7 ms·

RssCloud, WordPress. FeedLand, and Dave Winer

AndySylvester01 4y ago
My summary of the recent work in the rssCloud arena
- pixelmonkey 4y ago
  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.
  - AndySylvester01 4y ago
    The main benefit of rssCloud is quicker notification of updates versus polling every 10 to 60 minutes, as most feed readers do. The drawbacks are that the tool generating the RSS feed needs to include another element (the cloud element), the tool needs to inform a server that an update has occurred (need a server), and there has to be an app that registers with the server to get updates, and to display those updates (need an app that supports rssCloud). Without all of those 3 pieces, rssCloud is not going to provide the value of quicker notification. You could also consult your fellow employee, Joseph Scott, who worked on the WordPress plugin, for more context. I am not familiar with what is needed to support WebSub, but I assume there is some work involved, just as there would be for XMPP, Jabber and any other protocol that involves more than polling. That "extra work" is the barrier to entry that helps keep people using Twitter and Facebook - the users get that notification "hit" and network effect without any extra work on their part.
    - pixelmonkey 4y ago
      Thanks, that makes sense. So the core problem it solves is preventing the need for polling for feed consumers and apps, allowing for real-time notifications of updates. In theory, people could use rssCloud to adapt blogging platforms into microblogging use cases, e.g. using the simplicity of an analogy, Mastodon use cases built atop WordPress infrastructure.
mro_name 4y ago
why seems everybody to ignore Atom (RFC4287)? Is it to follow iTunes' innovation leadership in doing so? I'd be curious.
- simonw 4y ago
  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?
  - k1m 4y ago
    There are some recommendations here which I've tried to follow when I've worked with RSS: https://www.rssboard.org/rss-profile https://www.rssboard.org/rss-profile They are from 2007, so you might have seen them already.
  - DonHopkins 4y ago
    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.
  - modernerd 4y ago
    The RSS 2.0.1 spec at https://cyber.harvard.edu/rss/rss.html 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 https://github.com/rubys/feedvalidator/pull/12 [2]: https://github.com/manton/JSONFeed https://github.com/manton/JSONFeed
wojciechpolak 4y ago
How this relates to WebSub (previously known as PubSubHubbub)? https://www.w3.org/TR/websub/ https://www.w3.org/TR/websub/
- theschmed 4y ago
  Came to ask this as well. It seems like a competing solution to the same problem.
- kevincox 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    I would be interested in know what your feed reader service is, and how subscriptions support WebSub.
    - kevincox 4y ago
      My feed reader service is https://feedmail.org https://feedmail.org. The simplest instructions for WebSub are those on the public Google hub https://pubsubhubbub.appspot.com/ https://pubsubhubbub.appspot.com/. But there are other public hubs available or you can run your own.
- AndySylvester01 4y ago
  rssCloud is a separate protocol, but performs many of the same functions as WebSub.
PopAlongKid 4y ago
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.
- garyrob 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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
carapace 4y ago
> 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 4y ago
  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.
  - carapace 4y ago
    > Can you provide details? Sorry, no. I'm not an expert. I'm just pattern matching.

My summary of the recent work in the rssCloud arena

pixelmonkey 4y ago
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.
- AndySylvester01 4y ago
  The main benefit of rssCloud is quicker notification of updates versus polling every 10 to 60 minutes, as most feed readers do. The drawbacks are that the tool generating the RSS feed needs to include another element (the cloud element), the tool needs to inform a server that an update has occurred (need a server), and there has to be an app that registers with the server to get updates, and to display those updates (need an app that supports rssCloud). Without all of those 3 pieces, rssCloud is not going to provide the value of quicker notification. You could also consult your fellow employee, Joseph Scott, who worked on the WordPress plugin, for more context. I am not familiar with what is needed to support WebSub, but I assume there is some work involved, just as there would be for XMPP, Jabber and any other protocol that involves more than polling. That "extra work" is the barrier to entry that helps keep people using Twitter and Facebook - the users get that notification "hit" and network effect without any extra work on their part.
  - pixelmonkey 4y ago
    Thanks, that makes sense. So the core problem it solves is preventing the need for polling for feed consumers and apps, allowing for real-time notifications of updates. In theory, people could use rssCloud to adapt blogging platforms into microblogging use cases, e.g. using the simplicity of an analogy, Mastodon use cases built atop WordPress infrastructure.

why seems everybody to ignore Atom (RFC4287)? Is it to follow iTunes' innovation leadership in doing so? I'd be curious.

simonw 4y ago
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?
- k1m 4y ago
  There are some recommendations here which I've tried to follow when I've worked with RSS: https://www.rssboard.org/rss-profile https://www.rssboard.org/rss-profile They are from 2007, so you might have seen them already.
- DonHopkins 4y ago
  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.
- modernerd 4y ago
  The RSS 2.0.1 spec at https://cyber.harvard.edu/rss/rss.html 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 https://github.com/rubys/feedvalidator/pull/12 [2]: https://github.com/manton/JSONFeed https://github.com/manton/JSONFeed

wojciechpolak 4y ago

How this relates to WebSub (previously known as PubSubHubbub)? https://www.w3.org/TR/websub/ https://www.w3.org/TR/websub/

theschmed 4y ago
Came to ask this as well. It seems like a competing solution to the same problem.
kevincox 4y ago
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 4y ago
  I would be interested in know what your feed reader service is, and how subscriptions support WebSub.
  - kevincox 4y ago
    My feed reader service is https://feedmail.org https://feedmail.org. The simplest instructions for WebSub are those on the public Google hub https://pubsubhubbub.appspot.com/ https://pubsubhubbub.appspot.com/. But there are other public hubs available or you can run your own.
AndySylvester01 4y ago
rssCloud is a separate protocol, but performs many of the same functions as WebSub.

PopAlongKid 4y ago

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.

garyrob 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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

carapace 4y ago

> 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 4y ago
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.
- carapace 4y ago
  > Can you provide details? Sorry, no. I'm not an expert. I'm just pattern matching.