Lance's TextBox

US Congress: The single-most API needy organization in the world

Who is it? Who is starving for an API or a set of dynamic feeds? Why, the United States Congress, of course!

Think about it...do you know what your state senators did last summer? Or your house representative? You might know their positions on the big issues - but what about the ones that don't get big attention in the press? Are they just a pawn voting down the party lines? Are they hiding something?  Are they acting contrary to how they campaigned?  Are they ignoring the opinions of their constituents and voting with their wallet?  Are they lying to the people?

You can't even find their votes on the officials' own websites (big shocker there, right?)! If you want to find this information now, you can go to the US Senate or US House pages and painstakingly search, or there there are a few organizations that also provide records, but none of them in a very usable format IMO.

The vote-smart website is great. My question is - why don't they have some open API that software and website developers can use to retrieve voting records programmatically? If they did - what a great way to get the information out there (right now, as far as I know the only way to find this stuff is to dig for it at one of a handful of websites) and get the vote-smart name and message out there. Look at what is happening on the web right now with all the mashups and grass roots projects taking shape. What if that kind of web 2.0-ish mashed up grass roots mentality focused on our political system? It could be made very easy for people to stay informed on how their representatives are voting, who they are being lobbied by, who is sponsoring mega resolutions with all sorts of hidden agendas and piggy-backing tidbits being hidden from the people.

Vote-Smart does have an RSS feed, and that is great. That single feed is informational but nothing like it could be. I'd love to see dynamic feeds for each congress-person (ie http://www.vote-smart.org/rss/votingrecord.php?member=MyCongressmansName) and each vote. Also the feeds could make use of syndication extensions to provide more modular information that can be easily parsed out by software developers instead of being limited in its use to being read by a human in a feed reader. For example besides just a description element containing all the information in html format - add a "vs" (vote-smart") namespace prefix to the feed and use things like Bill Sponsor, H.R.####, S.#, and numberofyeavotes, etc.

Technorati : US Congress API, congress, feeds, house, politics, rss, senate, vote-smart, voting

posted @ Tuesday, August 29, 2006 9:44 AM | Feedback (3) |

Flickr Geotagging

Tim pointed out to me yesterday that Flickr was adding some official support for geotagging. In the past, Flickr members just used regular Flickr tags to geocode their photos (ie, tags like lat:36.45 and long:-79.34). Now Flickr will let you go to the Organize page's "Map" tab and literally drag and drop your photos onto a map to geotag them. This is very cool, IMHO.

What they've not done yet is make this information available via their API, but they say that functionality is coming soon. So what they have done so far is just the first step. As soon as their API provides access to this information it will open up a big beautiful door. I also hope they go ahead and include these geotags in the RSS feeds that they already offer.

Update:  It didn't take long for the API changes to be made public.

Technorati : georss flickr geotagging ydn

posted @ Tuesday, August 29, 2006 9:29 AM | Feedback (0) |

Why should apps take advantage of syndication extensions?

I made some comments about how Feed Crier should understand syndication extensions. In that post, Adam Kalsey (doesn't he kinda look like a younger version of John Travolta in that photo on his blog?) was kind enough to comment:

 

 

> Maybe Adam Kalsey will make Feed Crier understand
>some of the common syndication extensions

Perhaps, but I'm not convinced of their value to Feed Crier. Right now I'm just >trying to make it the best way to get instant update notifications. As I watch how it's used, that may evolve over time. But right now, I don't see Feed Crier being a general-purpose feed reader, and I'm not sure that anyone would want to consume media (podcasts, enclosures, whatever) using an IM client.

This makes total sense. Feed Crier is young, simple, and straight-forward. I guess I picked on Feed Crier a little bit, when my statement really applies to all developers who are working with feeds. The value is that your application will be smarter and more dynamic. For example, if I am subscribed to a feed that gives me a location of some event, that feed probably uses a geocoding standard like georss. If applications like Feed Crier understand georss, they can go ahead and provide me with a map or link to a map so that I can see the location. In the future, when I get this IM on my mobile device it can go ahead and start programming my driving directions. ;)

By the way - think how much more useful some of the Craigslist feeds would be if they used georss. Same thing for the Google Calendar event entries (Google already has a geocoding api). I've already mentioned the need for extensions in many of the Yahoo feeds. Amazon has tons of web services, but relatively few RSS/atom feeds (only those for basic product searches) which . Fortunately their spectacular APIs give us the ability to create all kinds of useful applications and feeds. RSSBus' AmazonOps includes operations for cart management, wish/registry list searches, generic searches that include very detailed information like product rewiews and price, specific category searches, etc.

