I've just listened to a podcast of David Heinemeier Hansson's keynote at RailsConf 2007 (which actually took place back in May of this year). David describes the changes and new features being introduced into Rails 2.0. Firstly, he is at pains to point out that Rails 2.0 will not represent a radical change, or a complete re-write. Also, 95% of what will constitute Rails 2.0's new features are already available in the bleeding edge EdgeRails and are being actively used. [continues...]
A couple of years ago, Dave Winer posted an article in which he outlined the notion of a _ River of News_, describing the use of an RSS aggregator to simply scroll through the latest new items from many sources (or categories), all merged together in one 'stream'. I don't tend to use my RSS reader (the excellent NetNewsWire) in this way, preferring to browse particular sources as the fancy takes me. [continues...]
Brian alerted me to a post by Dave Winer, called Facebook is opening up. It's true! Some Facebook content is now easily available as RSS feeds: for example a feed of items which have been posted by my 'friends'. Note how you don't need to be logged in to Facebook (or have an account for that matter) to use this. Dave reports that, in fact, these feeds have been available for some time. [continues...]
Several Java packages work with RSS. Some can read certain formats, while others can write them as well. The class this article features reads all known RSS formats and outputs the converted data in the 2.0 format. Vlad Patryshev on DevX.com This looks useful - I haven't tried this out yet but I probably will in the near future. At the very least it could be deployed to sit between remote content and a local presentation layer, allowing the presentation technology to concern itself with a single format. [continues...]
"A demo publishing system launched Friday by a popular programmer and blogger merges two of this season's hottest tech fads -- RSS news syndication and BitTorrent file sharing -- to create a cheap publishing system for what its author calls "big media objects." The hybrid system is meant to eliminate both the publisher's need for fat bandwidth, and the consumer's need to wait through a grueling download." Wired News [continues...]
I've been asked to introduce blogging to my place of work for a team of myself and six colleagues. Our activities are wide-ranging within the sphere of web-based service delivery and development, so the team might be described as fairly loosely-coupled. The idea is that blogging will be a potential way of improving understanding of what colleagues are focussed on at any one time. The discussion about how to implement this was interesting, and the following was decided: [continues...]
Easy News Topics (ENT) is a new specification for defining topic meta-data in RSS2.0 news feeds. As the authors explain: The goals of ENT are to: be as simple to implement as possible represent topics sufficiently that they be useful in enabling smart aggregators (e.g. filtering, recombining feeds, etc...) allow, via linking, use of more powerful and flexible standards where appropriate I have implemented some of the ENT specification into a new RSS2. [continues...]