters to do the same, substituting their tastes for his.
This is what needs to happen. I wish developers would recognise this, instead of repeatedly falling into the trap of implementing ratings collectors. Podcast Alley collates votes and produces a top 10. Top tens don't interest me.
Windows: force you to do things its way Mac OS X: Many applications are much more specific in their task (alternatively known as not having as many features, but the features that it does have actually work as you expect them to)
Come on, this is just one pejorative way and one non-pejorative way of describing the same thing.
You've just decided that the way Apple is forcing you to work is the coolest way.
This is a new (not even that new) graphics format. How much totally new stuff could you possibly have to learn?
It's a bit more than that. There is support for interactivity. There is support for pulling in content over HTTP. For example, the SVGs generated by GPS Visualizer pull in maps layers from various bitmap sources, allow you to drag labels around and adjust the opacity of layers using a slider.
Also, Javascript can access SVG DOM. Imagine Google Maps implemented on that kind of technology.
Way back in 1998, work began on an open source Lotus Notes replacement. The design looked pretty cool, and they got replication between Berkley DBs doing I think, before the whole thing stagnated -- probably because very few people are really interested in groupware, and those who are probably don't want to model it on Notes...
Anyway, it was called Yoga, and its homepage is still available.
And the reason I mention this? Well, it started off called Gnuotes, which didn't exactly trip off the tongue, and so the name changed to Yoga. While Yoga stands for "Your Open Groupware Application", it was also chosen because they were "adopting the Lotus position", which I think makes it the wittiest name for a failed Open Source project EVER.
It's official then, Slashdot is the mother of all blogs.
Well, Slashdot is a blog (which is why I always chuckle at comments saying "I don't read blogs"), and if it wasn't the first website to use the "newest article appears at the top, pushes previous ones down" format that characterises a blog, then it was certainly among the first.
If 10,000 people subscribe to a sites' RSS feed and set their RSS aggregators to 'refresh' that feed every 5 mins or so, the bandwidth usage very quickly mounts up. Most sites use dyanamically created pages even for the feeds, so pre checking the age of the page doesn't help.
That depends on how smart the code that dynamically creates the RSS is. A sensible implementation will understand the "If-modified-since:" header, will perform a very cheap database request for items newer than that, and if there are none, respond with "304 Not modified".
Wordpress's RSS generator does just that. I'm sure all the other reputable applications do too, and I know any respectable client will implement conditional GETs.
Subscribing to an RSS stream has always struck me as a misnoma. You're still using HTTP, so you're still having to request the data, rather than sit back and let the data come to you. Why can't the site tell me that the content is ready and ship it to me? If thats to bandwidth intensive, why can't there be a RSS protocol that using P2P to roundrobin the info amoungst the subscribers?
I too was disappointed to find you had to poll for RSS -- but when I gave it some thought, I accepted it. Polling is simple, and does the job. If-modified-since headers keep the bandwidth hit down. You can hand-crank your own RSS feed and host it on any old static web server.
And of course, once you have an application that polls on your behalf, as a user you really do "sit back and let the data come to you". As an end user, does it bother you that your POP3 client has to poll?
Couldn't this technology then be used to allow software updates etc as well as podcasts and news feeds?
Thanks for clearing that up. I am now left wondering why this is the buzzword du jour, as it seems pretty boring. Do we have "Podcasts" of "blogs" now, so the angsty teens can discuss their angst in full 44kHz angst-filled audio? These types of trends make me fear for our future sometimes.:-(
Yes, yes we do. But it doesn't matter because just like you never read their blogs, you don't need to subscribe to their podcasts.
But, if there's any kind of audio content you enjoy listening to, there's now a widely used an reliable technology which means you can have it magically appear on your player whenever a new one appears, which is sort of neat, isn't it?
Sorry, but I think I'm getting old. What exactly is Podcasting? Why is it hyped by even non-tech media? It is just an audio-stream recorded at home and put on a blog, is it? Why is it called Podcasting?
Podcasting is publishing audio files (not streams) and announcing them via an RSS feed -- a standardised machine readable format. As someone else has pointed out, no RSS == not a podcast, so this NASA story is a red herring.
The result of this is that with an appropriate client, you can subscribe to RSS feeds, and these files can appear on your portable MP3 player with little to no subsequent effort on your part (assuming you regularly sync your player already).
I pop my iPod in its cradle when I get home at night, and in the morning there is always new content for my journey to work.
It's hyped for various reasons. One, it's socially interesting. Two, Adam Curry did a great job of promoting it, for his own reasons. Three, Apple picked up on it. Four, it bathes in the iPod halo effect (partly due to its name). Five, it's actually an example of a technology that really delivers on its promise.