Technorati : atom, feed crier, rss, rssbus

posted @ Friday, August 25, 2006 12:19 PM | Feedback (0) |

Technorati struggling to keep up with the new A list.

The good news is, I'm no longer the 1,420,445th ranked blog at Technorati.

Of course, the bad news is, Technorati obviously did not get the memo.

But...since I joined the A-list (contribute to the cause: link to me, subscribe to me), and Technorati has discovered that I haven't actually been missing for the last 6 months, my Technorati ranking has moved up from 1,420,445 to 237,441. Woohoo! Party over here!

James, I'll join you in that beer. Of course, in reality this ranking means nothing. Just ask Brian, he knows. But...its all in good fun, right?

Technorati : A list, A-list, A-listers, blogging, technorati rank

posted @ Friday, August 25, 2006 9:02 AM | Feedback (1) |

Flickr urls changed for the worse

Lets say you wanted to get the RSS feed for a particular Flickr Group called "MyGroup". All you had to do to know the URL for this feed was:

"http://www.flickr.com/groups/" + MyGroup + "/pool/feed/?format=rss_200"

Easy as pie. No matter the group name, it was always very easy to find the URL for its feed.

No longer. Now, the urls look like this:

http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/groups_pool.gne?id=27144182@N00&format=rss_200 (the format parameter can also be atom_03).

On top of the fact that the URLs have changed, they are not even giving a 302 redirect for the old URLs. Just a 404 Not Found.

Ugh. I'm not sure if this is part of improving the API or not. Don't get me wrong, the Flickr API is great...but this is one step in the wrong direction if you ask me.

Technorati : flickr, ydn

posted @ Friday, August 25, 2006 7:11 AM | Feedback (0) |

Upcoming.org RSSBus Ops

As I've mentioned a couple times in the past, Upcoming.org already provides a useful set of RSS feeds. On top of this, they also have a great REST API. Here's a list of "cool third-party applications" that use the Upcoming.org api.

Their RSS feeds are useful only if I know the metro code. For Raleigh, NC it is 99. So the full feed URL is http://upcoming.org/syndicate/v2/metro/99. It would be nice if I could easily piece together this URL without knowing anything other than my state and city, ie: http://upcoming.org/syndicate/v2/nc/raleigh/. But I can't. Another alternative would be if I could put the zip code in the URL and get the feed I want. But I can't.

So...I used their API, along with RSSBus, to create a set of dynamic RSS feeds for Upcoming.org events. I can now control the results of an event search by using the querystring in the URL. Now, in my local RSSBus installation, I can just use the following URL to get a list of events in my zip code:

http://localhost:1110/admin/call.rsb/upcomingSearch?location=27502

Of course I can change the value of the location querystring variable to any zip or street/metro/state combination that I like. Thanks to the Upcoming.org API, there are tons of other optional querystring arguments that I can pass along, like radius, state, venue, start and end dates, tags, and sort directives.

This upcomingSearch operation simply takes the querystring args, passes them on to Upcoming's "event.Search" method, parses the results and pushes them out as RSS. I've also implemented feeds for listing Metros, States, and Countries included in the Upcoming.org database. Later I'll put this up for download - until then email me if you want to try it.

Technorati : events, rssbus, upcoming.org

posted @ Wednesday, August 23, 2006 3:39 PM | Feedback (0) |

Great music at Lincoln Theatre this weekend

I just heard about an awesome show this weekend, Saturday August 26, at Lincoln Theatre in Raleigh. Far Too Jones is doing a reunion show. Glorydrive is opening for them. Two great bands.

Far Too Jones was one of my favorites back in the mid-late nineties, they were local but very well known around the whole southeast.  I remember that time they played at Alive After 5 and I got totally...I mean...uh...I had a blast.  :)

Technorati : music, north carolina, raleigh

posted @ Wednesday, August 23, 2006 8:47 AM | Feedback (0) |

Google Calendar to SalesForce Event

Charlie Wood has been working on synching his Google calendar data with his SalesForce.com account. This is an interesting project. Despite its early age, I thought this a good test for RSSBus. I decided to start with moving Google Calendar events to my SalesForce.com account.

First, RSSBus already has a set of GoogleOps, including a googleCalendarSearch operation that lets me get the details of calendar events in my Google account.

