Ted Leung on the air
Ted Leung on the air: Open Source, Java, Python, and ...
Ted Leung on the air: Open Source, Java, Python, and ...
Tue, 01 Jul 2003
Mark declares himself persona non-grata
Today Mark Pilgrim took himself off the blogosphere. I am pretty sure that's not what he intended to do, but the practical effect is the same. Mark declared his support for the-project-currently-named-echo by removing all the namespaced items from his feeds, and replacing the text of the posts with short excerpts. So when FeedDemon grabbed his feed today, I saw almost nothing. I undestand the technical reason for what he did, but practically he just made it much harder for me to follow his blog.
My aggregator is my portal to the blogosphere. If you disembowel your feed, you remove yourself from the world. Maybe Mark could have waited until there was actual an Echo serialization format before doing this.
[11:48] |
[computers/internet/weblogs] |
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4 Comments |
Ted,
Yeah, I was amused by this. I see his items just fine in BottomFeeder, but this sort of antic is one of the reasons for my skepticism towards the whole effort. I'll support this format in BottomFeeder (assuming it ever comes to fruition) - but I likely won't be happy about it
Posted by James Robertson at Tue Jul 1 12:01:01 2003
Posted by James Robertson at Tue Jul 1 12:01:01 2003
Wonderful! As far as I'm concerned, an RSS feed should contain METAdata - only. A description should contain description of content, not the content itself.
An RSS reader should display that description, or summary to me, and then let me decide whether I want to read the content in the first place (in one of my many browsers, NOT an RSS reader). An RSS feed that contains the content itself is just a waste of bandwidth, both when I do want to read it (I'll load it in a browser) and when I don't want to read it (my RSS reader has been forced to download what I'm not interested in).
RSS feeds that contain too much content (really large pieces of HTML that I won't read in my RSS reader anyway) will tend to get removed from my list of subscriptions. So, as far as I'm concerned, Mark has done the very opposite of "taking himself off the blogoshere"; instead he's increased the chance of his blog posts being actually read - not as a feed but as real content, with a feed pointing to it with just the right amount of metadata. Thanks, Mark!
Posted by Marjolein Katsma at Wed Jul 2 05:37:49 2003
An RSS reader should display that description, or summary to me, and then let me decide whether I want to read the content in the first place (in one of my many browsers, NOT an RSS reader). An RSS feed that contains the content itself is just a waste of bandwidth, both when I do want to read it (I'll load it in a browser) and when I don't want to read it (my RSS reader has been forced to download what I'm not interested in).
RSS feeds that contain too much content (really large pieces of HTML that I won't read in my RSS reader anyway) will tend to get removed from my list of subscriptions. So, as far as I'm concerned, Mark has done the very opposite of "taking himself off the blogoshere"; instead he's increased the chance of his blog posts being actually read - not as a feed but as real content, with a feed pointing to it with just the right amount of metadata. Thanks, Mark!
Posted by Marjolein Katsma at Wed Jul 2 05:37:49 2003
Marjolein,
I guess this is why we're doomed to neverending wars over syndication formats. What I want is exactly the opposite of what you want. I don't want to have to open a separate browser to read the content.
Posted by Ted Leung at Wed Jul 2 11:38:39 2003
I guess this is why we're doomed to neverending wars over syndication formats. What I want is exactly the opposite of what you want. I don't want to have to open a separate browser to read the content.
Posted by Ted Leung at Wed Jul 2 11:38:39 2003
Ted,
Yes, I'm aware that what I (and others) want is the exact opposite of what you (and others) want.
No need for a war over that, let alone a never-ending war. If you want to publish content, and syndicate it, and want it to be read, simply provide two formats: one with content included, and another with just descriptions of content. Everybody happy.
Let's not forget though that not all RSS feeds point to (can point to) web-page content in the form of (X)HTML. Any decent syndication format should allow for links to other types of content, such as CVS changes, new software downloads or patches, new attachments to bug reports, stock values, or whatever has changed and is available somehow (via some protocol, not necessarily via HTTP) on the Internet - as long as you can make up a URL (or URI) to point to the changed resource. RSS is not just for blogs.
Posted by Marjolein Katsma at Fri Jul 4 04:48:17 2003
Yes, I'm aware that what I (and others) want is the exact opposite of what you (and others) want.
No need for a war over that, let alone a never-ending war. If you want to publish content, and syndicate it, and want it to be read, simply provide two formats: one with content included, and another with just descriptions of content. Everybody happy.
Let's not forget though that not all RSS feeds point to (can point to) web-page content in the form of (X)HTML. Any decent syndication format should allow for links to other types of content, such as CVS changes, new software downloads or patches, new attachments to bug reports, stock values, or whatever has changed and is available somehow (via some protocol, not necessarily via HTTP) on the Internet - as long as you can make up a URL (or URI) to point to the changed resource. RSS is not just for blogs.
Posted by Marjolein Katsma at Fri Jul 4 04:48:17 2003
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