It's called Podcasting because it was originally developed by weird Mac type people, who forgot for a while that there are MP3 players other than iPod. So, it's a broadcast to iPods. The name is misleading -- any MP3 player will do. You can listen on your desktop if you want -- but it's when you get to take the content with you on the move that its advantages over streaming content become clear.
Just like any other web site, a podcast may be an amateur affair (there are lots of them) or a professional production (there are lots of those too). It may be music, speech, or anything else. The technology does not care.
Those who can't afford a digital camera will (presumably) continue to be ripped off with single-use point-and-shoot film cameras
My guess is that single-use film cameras are likely to be replaced with use-and-return digital cameras like the ones CVS sell in the US -- depending on how the price of film goes. I notice that Kodak now does single-use film cameras with a CDR containing the images included in the price.
However, unless you're completely incapable of saving up a couple of hundred dollars, digital photography is already vastly cheaper than even entry level film photography.
Since buying my second digital camera about a year ago, I have taken literally thousands of pictures. If I'd used the cheapest film developing service, with their free films, it would still have cost me a lot more than the price of the Digital camera, and the picture quality would have been lower. If I'd used quality film and quality developing -- for the equivalent of 5MP digital prints, the cost would have been vast.
My completely computer illiterate girlfriends mother really struggles to use iPhoto.
I'm not surprised. One of the reasons I bought a Mac was that I needed to move my photos off my work laptop and onto something I actually owned: I'd read glowing reviews of iPhoto and decided it must be as good if not better than Picasa.
It turns out iPhoto is unintuitive, slow, and interrupts your experience with unnecessary and distracting messages (e.g. don't tell me you're saving changes -- take me to the next image and save the changes in the background).
It will be interesting to see if in 20 years I can pull up all my digital images or will they disapear in a hd/backup crash...I know my negatives should still be around.
Negatives are pretty fragile -- fire, flood, mucky infant fingers, etc. will all wreck them. You have to take some measures to keep backups of digital media, but if you do this properly it should be a lot safer than analogue archives.
The other cause of bit rot is loss of support for file formats -- but JPEG is an open enough standard that I wouldn't consider it a risk.
Setup Instructions: 1. Use an Apple Computer 2. Download Aaron Faby's packages (and tip him a few bucks) 3. Install (i.e. click 'continue' until the screens go away)
Or, for Windows, Linux, or Solaris (Mac version in early stages of development), get XAMPP.
It's not bulletproof security-wise, but it's just the ticket for getting a development environment up in short order.
There is not enough bling available for any other mp3 player.
Even though you're moderated as "funny", you speak a lot of sense. I bought an iPod. I did some investigation into non-Apple alternatives (because I'm was scarred by Macs in the 1990s) but the dealmaker was iTrip.
There were FM transmitters available that fitted a generic personal stereo, but by necessity with these you'd end up with a mess of wires all over the place. Because it was designed for the iPod and the iPod only, the iTrip was neat and functional.
Now I have a Dension ICE>Link iPod interface in my car, so 3rd parties have effectively locked me into Apple's products. When my girlfriend wanted an MP3 player, the accessories we already had made a non-iPod choice foolish.
There are all sorts of third party gadgets and "bling" you can buy for the iPod, most of which are strongly tied to the dock interface or the overall form factor of the device.
I strongly feel that in order to compete against Apple, the rest of the industry should design an industry standard interface and to some extent form factor (with room for variety).
What 3rd party is going to target some device with 10% market share? Very few. What if four manufacturers with 10% market share standardised on an interface. Then a 3rd party would have 40% of the market to sell to. It works both ways, devices sell accessories, and the availability of accessories sells devices.
Well, it means that royalties are going to an editor/note writer/introduction writer, rather than to the copyright holder for the original work, or their estate.
So from a copyright holder's perspective, longer copyrights are good for them.
Because Penguin mostly prints stuff that is out of copyright.
The Penguin Classics imprint largely consists of out of copyright works, but Penguin Books publishes a lot of contemporary literature.
Back in the day, the had Penguin for fiction, Pelican for non-fiction and Puffin for "younger readers". I get the impression those brands have been phased out, which is a shame because I thought it was rather clever, and the logos were nice.
Penguin is probably most famous for fighting and winning the Lady Chatterly's Lover censorship case.
Funny, my *hardcover* "The Illustrated Stratford Shakespeare", which says "All 37 Plays, All 160 Sonnets" and comes to 1024 pages only cost me $13 at Barnes and Noble. Classics are cheap. Paying $40 for a paperback version of this would be insane.
