Paying Attention to the APML Format
I spotted a new XML button on a blog yesterday: The button links to an APML file that describes a person's interests, in an XML dialect suitable for consumption by software. APML, which stands for Attention Profiling Markup Language, has a short-on-detail spec that wasn't easy to figure out. There's an example and a schema, but no description of each APML element and how it can be used. The web applications Engagd and Dandelife support APML, so I joined them to see how they use APML to describe my interests. ... read more
Make Google Happy: Weed Out Duplicate Content
I spend a lot of time these days trying to master search engine optimization, the practice of making Google's great and terrible algorithm give you the love you never received from your emotionally closed off, impossible to please father1. A commercial venture like Wargames.Com, which I'm running as a bootstrap with no advertising budget, would be utterly hopeless without search traffic. Towards this end, I've created a sitemap for each of my sites -- an XML file that tells Google and other search engines where ... read more
Chris Finke Joins RSS Advisory Board
Chris Finke, a senior engineer at Netscape, has joined the RSS Advisory Board. Finke's a Netscape.Com and Netscape 9 browser developer as well as the creator of the Mozilla Firefox extensions RSS Ticker and OPML Support. Netscape played a formative role in the development of RSS, publishing the first RSS specification in 1999 and spurring adoption by encouraging publishers to create feeds for the first aggregator -- the recently relaunched My.Netscape. Netscape published RSS 0.90, the common ancestor of both RSS ... read more
Running for Chair of the RSS Advisory Board
I announced today that I'm interested in continuing for the next two-year term as chair of the RSS Advisory Board, the group that publishes the RSS 2.0 specification and helps foster interop on issues such as RSS autodiscovery and the common feed icon. The board went public one year ago with eight new members, publishing our charter and conducting all votes on a public mailing list. Previously, we operated in private and were accorded little credibility -- when I joined the board in 2004 at Dave Winer's ... read more
Atom and RSS Go Together Like Peanut Butter and Bananas
When Randy Charles Morin and I were trying to wrap up the RSS Autodiscovery specification, we removed references to Atom to avoid discord. Telling Atom publishers how to implement autodiscovery while they're working on their own spec seemed like a good way to spark a war between syndication formats worse than "Dick York vs. Dick Sargent" or "let the rabbit eat Trix." Naturally, our decision angered Atom developers. Sam Ruby: Push the reset button, and get a better attitude. I thought I had the right ... read more
Jason Douglas Joins RSS Advisory Board
Jason Douglas, the project lead on the RSS Platform at Yahoo and the cocreator of Channel Definition Format, has joined the RSS Advisory Board. The board now has members from Google, Microsoft and Yahoo. If we can find a member from Apple's RSS team, we'll be in an even better position to help the big companies and enterpreneurial companies like FeedBurner and Six Apart work together to promote RSS interop and resolve some incompatibilities between different software that supports syndication. ... read more
A note on the home page of Planet Apache: Planet Apache provides its aggregated feeds in RSS 2.0, RSS 1.0 and RSS 0.9, and its blogroll in FOAF and OPML (the most horrific abuse of XML known to man). RSS 2.0 Specification ... read more
