Follow the instructions provided by Luke Huttemann for the w::bloggar plugin for SharpReader and replace SharpReader with RSS Bandit. Aren't plugins grand?

 

 

I couldn't sleep so I wrote up a first draft of a conceptual model for a weblog editing API for use with the project formerly known as Echo.

Below are various thoughts on schema-first design & XML Web Services, more exploration of why using derivation by restriction is unnecessary when authoring schemas using W3C XML Schema and a link to a one of the funnies memos yet from Pud's Internal Memos site

 

 

Sam Ruby recently launched a wiki for the Echo Project (which needs to be renamed) which has the following goals

• We want a weblog authoring tool to be able to post log entries to all sort of weblog engines. Prerequesites:
• • common API to the weblog engine
  • common markup for the entries
  • common meta information such as author, time, place, etc.
• We want to read weblogs using a variety of means, including various transformations by software. Prerequesites:
• • standard output formats such as RSS with a specified list of optional well-defined modules (and plain HTML, of course)
  • common API if the queries are allowed (eg. all log entries in a specific time period)

Although people like Sjoerd Visscher and Ben Trott have mentioned why the "Echo: The Syndication Format" is different from RSS, no one has actually bothered to state why the why "Echo: The Weblog API" which is supposedly the primary reason for Echo existing would be better than the status quo (the MetaWeblog API and others)

Below is a more in-depth exposition of my earlier post describing the limitations of current weblog posting technologies and the problems Project Echo is supposed to fix. Specifically, I will tackle the MetaWeblog APIs since certain parties who are personally invested in it have engaged in a FUD campaign and have given the impression that there is little if anything fundamentally wrong with it.

 

 

It seems Simon Phipps has stared a list of known bloggers that work at Sun Microsystems which led me to Norm Walsh's blog. Yet another one of the XML gods has started blogging. Sweet. By the way, Simon's list makes a decent companion to Joshua's list of bloggers who work in the B0rg Cube. I wonder when someone will start similar lists for IBM, Apple and Sun folks.

So far Sam Ruby is the only IBM blogger I've seen and the most visible Apple blogger I've seen, David Hyatt, has hard to turn off comments in his blog due to being flooded with bug reports. Interestingly enough I haven't seen similar things happen on the blogs of the various B0rg folk including mine. Not that I'm asking people to post bug reports in my diary. ;)

 

 

I stumbled on the The Big Picture of the XML Family of Specifications which lists a large number of technologies that are related to XML in one way shape or form. It seems some people take a look at the diagram and it gives them the impression that XML is too complex after all, just look at all those specs. This is amusing given that one could probably run out of printer paper if a diagram of all the specs that were related to or dependent on ASCII were placed in a diagram.

An interesting fall out of this has been that some fellow B0rg have posted their opinions on what they consider the core of XML. Unsurprisingly, I disagree with some aspects of both their posts. My opinions on the what constitute the core technologies for XML development are below.

 

 

Producing Multiple Outputs from an XSL Transformation

 

 

TITLE: On the GPL and the Devaluation of Software

 

 

Based on some comments by Beth Goza at a meeting yesterday I noticed that a number of the blog kids are engaging in a What is a Weblog? debate which was kicked up a notch with a decision by the grand arbiter of funk to step into the fray.

I remember the first time I heard the term "weblog" about four or five years ago and it was used specifically to describe Slashdot. Come to think of it this whole debate sounds familiar...

Here we go, people were having it four years ago. Here's a Jon Katz piece on Slashdot about weblogs being the "new gated community of the WWW" and it links to a four and a half year old article called Anatomy of a Weblog which seems identical to the one or two pointlesss philosophical meanderings I've seen in the most recent incarnation of the debate.

A bunch of links and quick opinions below.

 

 

A few days ago I posted an entry about spending 15 minutes writing an XSLT stylesheet to save 1 minute of effort. So it turns out the 1 minute of effort gave me the wrong results. The problem was how to add 4 months and 20 days to a column containing dates in an Excel spreadsheet. It turns out the change one value, click and drag approach doesn't work because it adds one day to each subsequent date instead of adding the changed amount to each date. This means I get a column of dates in chronological order instead of having X days added to each date in the column.

Below is an XSLT stylesheet that adds 4 months and 20 days to every column containing a date in an Excel spreadsheet (saved as XML in either Excel from Office XP or Office 2003 beta 2)

 

 

Recently I've been bored with working on RSS Bandit and it has begun to seem more like work than fun. I wondered why until I revisited the reasons I had for building RSS Bandit in order of priority

1. Investigate how hard it was to embed Internet Explorer in a C# forms app.
   
   
2. Write an app that makes it easier to read and post comments to Joshua and Sam's blogs.
   
   
3. See for myself how difficult it is to write a .NET framework application that consumes and produces XML. Note places for improvement in our APIs.

Then I saw the problem, all my itches had been scratched. This was until I saw a screenshot of RSS Bandit in Torsten's blog and was inspired.

Below is an attempt to organize my thoughts around the potential for RSS Information Aggregators and the dual themes of XML Everywhere & Unified Query Data Access.