I'm repeating something I wrote in another thread here, but you pay extra for quality editing, introductions, explanatory notes etc.
Over here there is a discount brand of paperbacks called "Wordsworth Classics". £1.50 each on Amazon. I used to get them for £1 each in discount bookshops. What you get is the text dumped onto paper (sometimes there are out-of-copyright illustrations too : Alice in Wonderland for example).
What you don't get is footnotes, a few thousand words about the author and the background to the book, etc., and sometimes that's worth having.
Most (all?) of these titles are in the public domain, so the publisher's only cost is printing. And they're paperbacks. Penguin is making a pretty good margin on these.
Penguin adds value with excellent introductions and annotations. Only yesterday I chose a slightly more expensive Penguin Classics edition of H.P. Lovecraft short stories over the Del Rey edition, because of the 14 page introduction and the extensive explanatory notes, which help put the writing in context.
Slashdot Mirror
You've never heard of ISO 8601?
When I first wrote an RSS generator, I was gutted to discover that the specification wanted RFC822 dates -- and the parser I was testing on required this.
It looks as if ISO8601 has won out though -- if I pick an arbitrary feed I see ISO8601 dates. Has the spec changed?
(for the puzzled, RFC822 is "Sat, 06 Jan 2000 12:00:00 GMT" -- hassle to build, hassle to machine-read. ISO8601 is "2000-01-06T12:00:00" -- much better.)
If you're not prepared to do it properly with an XML library, then:
Grab somebody else's RSS feed.
Look at it -- the meaning will be immediately obvious.
Replace their variable content with template placeholders.
Write code to place your content in the template.
Have this run whenever you post, placing the output at a static HTML page on your site.
Or, give up on your homebrew blog code, and become a WordPress hacker.
"Mains power" is English for what Americans call "outlet power".
Example usage "You can run this radio from a battery, or you can plug it into the mains".
Is it just me, or are 99% of the podcasts out there completely braindead
You're slamming the medium when your real beef is with the content. Saying "I hate podcasts" because 99% of them are rubbish is like saying "I hate MP3s" because 99% of those are rubbish.
On any medium, there's a lot of dross around. Buy a CD at random, and the chances are you won't like it. Go to a random web page, it's likely to be dross.
This was the problem with the old mp3.com -- I'm sure there was great stuff on there, but it was diluted with mediocre stuff, and there was no layer to sort the wheat from the chaff.
With a lot of traditional media, we have an infrastructure that wades through the surfeit of available material and picks out the best for us. That infrastructure includes music radio, newspaper and magazine reviewers, word of mouth, etc. Sometimes it lets us down -- the system might completely overlook a great new novel or band -- but at least it does something, and we can tune our exposure to the system by listening to that DJ whose choices we usually enjoy, or reading the film reviews in the organ that we usually agree with.
Podcasting -- and non-label bands who publish straight to MP3 -- need that kind of promotional path. It's nice to see that this is actually happening. Say what you like about Adam Curry's Daily Source Code podcast, but it gets a lot of listeners, and he frequently plays promos for other podcasts, or describes and recommends podcasts he likes or things his listeners should check out. That's a start. He has said that what needs to happen is for other high profile podcasters to do the same, substituting their tastes for his.
This is what needs to happen. I wish developers would recognise this, instead of repeatedly falling into the trap of implementing ratings collectors. Podcast Alley collates votes and produces a top 10. Top tens don't interest me.
Windows: force you to do things its way
Mac OS X: Many applications are much more specific in their task (alternatively known as not having as many features, but the features that it does have actually work as you expect them to)
Come on, this is just one pejorative way and one non-pejorative way of describing the same thing.
You've just decided that the way Apple is forcing you to work is the coolest way.
This is a new (not even that new) graphics format. How much totally new stuff could you possibly have to learn?
It's a bit more than that. There is support for interactivity. There is support for pulling in content over HTTP. For example, the SVGs generated by GPS Visualizer pull in maps layers from various bitmap sources, allow you to drag labels around and adjust the opacity of layers using a slider.
Also, Javascript can access SVG DOM. Imagine Google Maps implemented on that kind of technology.
Way back in 1998, work began on an open source Lotus Notes replacement. The design looked pretty cool, and they got replication between Berkley DBs doing I think, before the whole thing stagnated -- probably because very few people are really interested in groupware, and those who are probably don't want to model it on Notes...
Anyway, it was called Yoga, and its homepage is still available.
And the reason I mention this? Well, it started off called Gnuotes, which didn't exactly trip off the tongue, and so the name changed to Yoga. While Yoga stands for "Your Open Groupware Application", it was also chosen because they were "adopting the Lotus position", which I think makes it the wittiest name for a failed Open Source project EVER.
