FeedHenry

A handy development post on how Internet Explorer handles right-to-left languages in RSS.

Geek News Central has a short list of do’s and don’ts for RSS Syndication. Some are good though the “opt-in” statement needs to be clarified as requiring 50 million opt-ins is going to hurt the network effect of an aggregation and syndication system. By all means, allow opt-out and respect robots.txt and licenses but lets not kill off the network effect of syndication by thinking in old world terms of ownership.

I’m sure the first thought Dave had when he was born was the genesis of RSS. It had to be, nothing as simple as RSS could be created in less years. It takes hard work and thought to create simplicity.

So, happy birthday Dave Winer, father of RSS.

(Geek-out over.)

Microsoft are showing some understanding of what feeds can do in an update to their Windows Live Spaces site. Not only providing feeds of items, like blog post and photos, they are also providing feeds of available feeds. Feeds of categories, feeds of users etc.

This is key to the future of feeds. Making any resource available on a website available through a feed.

Yahoo! is pushing the xhtml:meta namespace for controlling how feeds are reaped by their robot. Unfortunately Google has their own and Bloglines has a separate scheme.

Microformats embedded in RSS feeds are now being handled by a beta of NetNewsWire. With big sites such as LinkedIn producing RSS and using microformats the possibilities are good.

Amazon announced two RSS feeds today, one very useful and the other possibly not quite so useful. The useful one is Customer Reviews by Author. So if Joe made 50 reviews then you can get an RSS feed of all his reviews. It would be even better if Amazon provided RSS feeds of Product Reviews but you can flip the other one around and work that way.

This is a good introduction to RSS for developers. Goes over the format, its uses and its future.

Unlike Google we should be listening to HTTP codes properly e.g. the 410 telling the requester that the feed is gone.