Reflective Surface

Wildgrape NewsDesk is yet another .NET news aggregator. It features the basic capabilities to read RSS feeds, although support to RSS 2.0 is preliminary. Nevertheless, it supports conditional GETs, which is pretty much a required feature for aggregators now.

I’m impressed with the number of .NET aggregators that have been developed in the last few months. I believe this development is related to the high availability of libraries for Microsoft’s new platform. From the GUI down to the RSS parser itself, most of the required pieces for reading and displaying feeds are already done.

It would be interesting to know if any of those aggregators is being adopted beyond the developer community, which is more lilkely to have the .NET run-time installed. I don’t believe other classes of users will suffer the run-time’s download time.

I’m experimenting with Vellum, Stuart Langridge‘s weblog tool written in Python. It’s an very nice piece of code; a geek tool for geek bloggers. Although I don’t like funky caching, its other features are impressive; and it keeps getting better with each new release.

As I didn’t have a Linux box in hand when Vellum was released, I tried to get it running on Windows. The first releases refused to cooperate, but the current version (1.0a5) worked like a charm. I needed to make some changes in both the web server configuration and Vellum itself, but now it’s running nicely under Windows 2000 Server. I’m using Apache 2.0.44 and IIS 5.0, but I believe the instructions bellow are valid for Windows NT 4, Apache 1.3.x, and IIS 4.0 too.

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Baldur Bjarnason writes about Mark Pilgrim’s Parsing RSS at all costs article at XML.com:

Mark fails to say the obvious. All RSS is automatically generated by an application of some sort. The webloggers are end-users themselves of weblogging applications.

So we should lobby the application developers to automatically validate the RSS feed every single time it is generated and automatically fix the most common errors (unescaped ampersands).

This is a sensible thought. If weblogging tools enforced at least the well-formedness of the RSS output, a great part of the problem with invalid feeds would be solved. Enforcing the validity of the feeds itself with respect to the specifications is a minor problem because SAX-based approaches to parsing can take care of almost all incorrect uses.

But there are still some problems. Obviously, not all tool developers care about generating well-formed feeds. Some even have a history of proving feeds that are almost garbage, if feeds are provided at all. That’s the problem I see with any solution other than parsing at all costs: it may be harder to convince some providers to create tools that generate correct XML than write liberal parsers. And even if those developers could be convinced, there are still large amounts of deployed tools that won’t be upgraded and will continue to generate invalid feeds.

I don’t like this situation. As Dare Obasanjo said, it’s quite depressing. XML was supposed to bring a new age to information processing. But real life is always different, and now we must deal with those problems in a way users can benefit. After all, there is no point in creating technology that cannot add value to people lives.

Syndirella is a new Windows news aggregator by Dmitry Jemerov. It’s a real desktop application, not browser-based. The feature list is nice, including RSS auto-discovery, support to a lot of RSS extensions, and the possibility to screen-scrape sites that do not support RSS feeds. And as it’s GPL-license, you can extend and modify it as needed.

A problem, however, is that it’s based on the .NET platform, which implies a huge download if you don’t have the run-time. As the run-time is only commonly found in developers’ computers, this can make Syndirella less appealing to common users.

Cool! Stuart Langridge just released the code to Vellum, his own weblogging tool. It’s written in Python, and features funky caching, a plug-in system, and the possibility to write real Python code in the weblog templates.

A lot of people are thinking of or already creating their own weblogging software. Dean Allen just announced Textpattern, Reverend Jim is planning Inklog, Aquarion is already using his Epistula, and Dougal Campbell wants to someday write dblog. Given the recent post in the MovableType forums listing all feature requests for it, it’s easy to see while people would want to write their own systems: there’s always something they want that their current CMS or blog tool doesn’t support.

I have my own list of things I want or need that MovableType doesn’t support. MovableType is a powerful tool and will probably become even better in the future, but I want to be able to add something when I think of it without having to wait for someone else implement — if it gets implemented at all. So I’ve been thinking of writing my own tool, too. I’m a programmer, and it is a good excuse to learn new technologies and/or improve skills. I’ve been playing with Python, RDF, XML-RPC, REST, and other things for some time now, and I’d like to have something useful to try them on. As my other home projects are not specifically web-related, I’d like to experiment with some of the web technologies I don’t use at wok, and I guess writing a weblogging system is a good way to do that. I will be posting thoughts about development issues I face as I go.

One of the coolest things about weblogs is their use as tools for thinking publicly. I’m always amazed at the insight you can gain when people dump their brains in the open, allowing their knowledge to spread and grow as it traverses the web. Even simple information, not directly linked to anything usable by itself, can be interesting and provide ideas for further interaction.

That’s why I tend to link a lot. If I benefited from some information I found somewhere in the web, others may too. Connections are then created, and grow. That is when the Web is more true to its nature. So keep thinking, keep posting and keep linking. The collective thanks you.

I’m beginning to believe that the LazyWeb is a living entity with telepathic powers: you just need to think about something and it’s granted.

Ben and Mena Trott have announced a new MovableType feature that will allow users to choose the way each entry is rendered, using different formats like Wiki or POD. I’ve been thinking about this very thing in the last few weeks. They are also planning it as a pluggable architecture where new formatters can be easily added. Very, very cool!

Wired News has an article on the role blogs are playing in bringing some issues to the world’s attention when the mainstream press would just let them go unnoticed, as exemplified by Trent Lott’s downfall.

An interesting point in the article is the reaction of traditional media professionals. The opinions are divided: some believe blogs will become an important part of the process of distributing and validating news, while others see blogs as just uninformed opinion. Obviously, both opinions are true to some extent. However, the strength of blogging lies not on the individual blog, but on the collective gathering of opinions and facts that can lead to a more clear and consistent picture of events.

All in all, it’s nice to see that blogging is getting more and more attention. It signals the maturing of this new media. It’s always amazing to see how a simple concept as blogging has become such an important part of the Web, changing the way people communicate and relate daily.

The blogosphere is an interesting place. I happen to host the blogs of two friends of mine under my domain. A few time ago, one of them found a new, interesting blog and left a comment on it. The blogger on that site returned the visit, and found our mutual friend, also leaving a comment in his blog. Some time later, I followed the links in the comments, and found that the blog my friend had linked to was part of a collective. More interesting, one of the blogs in that collective belonged to a former coworker. It’s a really small world.