The next step: adding events to SalesForce.com. The currently shipping RSSBus does have an sforceQuery operation that gives me all the details of my SalesForce.com Events. It uses an sf namespace prefix so that each item in the feed contains details like the event recurrence, subject, description, starttime, etc. But...Sforce ops does not have any SalesForce.com Events operations for adding, deleting, and updating. So, before I could start I had to actually create a new operation to do this. That didn't take long thanks to the fact that the original author of the Sforce operations had already written all the core code and all I needed to do was lay on top the specific details of the SalesForce.com "Event" object. Just like that I had an sforceEvent operation that could retrieve, create, modify, and delete events in my SalesForce.com account. Easy breezey.

Off topic for just a second: Maybe Adam Kalsey will make Feed Crier understand some of the common syndication extensions like media, itunes, and itms. Or maybe he'll let his users customize their feeds to look for specific namespaces - like the sf namespace used by my Sforce operation feeds.

Ok, now back to the point. The final step was to create a script or template that could "glue" together my new sforceEvent operation with the existing googleCalendarSearch operation. First I call the googleCalendarSearch operation, and for each result I turn around and call the sforceEvent add operation. Voila, I'm done.

The new Sforce ops like Event will be in the next RSSBus update. If you can't wait, or if you'd like to see the GoogleToSalesForce template that I created - send me an email and I'll send the operation and template your way.

Technorati : feed crier, google calendar, rssbus, salesforce.com

posted @ Tuesday, August 22, 2006 5:39 PM | Feedback (1) |

Where are Tim, Jeff, John, and Joseph?

Jeff, John, Joseph, and Tim are going to South Carolina Code Camp 2.0. No word on whether Waldo is going or not. These guys want to do something nerdy along the way. Great idea, and I'm always up for nerdy games. :)

We can easily create one RSS feed that shows their real-time location (using Where's Tim), the weather they are experiencing (yahoo weather), local events happening in the area that day (upcoming.org), and area restaurants in case they are hungry (yahooLocal).

I don't know anything about geo-tagging photos though. Who does? Are there cameras that include geo data in the EXIF of the photos they take? If so, I know that Flickr has an API call that will let us retrieve that data. Alternatively, it looks like you can just manually add tags to your photos on Flickr like "geo:lat=47.620628" and "geo:long=-122.349329". Either way, we should be able to pretty easily make a map of the route with Flickr photos pinned to the map at the location where they were taken.

Now that would be cool and nerdy (...wait...can it be both?)!

update:  I took a look at the GeoTagging Flickr group.  The Atom and RSS feeds for the group use the dublin core subject element to show the tags, e.g.:

finland geotagged helsinki geolat60171665 geolon24937077

It would be nice if Flickr was smart enough to go ahead and use an extension (*cough* georss *cough*) to Atom/RSS to provide the geo tags in a more friendly manner.

Technorati : flickr, geotagging, rssbus, wheres timgeorss

posted @ Tuesday, August 22, 2006 12:33 PM | Feedback (0) |

Who's down with APP?

Who's down with APP? You down with APP? Yeah, you know me.

Atom Publishing Protocol is naughty, by nature. Its the bad boy on the street who knows it all and is intimidating all the other kids on syndication street. It has made friends with the Googlers, and with this new found friendship it plans to take over all the street corners in Webservicetonvillelandberg.

My question is - what services support APP? I read that Blogger is rolling out support for it - but what other services are?

Update:  Elias Torres is working on a tagline.  Oh and he also announced WP-APP: Atom Publisher Protocol for WordPress.

Technorati : atom app blogger

posted @ Tuesday, August 22, 2006 7:06 AM | Feedback (2) |

How do you track comments

How do you keep track of comments that you've left on various blogs? I tried Commentful (.com), but it doesn't seem to work for me....

Technorati : track comments

posted @ Monday, August 21, 2006 9:32 PM | Feedback (0) |

Music filled weekend

This weekend I had the pleasure of attending two concerts.

Saturday night was Patty Griffin at the NC Museum of Art in Raleigh. I'd never been to the amphitheater at the museum, but I'm happy to say that it was quite nice. Beer and wine was available, in fact you could a bottle of wine for $12. We took a blanket to sit in the lawn, but ended up moving right up front about 6 feet from the stage. It was a great show.

The NCMA site says about Patty:

A native New Englander, Patty Griffin made her reputation as one of America's most gifted and compelling singer-songwriters while living in Austin, Texas. The multiple-Grammy Award nominee has been covered by artists such as Emmylou Harris and the Dixie Chicks, and her own recordings are gems of storytelling, craftsmanship, and vocal beauty.

