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  • 1 min read

Discovering RSS feed URLs

Scoble bemoans the fact that folks aren't all using the XML Icon, and he cites Random Bytes.

(Lucky Random Bytes for being mentioned by Scoble. As they say in Holleywood, you can say anything you like about me, just as long as you spell my name right.)

While I have always felt that XML icons, RSS, RSS Versions, and other geeky things should be hidden from regular users , for this point in time, Scoble is right.

Until we have nice 1-click subscribing with user meaningful gestures rather than rss.xml, some elementary standardization around a name and an icon is highly desirable.

Now to add insult to injury, using Syndic8's RSS Feed Autodiscovery lookup for Random Bytes yielded 3 different rss URLs:

What is a user to do now?

  • 1 min read

Fair Use of Share-your-OPML?

One of the core goals of BlogBridge is to give a newbie a quick and delicious taste of the world of blogs. One of the very first steps of course is to decide what feeds to follow. Other blog readers come with an initial set of feeds built in or offer the user to pick from a bunch of them. (I hear that the authors of those readers, once they become at all well known, are inundated with bloggers who would like their particular blog to be in the built-in initial list.

Here's a different approach. In BlogBridge I want allow a user to use someone else's subscription list as a base for their own. In other words, give me a subscription list that matches Jon Udell's. Or like George Bush. Or like Eric Clapton.

There actually is a fairly straightforward way of doing this, using Dave Winer's Share Your OPML service. This is a place where willing participants can publish their own personal RSS reading list for others to look at and use.

From my reading of the fair use guidelines, this use of the OPML is legitimate and fair. Still, before proceeding I will verify that using the Share Your Opml SDK for this purpose does not violate the spirit or letter of the rules.

  • 1 min read

BlogBridge – Major progress!

This is getting interesting. In the last few weeks we've added a bunch of new features and we are now in the final stabilization of this release to make it suitable as a beta. While it is still way less featurefull than for example FeedDemon, we do have some very neat wrinkles that others don't have. Try it!

  • 1 min read

Words DO matter

I was scanning Jon Udell's blog and came across the following:

" Plog is a brand-new word that's even uglier (if possible) than blog. But the words don 't matter. What's striking is how the art of storytelling -- our instinctive human way of making sense of the world -- has woven itself into the science of information technology. "

Jon, I am going to take totally the wrong point from this paragraph, so appologies in advance.

What strikes me about the word "plog" is part of Michael Schrage's genius, which is coming up with just the right, clever, memorable word that will make me and you remember what he said. The idea may not even be particularly profound, but picking just the right word can make such a difference.

Sometimes it is in just remembering the point, but often it 's sneakier: it's to misdirect by association and totally confuse the issue. That's not the case here, but, I am always fascinated and amused to see just the right/wrong word make all the difference in the point being made.

  • 1 min read

Can we charge for an open source BlogBridge

As you know we are developing BlogBridge, "a new kind of blog reader." As you may know, BlogBridge is open source (see https://sourceforge.net/projects/blogbridge/.)

With all our recent progress, I feel that pretty soon BlogBridge will be functional enough that it will actually be usable , and suitable for a beta. And after a successful beta, we plan to start charging for it, in some form or another.

The $64,000 question is: " How does it make sense to charge for a product, when all the source code is available for anyone to download for free?" Our theory right now, is that people who would be willing to pay for an application like this, are paying not just for the source code, but it's maintenance, enhancement, packaging, and evolution. And more likely than not, most of those people wouldn't know what to do with the source code, how to build and run it or deal with problems.

So the bet is that there will not be significant canibalization , at least initially. Over time, depending on how things go, it might make sense to have a different, non-open-source, commercial version of BlogBridge.

  • 1 min read

Moving from Radio to Movable Type

I've seen some discussion on the issues related to changing blog infrastructure from one system to another. In my case, I moved from Radio to Movable Type.

My experience is that is was pretty easy to move the data (no data lock in) but the problem was the urls. Even if you take steps to make sure that the root url doesn't change, the individual post and archive urls will probably change which means that anyone linked to your blog before will stay linked to your old blog and so you will experience a disruption in your traffic.

  • 1 min read

Still can learn more,,,

If you are doing Java programming, check out Hardcore Java by Robert Simmon Jr. It's a idiosyncratic tour through many very interesting advanced Java topics.

My wife who sees another Java book sprout on my table every week wonders why it's taking me so long to learn this "Java" thing 🙂

  • 1 min read

BlogBridge – coming along!

It's been quiet but we've been busy. We are getting ready to put up a major new revision of BlogBridge with goodies such as drag and drop of Channels, Collapse/Expand groups of articles, based on age, Next Unread processing, a bunch of new User Preferences. Also we are doing a bit of a reorganization of this site. The 'Tasks' page has become a nuisance to maintain and really not that useful, so it's gone. And the Specs page is being totally revised to be more useful. Expect lots of additions to the Specs page as we move into another phase of development.

Keep those cards and letters coming in!