It's official then, Slashdot is the mother of all blogs.
Well, Slashdot is a blog (which is why I always chuckle at comments saying "I don't read blogs"), and if it wasn't the first website to use the "newest article appears at the top, pushes previous ones down" format that characterises a blog, then it was certainly among the first.
The web page says "Download seamlessly with HTTP or BitTorrent".
If 10,000 people subscribe to a sites' RSS feed and set their RSS aggregators to 'refresh' that feed every 5 mins or so, the bandwidth usage very quickly mounts up. Most sites use dyanamically created pages even for the feeds, so pre checking the age of the page doesn't help.
That depends on how smart the code that dynamically creates the RSS is. A sensible implementation will understand the "If-modified-since:" header, will perform a very cheap database request for items newer than that, and if there are none, respond with "304 Not modified".
Wordpress's RSS generator does just that. I'm sure all the other reputable applications do too, and I know any respectable client will implement conditional GETs.
Subscribing to an RSS stream has always struck me as a misnoma. You're still using HTTP, so you're still having to request the data, rather than sit back and let the data come to you. Why can't the site tell me that the content is ready and ship it to me? If thats to bandwidth intensive, why can't there be a RSS protocol that using P2P to roundrobin the info amoungst the subscribers?
I too was disappointed to find you had to poll for RSS -- but when I gave it some thought, I accepted it. Polling is simple, and does the job. If-modified-since headers keep the bandwidth hit down. You can hand-crank your own RSS feed and host it on any old static web server.
And of course, once you have an application that polls on your behalf, as a user you really do "sit back and let the data come to you". As an end user, does it bother you that your POP3 client has to poll?
Couldn't this technology then be used to allow software updates etc as well as podcasts and news feeds?
It can already.
Thanks for clearing that up. I am now left wondering why this is the buzzword du jour, as it seems pretty boring. Do we have "Podcasts" of "blogs" now, so the angsty teens can discuss their angst in full 44kHz angst-filled audio? These types of trends make me fear for our future sometimes.
Yes, yes we do. But it doesn't matter because just like you never read their blogs, you don't need to subscribe to their podcasts.
But, if there's any kind of audio content you enjoy listening to, there's now a widely used an reliable technology which means you can have it magically appear on your player whenever a new one appears, which is sort of neat, isn't it?
Sorry, but I think I'm getting old. What exactly is Podcasting? Why is it hyped by even non-tech media? It is just an audio-stream recorded at home and put on a blog, is it? Why is it called Podcasting?
Podcasting is publishing audio files (not streams) and announcing them via an RSS feed -- a standardised machine readable format. As someone else has pointed out, no RSS == not a podcast, so this NASA story is a red herring.
The result of this is that with an appropriate client, you can subscribe to RSS feeds, and these files can appear on your portable MP3 player with little to no subsequent effort on your part (assuming you regularly sync your player already).
I pop my iPod in its cradle when I get home at night, and in the morning there is always new content for my journey to work.
It's hyped for various reasons. One, it's socially interesting. Two, Adam Curry did a great job of promoting it, for his own reasons. Three, Apple picked up on it. Four, it bathes in the iPod halo effect (partly due to its name). Five, it's actually an example of a technology that really delivers on its promise.
It's called Podcasting because it was originally developed by weird Mac type people, who forgot for a while that there are MP3 players other than iPod. So, it's a broadcast to iPods. The name is misleading -- any MP3 player will do. You can listen on your desktop if you want -- but it's when you get to take the content with you on the move that its advantages over streaming content become clear.
Just like any other web site, a podcast may be an amateur affair (there are lots of them) or a professional production (there are lots of those too). It may be music, speech, or anything else. The technology does not care.
Those who can't afford a digital camera will (presumably) continue to be ripped off with single-use point-and-shoot film cameras
My guess is that single-use film cameras are likely to be replaced with use-and-return digital cameras like the ones CVS sell in the US -- depending on how the price of film goes. I notice that Kodak now does single-use film cameras with a CDR containing the images included in the price.
However, unless you're completely incapable of saving up a couple of hundred dollars, digital photography is already vastly cheaper than even entry level film photography.
Since buying my second digital camera about a year ago, I have taken literally thousands of pictures. If I'd used the cheapest film developing service, with their free films, it would still have cost me a lot more than the price of the Digital camera, and the picture quality would have been lower. If I'd used quality film and quality developing -- for the equivalent of 5MP digital prints, the cost would have been vast.
My completely computer illiterate girlfriends mother really struggles to use iPhoto.
