This post makes me think.

Something came up on the syndication syntax list that bothers me. Syndication (RSS for now, Atom next) depends on separating formatting from content. A lump of html is thrown into an xml wrapper and passed along.

What happens to the original style sheets and the styled treatment of the post?

[a klog apart]

I want my news reader to give me the basics of the content, mainly the text. If I want the rich experience of the site in it's graphical glory, I'd go to the page. A problem is that I'm a geek and my needs are different than most of America and the world. :>

I think what we need to be careful about here is confining RSS/Nechoatom to one type of experience vs. another. RSS is a content syndication format, not an alternative to the visual experience the WWW has become. Let RSS transport syndicated content. Let RSS aggregators read it and display the feed. Instead of combining the web browser with the aggregator and perpetuating the current conventional thinking, let's try to take this in a different direction

Create a different kind of aggregator, one that's a browser first and a RSS reader second. The browser has a preference page where you subscribe to feeds of interest. Second, add a list of keywords to find in the feeds. Third, add technology to monitor your site view habits (think Tivo without the privacy issues).

When you launch this program, it displays a “customized home page” using the prefs from the paragraph above. Click a button on the page and the app opens news/info/entertainment of interest where each category is a window, each web page a tab. Info you wanted to know is highlighted (cues from CSS embedded in the feed or web page). Keywords are highlighted differently.

Wow…where did this post come from. Too much caffeine too early….

Anyway, all of the technology exists for this today. Apple's WebKit and Microsoft's integration of IE allow an app to be written that displays valid HTML correctly, but not be limited to a web browser app.

Whew. Comments? Brent Simmons, are you out there? You are the person that could do this. If Watson and NNW slept together, this idea would be their child.

Update: John Robb is thinking along the same lines with this. By the way, John, fix Radio so your post links in your RSS feed are the permalinks back to your web site. This one was to Macromedia.

Dann Sheridan asks Jake Savin here if a hacking Radio/Manila blog would be appropriate. I'd love to see one myself.

I've been thinking about this, too:

I'm curious; perhaps someone out there knows…

Has anyone yet attempted to create “RSS email”, where the “feeds” served to a feedreader might be automatically synthesized from the emails themselves as things such as Person (from or to), Thread, Folder, etc?  (One could probably easily implement this as a straight layer on top of IMAP.)

[Ray Ozzie's Weblog]

Here's the problem, though. What happens when the “news item” that came to me from email drops off my newsreader's list of recent articles? With email, I can flag it for a follow-up of import the information into a task item within my PIM. Since I'm using a Mac, Newsgator is not an option. Ideas? Comments?

I meant to post this a couple of days ago. Dann, I have felt this pain:

Oh, The Horror!!. The evil triad: Radio, my old firewall, and my ISP. The past 72 hours have been quite unintentionally Radio free.[Dann Sheridan's Weblog]

BloggerCon provides some relief. I'm now looking into attending through sponsorships. Anyone care to lend a hand? Email me.

After sending out the first round of invites to BloggerCon, we got quite a bit of feedback on the pricing. A lot of questions were raised, we answered them best we could, and now we want to respond, by:

1. Changing the program, in a significant way to offer scholarships, on a random basis, for people who can't afford the $500 or $250 fees.[bloggerCon News]

Original post

If you haven't ordered your copy yet, read this and follow the link to Amazon. It's great that we're going to get some help for Radio. I recently bought a copy of Frontier: A Definitive Guide from an Amazon vendor, mainly to have an easy reference.

John Palfrey says that they are working on a solution to the cost of BloggerCon. I wanted to go, but airfare from Springfield, MO to Cambridge, MA is at least that much, plus the cost of the forum (also hotel stay, food, etc.) puts it out my reach.

I'll watch this in case things change…

I've been looking for a new book series to read. I'm heading to Borders to look this up:

I've just finished reading Philip Pullman's Northern Lights, the first volume in a British kids' fantasy trilogy. I'm over the moon with delight. This is a brilliant novel: gripping, funny, dark, heartwarming and vivid. I haven't been so glad of a BritLit book since The Borribles Trilogy — up until now my absolute favorite kids' fantasy books, not least because of their unflinching grimness and refusal to be even slightly twee. Northern Lights rivals Borribles, outstrips the Hobbit, and leaves Harry Potter in the dust.

The book revolves around the quest of a little girl to uncover the nature of the universes parallel to her own — beginning in an alternate, steampunky Oxford University and ranging through London, the fens, and Lappland. The fantastic creatures and the magic that fuels them is utterly captivating and brilliantly executed. The book reveals its oddities and back-story in tiny sips, interspersed masterfully through the fast-paced action. I've just contacted my corner bookstore to see if they have volumes two and three in stock: I plan on devouring them.

I'm intrigued to see that there's an audio edition with Pullman reading: sounds wonderful.

LinkDiscuss

(Thanks, Cait!) [Boing Boing Blog]

Dewayne dug up this old Bryan Bell post about CSS and Radio:

If you would like to centralize your Radio CSS you can simple save your Style sheet as “#cascadingStyleSheet.txt” then place it in your “www” folder. Then simply add the macro to your template. Your CSS will be included where you included your macro.

This method will work even if you create a theme out of your design.

Spaces in the CSS macro tag added by me to prevent Radio from being confused…

I'm glad I found this. I'm working on my test install of Frontier/Manila and need this info to build the “surprise”.

From this “a klog apart” post:

Tim Bray measured the RSS traffic to his personal weblog. He came up with these numbers for a day with one change:

• 11,526 GET requests (about 8 per minute)
• 8,901 returned the no-change (code 304) 77%
• 2,625 returned the data (code 200). 23%
• 359 HEAD requests.
• 1,374 unique IP addresses.

Tim's work with Antarctica.net touches thousands of people. His professional network will be early adopters, so tracking Tim's blog would be natural.

Of note, Tim made a change. “The code that changes the picture-of-the-day every ten minutes or so was also as a side-effect re-writing the RSS. So I fixed it.” It's probably saving him 1.5 GB/month in downloads. Who's going to write the book on RSS optimization?

[a klog apart]