The show was very nice!  Needed more cowbell, though.  I wondered if the crowd might get a little rowdy when Wendy started singing what I think was the most fun song of the evening, "Too Much Vodka", about a wild night on the town. Then I realized that we were way out in the country, and sitting in a fold out chair in the middle of town is probably about as wild and crazy as a lot of those people get. But what do I know, I'm just a silly city boy.

Pictures from both concerts can be found here on my Flickr page.

Technorati : asheboro, band, concert, music, raleigh

posted @ Monday, August 21, 2006 2:39 PM | Feedback (0) |

Tim called me a bad word

Tim thinks I might be an RSSBus whore. :) It would have been much better if Time (as in the magazine) called me a whore though, then I would get a lot more exposure.  Of course, I don't really need it since I'm on the A-list now.

If you haven't checked out Where's Tim, you should. Its really cool and you can get real time track your whereabouts.

Truth is, I don't care what you call me, as long as you call me. Wait...that really does make more a whore doesn't it? Oopsey. 

But no, whore is not the right word...lets call me a web service hacking online RSSBus enthusiast.

Web service
Hacking
Online
Rssbus
Enthusiast

Hmm...if only this were an acronym...

Technorati : rssbus, where's tim

posted @ Monday, August 21, 2006 1:16 PM | Feedback (1) |

New service: receive feed alerts in your IM client

I've seen several people (Michael Arrington, Jeff Barr's links, Postbubble) talking about Feed Crier, a new service that lets you receive alerts in your IM client for when your favorite RSS feeds (craigslist, news, blogs) are updated. I'm surprised by this, because this is not some new mind blowing technology.

But ok. I think this service is fine and dandy.

Do I see someone using it to be alerted to Sam Ruby's latest Atom comments? Nope. No offense, Sam - I wouldn't use this to subscribe to alerts for anyones blog.

This is only useful to me for data feeds. Problem is, I don't think FeedCrier could understand syndication extensions.

Even so, I still wouldn't be a Feed Crier customer. Not because I don't see the value in it, but because I already have such functionality, and mine has more cowbell (like extension support).

Plus mine is free.

And it lives on my desktop.

And since it lives on my desktop I can also access private data like my bank account, my Paypal transactions, and my QuickBooks data.

Oh, and it can send more than just IMs. It can send pages, emails, and/or SMS messages.

Its easy enough for anyone to use, but extensible for you if you think you are a Mr. (or Miss) smarty pants.

Ok, ok, I'm talking about RSSBus (I know - what's new, right?). RSSBus can run on your desktop, and has operations that let you turn all kinds of data sources into rss feeds (like Quickbooks and my bank account like I mentioned before). Some of the demos that come installed show how you can create your own "feed crier":

• The EmailToInstantMessage demo consumes an RSS feed of emails in your POP3 mailbox. For each new email, it sends you an IM (ok, you got me - it only does Google Talk and other XMPP - Jabber, that is - IMs).
• NewFileNotification - monitors a feed of a directory listing. If a new file is dropped in the directory, an email goes out.
• PayPalToInstantMessage sends out an IM each time a new transaction occurs to my PayPal account.
• ...these are just a few of the many possibilities.
  

I personally receive emails everytime something comes posts to my bank account. I also receive an SMS message everytime I get an email matching certain criteria (I'm not telling you what criteria, but that would be a great prank on me wouldn't it?). As for regular news feed alerts, I monitor a dozen or so feeds and send myself emails when they update. This way I only need to check my regular feedreader once a day or so, but I can still stay informed by reading the alert emails (I am in my email pretty much all day long anyway).

Technorati : atom, feed, feed crier, rss, rssbus

posted @ Monday, August 21, 2006 12:06 PM | Feedback (4) |

News feeds vs Data feeds (and Yahoo)

Some feeds have no use, at least for the majority of us, outside of a regular feed reader like Bloglines or FeedDemon. I call these "news feeds" whether they are feeds of world news from CNN.com or Shelley Powers' personal blog postings. Perhaps "news feeds" is not the best name and I should change this habit. Now that I'm an a-lister I should be more precise, maybe. ;)

I don't like to just use the word "feeds" to describe them all, because I think feeds that have more granular data in them need to be distinguished. I call these "data feeds". Most feedreaders won't be able to parse the additional data in the feeds, so they should still have title and descriptions, etc. Some feed readers will (For example, Nick Brabury's FeedDemon supports Yahoo's media RSS extension).

