[HN Gopher] RssCloud, WordPress. FeedLand, and Dave Winer
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RssCloud, WordPress. FeedLand, and Dave Winer
Author : AndySylvester01
Score : 51 points
Date : 2022-12-23 17:36 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (andysylvester.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (andysylvester.com)
| wojciechpolak wrote:
| How this relates to WebSub (previously known as PubSubHubbub)?
| https://www.w3.org/TR/websub/
| theschmed wrote:
| Came to ask this as well. It seems like a competing solution to
| the same problem.
| kevincox wrote:
| As far as I am aware WebSub has more or less completely
| obsoleted RssCloud.
|
| Source: I run a feed reader service that supports WebSub and
| when I checked none of our subscriptions support RssCloud but
| not WebSub.
| AndySylvester01 wrote:
| My summary of the recent work in the rssCloud arena
| pixelmonkey wrote:
| What is rssCloud exactly and why should a long-time blogger
| care about it? I ask this not to be facetious. It's because I
| read your blog post with interest, but by the end, I still
| wasn't sure. Your second paragraph, which defines rssCloud,
| gave a kind of technical description (the "what") but not the
| user benefit description (the "why"). Unfortunately I found the
| Wikipedia article to be much the same. Basically, I couldn't
| really figure out "what's in it for me". For context, I'm a
| long-time programmer, I have blogged at amontalenti.com since
| ~2004, via WordPress since ~2005, and I even work for
| Automattic. So, if I'm confused, I bet a lot of people with
| less context are even moreso.
| carapace wrote:
| > a user did not have to find a rssCloud server for their feed to
| reference - their own site could handle feed registrations and
| notifications to feed reader apps. This created a supply of
| literally millions of weblogs that could support quick
| notifications to their readers if their reading app supported the
| use of rssCloud.
|
| Um, is it just me or does that sound like a DDOS waiting to
| happen? (I'm out of the loop on these things.)
| kevincox wrote:
| Can you provide details?
|
| I'm not familiar with RssCloud but WebSub requires the
| notification endpoint to confirm a subscription before sending
| new entries. So your DoS amplification is one small HTTP
| request for a small HTTP request. I guess at best it would make
| it slightly harder to block as it is coming from everywhere.
| PopAlongKid wrote:
| Interesting comments about Dave Winer in the article.
|
| I first became aware of him in the last year or two via a mention
| here on HN. Since then, I have been receiving and reading his
| daily blog post via email. (He claims his blog has been running
| longer than any other in existence, could be true). They guy is
| clearly smart and hard working, and has lots of ideas, many of
| which seem good. What he shares about his personal life is also
| interesting, I could imagine being friends with him if we were in
| close proximity.
|
| However I also get the sense sometimes that he is a "legend in
| his own mind", to the detriment of the very technical causes he
| is promoting. He is fixated on writing tools such as "outliners"
| (MS Excel and Word have all the outlining features I have ever
| needed, which isn't very often), and whether or not RSS items
| need to have titles. The things he agonizes over are, I think,
| just background noise for most users, and his illustrious history
| in a niche area of Apple desktop computing decades ago doesn't
| really buy him anything in today's marketplace, to his (unstated)
| frustration.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _He claims his blog has been running longer than any other in
| existence, could be true_
|
| Could very well be, remember reading his blog in the late 90s
| latchkey wrote:
| I've met Dave in person.
|
| I've talked to Dave on the phone.
|
| I've written an entire web server in Frontier.
|
| I've been an absolute dick software engineer!
|
| Dave is a dick.
|
| Now, we can debate all day long about how/why/what, but it
| really doesn't matter. He is who he is and nobody is going to
| change that. The guy must be in his 70-80's at this point.
| After all these years, he's still treating people weirdly, it
| must be a personality tick of his.
|
| We can decide if we want to work with him and his stuff, or
| not. "I've made a point of reaching out to old
| friends in the last few weeks to see if we can work together on
| any projects. So far most people are still wary of working with
| others, it seems." -Dave Winer
|
| We can think of him like we do Steve Jobs (and based on his
| ego, that's my guess of what he wants). He built something that
| got people's attention, but treated people poorly in doing so.
|
| We can also decide how we want to act towards others. Don't be
| like Dave.
| eduction wrote:
| This seems a little unfair, maybe unintentionally on your part.
| If you've been reading his blog long enough (and I don't know
| the value of "long enough" since I've been reading so long) it
| becomes clear he situates new proposals and tools in into a ton
| of context - how he came to think this new thing would be
| useful. This involves discussing history. By necessity this
| disproportionately is his own professional / independent
| developer history. I find this approach generally refreshing
| and honest - most software emerges from a path dependent
| individual context but people tend to suggest they just
| developed the objectively best solution to a widespread
| problem. Dave tends to be more honest about scratching his own
| itch and the influence of his own history on how he approaches
| problems.
|
| This approach can read as ego / bragging maybe, if you're not
| familiar with it. "Why is he talking about his past projects so
| much," etc. Well because it led into why he thinks the new
| project is a good idea.
|
| Not to say he doesn't have some ego like all people. He does
| want people to know for example that podcasts were a natural
| outgrowth of RSS, so natural he hand a hand in adding it
| himself despite not having an audio background. But his point
| is almost always that podcasting should stay open, not that he
| is some genius. If anythint he tends to encourage non
| developers (eg journalists) to be more involved in developing
| new standards.
|
| (Also the "fixation" on blogs without titles is about the fact
| that RSS the standard is perfectly capable of carrying Twitter
| type items without titles, since it only specifies either a
| title or description as required - but feed readers mostly
| assume titles which has encouraged a heavyweight high effort
| concept of what a post is, to the advantage of closed platforms
| like Twitter and to the disadvantage of the RSS ecosystem. I
| think he has a very good point on this. These details matters.
