The Life and Times of the Watters Family

Cam’s New Blog

Just a quick heads up. I (Cam) launched a new blog, which I’m calling Cameron Avenue (you’ll see why when you get there) over at cameronwatters.com. It’s mostly focused around technology and consists largely of quotes/links to stuff other places. I’m looking to write something original around once a week, but none of it will be family-ish stuff. It’ll mostly be about the business of software and technology with some politics and religion thrown in if/when I run out of other stuff to say.

At Least, I Thought I Agreed With Dave

After a somewhat discouraging series of posts last year between April and June, there’s kind of been a moratorium on commentary about the greater weblog/syndication world. I found that nothing productive really came out of it, and I wasn’t really invested enough to continue to post about the topic. I tried it, and it was interesting for a while, but I’ve moved on.

I still read Scripting News nearly every day and I still think Dave Winer is a bit of a nutjob a fair bit of the time. Sometimes I agree with him, but I rarely feel strongly about it when I do. Usually it’s about something run-of-the-mill or otherwise meaningless. Today, however, I found myself actually rooting for Dave, which, to be honest, felt a little, well, dirty (j/k).

As I write this, though, the inspiration for my short step out of character isn’t posted on the site any longer and appears to have been replaced by this bland little item. Apparently, Dave was semi-spurned by IDG, the organizer of the Syndicate conference for posting the details of his interactions with them regarding his finding a personal sponsor for his appearance. In particular, I’m betting they didn’t like the criticism he leveled after they told him he couldn’t have a personal sponsor. He had written a very honest, but fair response to their attempt to censor his weblog by threatening his ability to speak if he didn’t stop posting the details. He said, thanks, but no thanks.

Hey, I don’t agree with the guy very often, but I sure appreciated what appeared to be his stand on this issue. I hope he re-posts it soon.

UPDATE:

Looks like I spoke too soon (about his taking it down). He just moved it off the front page. It’s posted at the bottom of this entry at reallysimplesyndication.com.

UPDATE:

BTW, the moratorium is back on. Also, Dave is back to being his good ol’ nutty self again today.

Post-By-Mail Wrapping Test

This is simply a test message to test the hack I added wp-mail.php to address the unnecessary hard text-wrapping that it does to things posted by e-mail. It’s pretty lame that I’ve got to do this, but oh well.

It should, however, maintain paragraphs correctly, so I’ve protected that function.

Here goes nothing!

UPDATE:

Woohoo! Got it working now. I should now be able to post from my e-mail without any stupid wrapping issues.

Yet Another Test Message

This is yet another test of the mail functionality. I’m trying to implement category functionality. Hopefully this works. I’m sick of all of my posts ending up in “Uncategorized”.

UPDATE:

So I’ve got categories working now. The problem is, when I post via e-mail it’s hard-wrapping lines un-necessarily, which makes the posts look funny on the website. Now I’ve got to go in and fix that.

Yet Another Test

Testing a new cron job…should update posts by mail every 5 mintues now…

Speaking of the WordPress post-by-email support (see yesterday’s post), this is apparently an area of WordPress that is fertile ground for enhancement. Currently (I’m using WP 1.5 beta nightly builds), there doesn’t appear to be any support for multiple or per-post categories. All items submitted via e-mail are assigned the administrator as an author. Author could be determined by looking at the e-mail address in the from box. If the e-mail matches a current user, publish it. If not, put it in “draft” mode. Author could also be set in the body/subject of the message.

Also, the submission is completely un-authenticated. It would seem like it should be possible to incorporate some sort of public/private key encryption (optionally) to allow people to add some security to the process.

Maybe if I just implemented these things and submitted a patch, they’d accept it. Or maybe not. It’s worth a shot.

Talk About Turnover!

As I watch the apparent disintegration of the RSS Advisory Board (now down to Adam Curry and Rogers Cadenhead), frankly, I’m a little sad.

Despite his frequently distasteful style, Dave’s numerous tangible contributions to the syndication space have been enormous. It would be a shame for any of them to lose the momentum they currently enjoy. Hopefully, they’ll get the board vacancies filled by a group of people that are committed to the success and growth of the RSS 2.0 format.