Previously, I pointed out that many of the Yahoo RSS feeds could be much more useful to developers if they were "data feeds". These feeds are documented on the Yahoo Developer Network pages, but lets face it - the majority of them are NOT for developers at all. They're for feed readers. Jeremy Zawodny asked for more suggestions, so here's a quick rundown of the "big list" of Yahoo RSS feeds.

Of course some of these feeds, IMO, are supposed to be "news feeds". They're supposed to be read inside a feed reader and have no real use for developers. For example: Ask Yahoo!, Yahoo! Answers, Yahoo! Autos Custom - not to be confused with the Yahoo! Autos feed, Yahoo! Education, Yahoo! Health, Yahoo!Message Boards, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Next, Yahoo! Picks, etc). Jeesh...I'm tired of typing "Yahoo!" so I'm just going to stop now.

Some feeds could have use for developers, but their usefulness is limited by the content of the feed itself. For example:

• Autos - This only provides a title, description, and link to an auto ad. Think of all the possible applications that could be developed if with this feed if it contained xml elements for manufacturer, model, year, msrp, price, fuel economy, blue book value, location, enclosure (photos), etc.
• Classifieds - Same as above. The extension elements would need to be more generic, such as msrp, price, condition, location, etc.
• Buzz - This provides a title, description, and link. Why is this search term so hot? How hot is it, how many people have searched for it? How long has it been hot? What is the category of this search term (entertainment, technology, finance)?
• Finance - I already commented on this here. To me, this missing data is the biggest example.
• HotJobs - Gives me a title, description, and link. Location, salary, education level, required skills? None of that appears, but is all information that should be in the feed. Any consumer is going to want to see this information before clicking through to the full listing.
• Local - The Events feeds of Yahoo! Local are just pitiful. Fortunately, the Upcoming.org feeds are great, though. Worst of all, the Events feed is not even a valid RSS 2.0 feed. It uses a "cat" element, which doesn't exist in RSS 2.0 (it should be "category", of course). It provides an event date in the "date" element, which also doesn't exist in RSS 2.0. They do provide a "pubDate" element but its value is in the wrong format. The Yahoo! Local Restaurants feed is missing info like the location, price range, and cuisine category (Italian, Greek, Indian, Eastern NC BBQ :P).
• Movies - There are a variety of movie feeds available. Sadly, only a couple of them provide useful information using Yahoo's own media namespace (media category, credits, thumbnail, etc). Most, such as the new releases and coming soon feeds, don't provide anything other than title, description, and link. None of the feeds provide rating, genre, box office earnings, release date, dvd release date, or enclosures (trailers).
• Musicmatch - Just the name Musicmatch already has me turned off - but maybe I'm the only one who thought the MusicMatch player install single handedly reduced the value of my PC by half. A variety of feeds are available - all useless to developers. Strangely, a couple of these feeds use an mmrss namespace, but only for a product image. There is no useful information about the media itself. The Yahoo! Music feeds and the Yahoo Music Engine are much more useful.
• Shopping - So much more can be done here, but the full Shopping API takes care of that for developers.

Other Yahoo! feeds are useful for developers, but the data that they provide fits nicely inside existing syndication formats without any extensions (blo.gs, del.icio.us, 360 blogs and comment feeds, Directory, and Groups).

Also, some of the Yahoo! feeds are already very useful for developers because of their use of RSS module extensions to provide more information about each item (Flickr, Upcoming.org, Yahoo! Traffic Alerts, Yahoo! Music makes good use of the media and ymusic namespaces, Search and My Search, and Weather).

Feed developers:

• Run your feeds through a validator before publishing them!
• Please give your items a guid.
• Make your feed more useful by providing as much detail as you can. If bandwidth preservation is an issue, let your feed accept inputs (via querystring, for example) that let the consumer ask for a more verbose feed.
• If you're not sure how to create your feeds, or you want to find a way to do it quickly, take a look at RSSBus.

Technorati : API, ATOM, Feeds, RSS, Yahoo

posted @ Monday, August 21, 2006 10:29 AM | Feedback (2) |

Joining the A-list of bloggers

Since the A-list is open, I'm just going to go ahead and join. Please be sure to pass the word along and link to me. Then you may as well go ahead and subscribe to me so that you won't miss any of my gems.  For those who say an A-list doesn't exist, ok fine, I will start it right now. :) Hah.

