Updated Atom Feed to 1.0

I use Blosxom on this blog and have an Atom feed.

Unfortunately, it seems that everyone else in the universe stopped using Blosxom and moved to something that requires MySQL or PHP which are non-starters for me.

So, I read this Moving from Atom 0.3 to 1.0 post and combined it with Feed Validator to update Blosxom's atom plugin.

My version of atomfeed Blosxom plugin for Atom 1.0 is here. Feel free to have at it.

The only issue is that the Feed Validator complains that the updated tag isn't early enough in the document. Besides being kind of bogus (XML can't define an ordering on the elements), there's just no way to do it easily in Blosxom without going through the stories twice. Close enough.

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Identifying new information on the Web

Mark says:

Better yet, there are some things happening that will enable traditional
websites to identify new information on their sites and ping that to us. This
way if WidgetsInc comes out with a new Dallas Mavericks Widget, they can
update their widgetsinc.com website and we will have it covered. It will
show up in Dallas Mavericks topic Im tracking.

Huh. I'm wondering if he's talking about something similar to Google Sitemaps.

Some Google folks approached dev@httpd about integrating that with httpd and we emitted a collective shrug.

I've always had a fundamental problem with a pull-oriented notification system, so I understand the rationale behind wanting a push-oriented system. However, my concern with Sitemaps is that it is too static and requires too much work on the part of the content maintainers. (Their bundled system only works for static sites, not dynamic ones - which is largely impractical for the types of sites they are really interested in having notifications for, IMHO.)

Rohit's dissertation went into detail about how a WATCH method could be implemented as a registration mechanism for a push-oriented system. But, the downfall with his approach was that it required maintaining a persistent connection - which is highly impractical but circumvents a registration/notification database. (It should be noted that, I believe, this WATCH approach was the core of the KnowNow system.)

As with most things, I favor Roy's MONITOR approach that he's talked about for Waka. Issue a MONITOR request to a URL and the server will issue a request to a specified URL whenever the source URL has changed. Now, if only we could get Roy to finish that prototype and unleash it upon the world.

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