Tag Archives: opml

There is a lot of Mangled RSS out their!

opml, RSS, Software, , ,

Dealing with RSS, OPML and the Extensible Markup Language (XML) at the development front has been very straight forward when working with sites that have 90% of their XML valid! But at this point I am very worried in our deployment of Blubrry.com of the 10% of sites that have completely jacked up RSS feeds.

As locked down as the RSS specification is a lot of people are really butchering there feeds, and it has me worried. You try to think of all the stupid things people will do with their feeds and then how to counter it with code so that it does not introduce some bug on our end.

Angelo the lead developer at RawVoice asked me tonight he said how strict do we want to be on RSS Feed Validation, and as much as I wanted to say that only sites that have Valid RSS feeds would be able to play on Blubrry. I knew that was highly unrealistic. But I told him to throw a series of flags in the database that would alert us to mangled RSS feeds. I am sure some mangled feed will cause us issues I guess thats just a sad fact of doing business on line in a non perfect world. [Nick Bradbury]

Apple is hiring a RSS Engineer!

Apple, opml, RSS, ,

Maybe Apple has been reading the blogs and figured out that they have blown it in some of their recent product roll outs, and figured out maybe they need someone that has some experience in RSS. Well I hope they get somebody really good so they can clean up some of the mess they have created, and make their feeds cross platform compatible. [Help Wanted] [Apple and RSS] [Apple cheating on RSS Standard]

Full Feed Policy

Media, opml, Podcast, RSS, , ,

I like many others of having a policy of only subscribing to RSS feeds if they are the full feed. If the feed is partial it gets removed from my read list. I also have a sort policy that if a site is not generally updated daily I put them in a secondary list which I review every other day. I have also developed a podcaster policy as well, I listen to all shows I am subscribed to but only visit the site if they have have content beyond their shows. Their are some great podcast out their but their sites and their content is pretty bad.

I don’t see why people go to the trouble of having a great podcast and yet don’t take a couple of hours and make some unique templates or hire someone to make them a nice site design. I would think also that if a podcaster has a good following of listeners it would only make sense that they would follow content on their websites as well yet many podcasters put up absolutely horrendous show notes. It only takes me a couple of times listening to a show and then not getting any show notes before I unsubscribe. I have sent notes to podcasters explaining this point but many seem to think they are above show notes.

In a way the articles I talk about in the podcast are the same ones I would normally right about and I would never write about a story and not link to it for me the logic does not make sense.

Take my RSS Feeds

Media, opml, RSS, ,

Where is the web headed today. From the perspective of a venture capitalist you would would think that if your company is not being innovative in creating segmented content, allowing it to be freely distributed and at the same time giving people a way to rank that information you may want to reconsider your objectives and goals of any projects you working on.

I am pretty happy that we cover at least 2 of the 3 items on the list on our project at podcasternews.com and will be looking at how we can make sure we have the third item covered. The question I have to ask myself how much of a strain will I put on the developers to make it happen. [avc.blogs.com]

Did Microsoft score a touchdown and bet the farm at the same time today!

Microsoft, opml, RSS, ,

I has a very full day at work, thus I was only able to play on Microsoft Live on dial up for about 20 minutes. Tonight I have had a second look while on broadband. First thing you still have to use that stupid Net Passport to login. I don’t know why I hate it so much but I do. Second the site does not work yet in Firefox which is pretty bad. It is obvious that Microsoft rushed to get this thing ready. Third adding my podcast page resulted in a player button showing up and I was able to play my podcast from the page. Thats good they know what and enclosure is.

The commentary within the community continues to grow. Personally I like my desktop applications, and have no desire to move that functionality online especially when it will likely cost me more money down the road. One thing for sure is that Microsoft is adopting RSS and OPML in a big way but I could not find an RSS button on the site. Live.com is RSS and OPML aware but most novice users will never know it. The site is like a plain car with no options the site is a bit ugly and buggy at the moment, so we will see what they do to the site in the months ahead.