Currently, Technorati says that my blog is ranked 1,420,445 out of 51,400,000. Thats pretty funny, especially since I don't believe that there are really 51,400,000 blogs (although there might be nearly that many spam-blogs!). But...it also says that my blog hasn't been updated in 185 days. In reality I've probably posted over 100 times in the past 185 days, many of those actually using technorati tags. Maybe technorati is not paying such great attention to the long tail after all.

No matter.

Technorati : a-list
rank
technorati

posted @ Friday, August 18, 2006 3:29 PM | Feedback (0) |

CBS to start streaming primetime

Amanda (Unboomed) brought this to my attention: BusinessWeek online article: "CBS to start streaming primetime shows".

I guarantee they won't be using RSS for this, and you'll have to logon to their website in order to watch. If thats true, I'll pass. Hello DVR.

posted @ Thursday, August 17, 2006 2:23 PM | Feedback (0) |

application/json

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4627.txt?number=4627

posted @ Thursday, August 17, 2006 8:42 AM | Feedback (1) |

Will Ferrell

I noticed that the other Lance Robinson posted about Will Ferrell. It seems that not only do we share the same name, and the some of the same technology interests, but we're also both Will Ferrell fans.

It seems that Will did a series of Apple commercials, none of which I'd seen until I saw them on YouTube.

"The other Lance" runs Hipbase.com, and produces the Hipbase podcast, about the Canadian band "The Tragically Hip".

posted @ Wednesday, August 16, 2006 10:26 AM | Feedback (0) |

Yahoo feeds could be more useful

Hey Jeremy Zawodny, since you are working so hard to improve the Yahoo! Developer Network, how about making feeds that are useful to software developers?

Right now, if you look at the big list of Yahoo! RSS feeds, you've got a lot of things that are interesting for me to subscribe to in my feed reader. For example, I can subscribe to someone's delicious links, or flickr photos, or the Yahoo! Finance feed for a particular company. All great for me to read when I have time. So whats my problem?

My problem is that these feeds are readable by humans only - not terribly full of data that machines can make use of. Most of the Yahoo feeds are news feeds only, and not data feeds. They could be both. This data is what will really make your feeds valuable.

Take for example, the Yahoo! Finance feeds. Company news for a ticker symbol? Fine, great. Very nice reading during my lunch break. How about the high, low, current price, and other valuable data in their own dedicated elements inside the feed so that it can be easily parsed out by feed readers or by my own software?

Here are a couple example of Yahoo! feeds that are on the right track:

The Yahoo! Weather feed. Not only does it contain human readable data that my feed reader can display to me for reading, but it also contains special yweather prefixed pieces of data that I can use. Now *that* is truly useful.

The Upcoming.org feeds (like this one for my area) are nice, because again they're using a RSS 2.0 modules to provide more valuable data, such as geo coordinates and the venue name and address, event name, time, etc.

Update:  Read more details about Yahoo's data feeds.

posted @ Wednesday, August 16, 2006 8:04 AM | Feedback (4) |

Tim Bray on Atom (from ETech)

IT Conversations show: "Atom As A Case Study". This is a recording of Tim Bray's talk at ETech 2006. Here are Tim's related links for this talk.
The biggest argument against RSS seems to be the lack of detail in the RSS 2.0 specification itself. Internet protocols and standards must be very precisely defined, and RSS certainly is not. There is something to be said for the simplicity of the RSS 2.0 specification though.

Recently I noticed that the RSS 2.0 spec says that the url attribute of the enclosure element "must be an http url".. I find it odd that the specification would enforce such a thing, which in my opinion it should not do. If I want to include enclosures in my feed, it should be accessible over whatever url scheme I want to expose it through (ftp://, file://, http://, etc.) - and support for the protocol which the enclosure is exposed through should be left up to the consuming software.

posted @ Wednesday, August 16, 2006 7:17 AM | Feedback (0) |

BlockRocker and geotagging

Scoble is pointing to Rod Edwards' BlockRocker.

It sounds interesting. Scoble didn't give it much of a detailed description, but it looks like BlockRocker lets you point to a Google map and then helps you geocode Flickr photos, blog posts, delicious bookmarks, and YouTube videos. I would look more, but I keep getting errors in Firefox. I'll check back later with IE7.

On the subject of geotagging, with a couple dozen lines of RSSBus script I've created a little web app that will pin-point geocoded feed locations on a Yahoo, Virtual Earth, or Google Earth map (I'll post more about this soon). So if you have a feed full of items with georss elements, you can view each of those coordinates on a map at the click of a button.

It would be neat to apply this kind of thing to a feed of items for sale on Ebay, or a feed of deliveries to be made, or a feed of customers in QuickBooks.

