The Life and Times of the Watters Family

Crawling Out From Under My Rock

It’s been a while since I’ve posted. Things have been incredibly busy at work and at home. Wednesday and Thursday I was in Cupertino meeting with a client (that shall remain nameless). Now, I’m still at work at 10:00 p.m. working on a project that’s due tomorrow.

I’ve also been spending my “blog time” working on a redesign (incomplete, broken links) of this site. I’ll be reorganizing as well, but I won’t switch over for a couple of weeks. I’ve got to re-structure the whole site while still maintaining all the old links as well.

On the Atom v. RSS front, the brazen FUD seems to have died down somewhat. It’s probably been taken out of band and, because I’m just little ol’ me, I’m not privy to the discussions. Frankly, I don’t care which one emerges as the dominant format as long it adequately addresses the needs of the developers using it. So far, Atom seems to be leading in that category, but I certainly welcome any progress RSS 2.0 can make toward such a goal. Maybe the newly appointed advisory board can begin to make that a reality. I also have my suspicions about the “mystery invitee”, but I’ll keep them to myself for now.

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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.
read more…

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