| That they are "background noise" to many users - well so are
| most important technical details. Try getting most users to
| understand the difference between transport and end to end
| encryption for example. )
| garyrob wrote:
| Dave was really a pioneer. In the early days of the Mac, he
| created an outliner called MORE which was a very innovative
| product for the time, which I immediately loved and used as the
| center of all my information-keeping. He sold it to Symantec
| for, as I understand it, a couple million dollars (probably
| twice that in today's money), but then it disappeared.
| (OmniOutliner, made by people with no relationship to Winer
| that I know of, carries on MORE's tradition.) Then he made a
| product called Frontier, which was a programming environment
| that never really took off. Then when the internet got critical
| mass he came up with RSS and that was obviously very useful and
| influential.
|
| His claim to have had the first blog is probably true. I
| remember reading it way back then.
|
| He's a bit of a prickly character, always has been.
| leejoramo wrote:
| And before MORE, he created Think Tank for PC and Apple 2.
|
| I remember reading him say his first outliner was on a
| timeshare system in the 1970s, and he took inspiration from
| that Douglas Engelbart's Mother of All Demos
| genericacct wrote:
| Outlining is a crucial step in authoring most anything with
| substance, from essays to books and even project plans (most
| gantt software Will collapse subitems like an outliner)
|
| My Guess Is mr Winer writes more than you do and therefore uses
| more outliners.
|
| Besides, your argoment Is a major ad hominem, which makes a bit
| invalid.
|
| (Apologies for the phone posting)
| bachmeier wrote:
| > MS Excel and Word have all the outlining features I have ever
| needed, which isn't very often
|
| This says more about you than it does about the usefulness of
| outliners. Not that that's bad, but it's important not to
| classify them as trivial just because you don't use them.
| Outlining software is exploding in popularity. Some examples
| include org-mode, Workflowy, Dynalist, Roam Research, Logseq,
| and Remnote. It's also fine to dislike DW, but it's not
| accurate to diminish his importance because you don't
| personally use outlining software.
| mro_name wrote:
| why seems everybody to ignore Atom (RFC4287)? Is it to follow
| iTunes' innovation leadership in doing so? I'd be curious.
| simonw wrote:
| Many years ago I switched to Atom because the RSS spec was
| ambiguous with regards to which fields could contain entity-
| encoded HTML.
|
| Anyone know if that issue with RSS ever got resolved?
| DonHopkins wrote:
| The worst use of the <BLINK> tag ever was the discussion held
| in the early days of RSS about escaping HTML in titles, whose
| attention-grabbing title went something like this: "Hey, what
| happens when you put a <BLINK> tag in the title???!!!"
|
| The content of that notorious discussion went on and off and
| on and off for weeks, giving all the netizens of the RSS
| syndication community blogosphere terrible headaches, with
| people's entire blogs disappearing and reappearing every
| second, until it finally reached a flashing point, when Dave
| Winer humbly conceded that it wasn't the user's fault for
| being an idiot, and maybe just maybe there was tiny teeny
| little design flaw in RSS, and it wasn't actually such a
| great idea to allow HTML tags in RSS titles.
| k1m wrote:
| There are some recommendations here which I've tried to
| follow when I've worked with RSS:
| https://www.rssboard.org/rss-profile
|
| They are from 2007, so you might have seen them already.
| kevincox wrote:
| Yes, they got resolved in the Atom 1.0 spec ;)
|
| I recommend that people use Atom for new implementations for
| basically this reason. However to be honest it probably isn't
| a big enough problem to switch to Atom of RSS is working for
| you.
| modernerd wrote:
| The RSS 2.0.1 spec at https://cyber.harvard.edu/rss/rss.html
| is essentially dead, or "frozen" / "settled" as it says
| there.
|
| 2.0.1 was published in 2003 and I don't expect to see a 2.0.2
| or 2.0.3.
|
| The ambiguities you mention are real, though. "The url must
| be an http url" is one that feed validators would adhere to
| very strictly, for example, rejecting HTTPS URLs as
| invalid[1], which even caused Apple's Podcast submissions
| process to reject feeds with HTTPS URLs in them at one point
| (I was employed at the time by a company that hosted
| podcasts, and we had to work around it by rewriting URLs to
| use HTTP).
|
| I received a reply from the spec's author to my email
| suggesting they update the spec to clarify this ("of course
| you can use HTTPS") but the spec itself was never updated and
| I would consider it unmaintained at this point.
|
| Atom and JSON Feed are good alternatives. Atom because it has
| fewer ambiguities and JSON Feed because it has an open GitHub
| repo[2] and was updated in 2020.
|
| [1]: https://github.com/rubys/feedvalidator/pull/12
|
| [2]: https://github.com/manton/JSONFeed
| riffraff wrote:
| I was wondering the same. At some point it appeared atom was
| going to take over the feed space, but when I started blogging
| again last year it appeared we had more or less standardized
| again on RSS 2.
|
| I have no idea why or what happened.
| Avamander wrote:
| Personally for a while initially, I just didn't bother
| figuring out which one was better.
|
| I'd say the lack of a push towards Atom might be one of the
| reasons.
| throw0101c wrote:
| > [...] _but when I started blogging again last year it
| appeared we had more or less standardized again on RSS 2._
|
| Per Gandhi, be the change you wish to see in the world: only
| provide Atom. :)
| BryantD wrote:
| I think it's probably as simple as these lines of code from wp-
| includes/feed.php in WordPress: $default_feed =
| apply_filters( 'default_feed', 'rss2' ); return (
| 'rss' === $default_feed ) ? 'rss2' : $default_feed;
|
| WordPress is a popular enough platform so that people will
| adapt to its defaults.
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