Technorati : georss, rssbus
Del.icio.us : rssbus

posted @ Tuesday, August 15, 2006 2:23 PM | Feedback (0) |

"Click the unclog button, or try again later"

The new 404 Tubes Not Found error.  Warning:  annoying audio awaits in this link.

posted @ Monday, August 14, 2006 8:48 AM | Feedback (0) |

"Enterprise Mashup" Links

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Hinchcliffe/?p=59 - The quest for enterprise mashup tools.

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/x-mashups.html?ca=dgr-lnxw16MashupChallenges - Mashups: The new breed of web app.

http://management.silicon.com/itdirector/0,39024673,39161297,00.htm - Why CIOs need to know about Ajax and mashups.

http://jhingran.typepad.com/anant_jhingrans_musings/2006/08/enterprise_info.html - IBM MAFIA:  Mashup Fabric for Intranet Applications.

http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2006/08/bastard_apps.php and
http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2006/02/the_truthiness.php - Nick Carr on “Bastard Apps” and their “truthiness”.

posted @ Friday, August 11, 2006 1:15 PM | Feedback (0) |

Turbo Delphi, Turbo C++, Turbo C#

posted @ Friday, August 11, 2006 11:25 AM | Feedback (0) |

Output any feed as JSON

In my last post, I explained how RSSBus can be instructed to output JSON instead of RSS items.

This means that RSSBus can be used to output ANY feeds items in JSON, simply by creating a 3 line RSSBus Script that calls the target feed.  As an example, here's how I can get the latest digg.com technology topics in JSON:

1.  Create a new RSSBus Script that looks like so:

<rsb:call op="http://digg.com/rss/containertechnology.xml">

  <rsb:push />

<rsb:call>

2.  Hit the url http://localhost:1110/digg.rsb?@json.  Now you'll get back a giant chunk of JSON describing all of the latest digg technology items.

3.  If you just want to get the most recent topic, add one more like to the RSSBus script so that it will stop after it pushes the first item:

<rsb:call op="http://digg.com/rss/containertechnology.xml">

  <rsb:push />

  <rsb:break />

<rsb:call>

posted @ Friday, August 11, 2006 10:32 AM | Feedback (0) |

RSSBus JSON output

Drew McLellan says that all web services and API's need to offer JSON output:  “if you want people to hack on your APIs, roll out JSON support“.  Several people made this same kind of comment in some of the feedback for the first beta of RSSBus.

Then, during the first beta, if I wanted to get a feed of MSFT and BORL stock quotes using the yahooStockQuotes operation that comes with RSSBus, I could call:

http://server:1110/admin/call.rsb/yahooStockQuotes?symbols=MSFT%20BORL.

Now, during the second beta, I can use the same url - but add the @json querystring argument:

http://server:1110/admin/call.rsb/yahooStockQuotes?symbols=MSFT%20BORL&@json.

The result that I get back is the same output items in JSON instead of RSS:

({"items":[{"yahoo:low":"24.20","yahoo:volume":"14113689\r","yahoo:date":"8\/11\/2006","rss:title":"MSFT: 24.2928","yahoo:symbol":"MSFT","yahoo:open":"24.34","yahoo:time":"12:34pm","yahoo:change":"-0.1672","yahoo:high":"24.43","yahoo:lastvalue":"24.2928"},{"yahoo:low":"5.17","yahoo:volume":"74404\r","yahoo:date":"8\/11\/2006","rss:title":"BORL: 5.20","yahoo:symbol":"BORL","yahoo:open":"5.34","yahoo:time":"12:34pm","yahoo:change":"-0.13","yahoo:high":"5.34","yahoo:lastvalue":"5.20"}]})

Neato! 

Also I could output this in HTML if I wanted - just by using @html instead of @json.  But thats not nearly as exciting to me.  :P

posted @ Friday, August 11, 2006 10:01 AM | Feedback (0) |

WS-* - aka WS-deathstar

posted @ Thursday, August 10, 2006 7:39 AM | Feedback (0) |

RSSBus and remote access

There are several things to consider when attempting to access RSSBus:

1. Operations are never directly accessible from outside of localhost. The only way to expose them to the outside is to create a script or template which makes calls to them.