I'm not surprised. One of the reasons I bought a Mac was that I needed to move my photos off my work laptop and onto something I actually owned: I'd read glowing reviews of iPhoto and decided it must be as good if not better than Picasa.
It turns out iPhoto is unintuitive, slow, and interrupts your experience with unnecessary and distracting messages (e.g. don't tell me you're saving changes -- take me to the next image and save the changes in the background).
It will be interesting to see if in 20 years I can pull up all my digital images or will they disapear in a hd/backup crash...I know my negatives should still be around.
Negatives are pretty fragile -- fire, flood, mucky infant fingers, etc. will all wreck them. You have to take some measures to keep backups of digital media, but if you do this properly it should be a lot safer than analogue archives.
The other cause of bit rot is loss of support for file formats -- but JPEG is an open enough standard that I wouldn't consider it a risk.
Setup Instructions:
1. Use an Apple Computer
2. Download Aaron Faby's packages (and tip him a few bucks)
3. Install (i.e. click 'continue' until the screens go away)
Or, for Windows, Linux, or Solaris (Mac version in early stages of development), get XAMPP.
It's not bulletproof security-wise, but it's just the ticket for getting a development environment up in short order.
For 3D buildings, check the "buildings" checkbox. Building models are only available for a few major US cities, but Boston is one of them.
For the rest of the world, check "terrain" and go somewhere mountainous or deep. If you're not impressed by that, I give up.
Great example, navigate to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, where the buildings are. Rotate so South is up, then tilt. Woah!
Adam Curry and the guy behind Coverville, at the very least pay ASCAP licensing fees.
See this topic on Podcast Alley for details.
There is not enough bling available for any other mp3 player.
Even though you're moderated as "funny", you speak a lot of sense. I bought an iPod. I did some investigation into non-Apple alternatives (because I'm was scarred by Macs in the 1990s) but the dealmaker was iTrip.
There were FM transmitters available that fitted a generic personal stereo, but by necessity with these you'd end up with a mess of wires all over the place. Because it was designed for the iPod and the iPod only, the iTrip was neat and functional.
Now I have a Dension ICE>Link iPod interface in my car, so 3rd parties have effectively locked me into Apple's products. When my girlfriend wanted an MP3 player, the accessories we already had made a non-iPod choice foolish.
There are all sorts of third party gadgets and "bling" you can buy for the iPod, most of which are strongly tied to the dock interface or the overall form factor of the device.
I strongly feel that in order to compete against Apple, the rest of the industry should design an industry standard interface and to some extent form factor (with room for variety).
What 3rd party is going to target some device with 10% market share? Very few. What if four manufacturers with 10% market share standardised on an interface. Then a 3rd party would have 40% of the market to sell to. It works both ways, devices sell accessories, and the availability of accessories sells devices.
Well, it means that royalties are going to an editor /note writer/introduction writer, rather than to the copyright holder for the original work, or their estate.
So from a copyright holder's perspective, longer copyrights are good for them.
Would that be the Penguin The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories? I've got a copy on my shelf too. Great edition.
Why yes, yes it would.
Because Penguin mostly prints stuff that is out of copyright.
The Penguin Classics imprint largely consists of out of copyright works, but Penguin Books publishes a lot of contemporary literature.
Back in the day, the had Penguin for fiction, Pelican for non-fiction and Puffin for "younger readers". I get the impression those brands have been phased out, which is a shame because I thought it was rather clever, and the logos were nice.
Penguin is probably most famous for fighting and winning the Lady Chatterly's Lover censorship case.
Funny, my *hardcover* "The Illustrated Stratford Shakespeare", which says "All 37 Plays, All 160 Sonnets" and comes to 1024 pages only cost me $13 at Barnes and Noble. Classics are cheap. Paying $40 for a paperback version of this would be insane.
I'm repeating something I wrote in another thread here, but you pay extra for quality editing, introductions, explanatory notes etc.
Over here there is a discount brand of paperbacks called "Wordsworth Classics". £1.50 each on Amazon. I used to get them for £1 each in discount bookshops. What you get is the text dumped onto paper (sometimes there are out-of-copyright illustrations too : Alice in Wonderland for example).
What you don't get is footnotes, a few thousand words about the author and the background to the book, etc., and sometimes that's worth having.
Most (all?) of these titles are in the public domain, so the publisher's only cost is printing. And they're paperbacks. Penguin is making a pretty good margin on these.
Penguin adds value with excellent introductions and annotations. Only yesterday I chose a slightly more expensive Penguin Classics edition of H.P. Lovecraft short stories over the Del Rey edition, because of the 14 page introduction and the extensive explanatory notes, which help put the writing in context.