Andrew Grumet Gets "Funky" With RSS And ATOM

In his post Embedding Atom elements in your RSS 2.0 feed, Andrew Grumet explores the value of using ATOM elements, particularly <atom:author>, to replace core RSS 2.0 elements.

I certainly applaud the effort. Anything that makes RSS 2.0 more useful is great as far as I’m concerned. What’s odd to me is the fact that he appears to get a pass WRT “funkiness” from Dave Winer.

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What Should Be Audio Blogged?

Well, since I’ve gone to the effort to list the advantages of text over audio for traditional blogging, I should probably spend some time exploring what audio blogs could be used for that would add something useful to the blogosphere.
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Advantages of Text Blogs Over Audio Blogging

Dave Winer has begun an experiment in audio weblogging. Various other experiments in Audio Blogging have been tried and I haven’t liked a single one. Now that Dave has seemingly revived this movement, I figure it’s worth commenting on.
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Don’t Throw The Baby Out With The Bathwater

Dave Winer comments on a recent Wired article that raises concerns about the scalability issues associated with aggregators polling RSS/ATOM feeds.

The article points out the most significant current issues (poorly written aggregators & questionable feed content strategies), but even fixing those items won’t solve the problem for long. While some are rightly exploring the concept of a new, distributed model for subscriptions, others are suggesting that aggregators simply enforce hard restrictions on polling intervals. Doing so would be an incredibly unfortunate and short-sighted approach as it would unnecessarily limit a number potential, albeit non-traditional, uses for RSS/ATOM.
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Developers _Are_ Users

Adam Curry: “I want to be creating and distributing content to everybody in the simpelest way possible. Blogger, MoveableType and Typepad users surely want the same.”

I’m a user. I’m also a developer. In fact, as a developer, I’m a user. As a developer, it is important to me that I chose formats that will scale to my needs. RSS 2.0 is simple, and good for doing a great many things, particularly syndicating weblog (or similar) content. However, “syndication” feeds and aggregators are becoming useful for other types of information as well. Apple and Amazon have touched on the edges of this, but so much more is actually possible.
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Enter The RSS Ninja

Adam Curry: “[Google] is betting its future and shareholders money with a plan has historically been proven to fail. That is sad.”

Adam is referring, here, to Googles support for ATOM. There are so many things wrong with this, that I’m not entirely sure where to begin.
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Play Along At Home

Via Tim Bray: “…Grab the nearest book, open it to page 23, find the 5th sentence, and post its text along with these instructions. I would add to the instructions: point back to where you got the idea so that we can follow the threads.”

From The New Hacker’s Dictionary, Third Edition: “The thought of uttering something that logically ought to be an affirmative knowing it will be misparsed as a negative tends to disturb them.”

This is like a bad blog chain letter…

Do Formats Really Matter That Much?

In the below entry, I expresse concern regarding Dave Winer’s belief that it should be illegal for Google to demonstrate a preference for a given data format. As I’ve thought about this, it has become clearer to me just how wrong-headed such a belief is. Antitrust considerations aside, I’m not sure I believe that it is even fundamentally wrong for Google to demonstrate a preference for a particular format per se.
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The Tin-Foil Hat Club Strikes Again

Dave Winer:“I never in a million years thought Google would stoop this low, even Microsoft on its worst day never played this dirty.”

It appears that Google is fast becoming the “Evil Corporate Giant” de jour. And with Dave leading the “Shoot First, Ask Questions Later” crowd, it is not surprising to see so much invective about the alleged slight to RSS 2.0.
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Feeds To Which I Would Like To Subscribe

I would absolutely LOVE it if I could subscribe to RSS or Atom feeds containing the following information:

- Newspaper Classifieds (by category)
- Employment Postings (from Monster, Hot Jobs, Microsoft, etc.)
- Real Estate Listings (customized by various parameters a la Apple’s iTMS feeds)
- Stock Quotes (one feed per symbol)
- Sports Box Scores (by team, by league, by sport)
- Athletes (Baseball/Football players; useful for those of us playing fantasy sports)

I’d volunteer my time to any company with meaningful content in any of the above areas stored in a useful form (no page-scraping) in order to provide/create and maintain the scripts/applications to generate such feeds.

Beyond that, though, what can be done to push syndication outside of the traditional news/blog boundaries to allow more data to be usefully centralized using aggregators, etc?