2. Scripts and templates are not accessible from outside of localhost by default. In order to expose them you must use the rsb:allow keyword. For example:

<!-- the following allows a particular user. -->
<rsb:allow host="*" passwd="changeme" user="joe" />

<!-- the following allows access to everyone. -->
<rsb:allow host="*"/>

3. Specifically for the Desktop Edition, the embedded server itself has access restrictions. If you right click on the RSSBus Desktop Server icon in the system tray and choose "Server Options", there is an "Allowed Clients" setting that by default is set to localhost. This means that only localhost can access the server.  You can change this to allow access from whatever addresses you would like.  Wildcard support is included so you could allow a particular subnet (10.0.1.*) or allow everyone (*).

4.  Specifically for the Server Edition, the first time you access the RSSBus you'll get a “Security Exception“ error page which explains that the Admin Console requires an RsbAllow application setting in the Web.Config in order to be accessed.  By default this application setting exists in the web.config but it is commented out for safety.  Before you can load the Admin Console and start using RSSBus, you'll need to modify the web.config file like this (of course you can specify whatever user and password values you like):   

posted @ Wednesday, August 09, 2006 8:40 AM | Feedback (0) |

Grillz. No, not grills - grillz.

I think my friend Andi might like a new grill.  Not a grill, but a grill.  The kind where the plural form ends with a z instead of an s.  The kind that wanna-be street thugs put in their mouth.  I found out recently that Andi is an accidental G-unit fan (he bought a G-Unit shirt, but didn't know what it meant).

Is it just me, or are grillz the stupidest thing since November 18th, 1923 (coincidentally, this date is also the birth of Ted Stevens)?  Why on earth would anyone want to wear such a thing, even if it were free?  Ugh.  I guess the upside is that nobody would ever punch you in the mouth.

posted @ Wednesday, August 09, 2006 8:19 AM | Feedback (2) |

RSSBus beta 2 released

RSSBus beta 2 was announced this week.  If you are interested in RSS, and leveraging RSS to create your own feeds - you have got to check this out.  Download here. 

Creating feeds is just scratching the surface of what RSSBus can do. IMO, the coolest thing is mixing and pipelining feeds and operations, and then pushing item data out as a new feed or in any other format like HTML, iCal, text, etc.  I personally suggest checking out the script and template demos that come installed with RSSBus first - they show some of this in action.

Technorati tags: rssbus beta announce 

posted @ Wednesday, August 09, 2006 7:17 AM | Feedback (0) |

A little fun for my boring blog

My friend Holly says that my blog is boring lately.  So here's a little Google Maps/Flight sim mashup that I saw somewhere today.  This is entertaining for at least 45 seconds, but not much more than that.  Sorry I guess thats the best I can do.  Of course you could just do the same thing in Google Maps or Google Earth or MSN Virtual Earth - just without the little plane and the potential explosions.

Here's a funny Flickr post from somebody in the Raleigh Flickr Group.  Apparently there are more goat-eating people in the area than I knew about.  I thought I knew them all and they were Albanian.

Do you watch "The Office"?  If not you're making a terrible mistake!  Its in re-runs right now on NBC, but you can get your fix from The Office Webisodes at nbc.com.

Remember how cool Atari was back when we didn't know that things like Halo could ever exist?  Here's a flashback, sort of, called Escapa.  Its not an Atari game - but its on the same level graphically.  My best is 24.765 seconds.

Now...back to my regularly scheduled geekiness.

posted @ Monday, August 07, 2006 2:08 PM | Feedback (5) |

RSS and Atom vulnerabilities

Last week Nial Kennedy posted about SPI Dynamics' report about RSS and Atom vulnerabilities.  There's been a little bit of chatter about this ever since.

Nick Bradbury says that FeedDemon is immune to all of the major vulnerabilities, and he points to Mark Pilgrim's Platypus prank as one example.  Mark offers a little checklist for aggregator authors to be smart.

Technorati tags: rss atom security 

posted @ Monday, August 07, 2006 1:48 PM | Feedback (0) |

access:restriction tags in feeds

Proposed by Bloglines, not very well received in the TechCrunch comments.

Technorati tags: rss atom 

posted @ Wednesday, August 02, 2006 11:58 AM | Feedback (0) |

How to build an Amazon S3 hosted website

From the AWS blog: 

• Peter Lewis, writing from Australia, shows how to create An Amazon S3 Hosted Website using Interarchy. Interarchy is an FTP client application for the Mac.The technique illustrated in the article is not specific to this application and is quite handy - Amazon S3 is a really good web host. Of course, the article itself is on an Amazon S3 hosted website!

Technorati tags: amazon s3 

posted @ Wednesday, August 02, 2006 10:04 AM | Feedback (0) |