You may have noticed we released v1.5.0.17 of my favorite feed reader (and refreshed the installer meanwhile) - for the coding guys we now have even more:

Thanks to the folks at atlassian we are now have the comfortable source browsing tool running on the SF repositories (CVS with the CLR 1.1 code and SVN for CLR 2.0). Most I like the diffs view and RSS link in the top right - there the circle closes (subscribed).

Who is somewhat involved in the feeds/rss/rdf/atom world like me may have noticed the interesting discussion at the Microsoft Team RSS blog. There is now a consens by major players about using this common icon  to visualize webfeeds. Two or three days ago Matt opens a site named http://www.feedicons.com/ to get it broadcasted and so I did by this post

As soon Dare Obasanjo gets the bugfix installer ready of my favorite NewsReader you will notice we use it the same way as it will be used within IE7 - to indicate autodiscovered feeds while you browse. OK, that's an old feature, but you know we refreshed all our used icons and so it was just the right time for the right think thing.

We decided to post another iteration of the Rss Bandit Alpha (v1.3.0.36): read about the details at Dare Obasanjo's blog and download it here.

It is the first version that is AddIn - enabled and you can find and use the first AddIn available here: AdsBlocker. So how to use it?

1. Download and unzip to a folder you like (e.g. "AddIns" sub-folder within your Bandit installation path).
2. Start Bandit and open the AddIns dialog via Tools|AddIns... menu.
3. Press the "Add..." button and select the AdsBlocker.AddIn.dll
4. Press "Close"
5. Optional: add entries/modify the ads.blacklist.txt file (regular expressions) to configure your blocked content (urls)
6. Optional: create a white list "ads.whitelist.txt" in the same location if your blacklist gets large and you want to re-enable some blocked content.

 

I wished I would have earlier experienced that a conference like Les Blogs takes place. So for now I only can read the short review Les Blogs: "Profi-Sex ist auch nicht besser als Amateur-Sex" [german, heise.de] or Vive le Blogs [wired news] (covered to late).

France is for now the number two in the blog world (overall count of web logs, "...half of all schoolchildren are bloggers..."): so I'm happy we are able to support also a french transation of my favorite RSS Reader:

"The French have a long tradition of speaking loudly," said Loïc Le Meur, a Frenchman and Six Apart's European vice president. "We are the people who made the French Revolution, (the national uprising of) May '68 -- and just look at all our strikes! We always want to debate. Perhaps blogs are the ultimate tool for us to express ourselves."

There are some postings here and there that indicates: the advertising companies (e.g. feedburner.com) now have also an eye to RSS feeds. There are some serious people who like to measure the requests of each single feed post and/or produce some income to lower their hosting costs. Others don't like to see such ads in their subscriptions. So I experimented today a bit to provide a channel processing infrastructure enabling assemblies to plug into the processing chain of RSS Bandit. Now it works all together and my first plug-in is...

You are right: an ads blocker:

RSS Bandit Ads-Blocking via NewsChannelServices" height=522 alt="RSS Bandit Ads-Blocking via NewsChannelServices" src="http://www.rendelmann.info/blog/content/binary/Ads-Blocking%20via%20NewsChannelServices.gif" width=664 border=0>

It is still a simple example but easy to extend with a blacklist loaded from a file or other things. The major improvement is the new channel plug-in infrastructure. Some things I have to discuss with Dare Obasanjo and Phil but if we get an agreement, it will maybe included in the next release of RSS Bandit (Wolverine). So what can you do with it? Examples:

• Saves feed content in a MySQL database as it arrives
• Monitors one or more URL's and notifies you when the web page(s) have changed
• Content manipulation like the ads blocker above
• ...

Stay tuned!

Today I posted a comment to a blog that have a wfw:comment enabled feed. Just wondering why the post does not display in my favorite news reader, I visited the site directly and does the post again with the following return message:

Moderation

Comments on this blog are currently being moderated. An email has been sent to the owner with the details of your comment.

Click here to return to the original post or article

Did not know, http://weblogs.asp.net supports moderated comments. There are some ideas about a comment preview discussed here, but how about moderation? Shouldn't the comment API return an info about like that of the web comment? Worst case: the user post again, and again, and again... just wondering why the post does not show up in the aggregator producing a lot filtering work to the blog author.

Any ideas how it could be reflected into the comment API?

PS: hopefully the wfw:comment was also e-mailed...

Yesterday Dare Obasanjo packaged a new installer zip for download at SourceForge and I just repeat the list here again FYI if you are not able to get the infos from Dare Obasanjo's blog because of the problems he reported:

This release fixes a number of bugs in v1.2.0.114. Major features will show up in the next release as described in the RSS Bandit product roadmap.

Download the installer from here. Differences between v1.2.0.117 and v1.2.0.114 below.

UPDATE: v1.2.0.117 replaces v1.2.0.114 SP1

• FEATURE: French translation added.
• FEATURE: Double clicking on an item in the list view opens the link in a new browser tab.
• FIXED: In certain situations RSS Bandit crashes with the following error message 'StartMainGui() exiting main event loop on exception.'
• FIXED: Mouse wheel now supported in embedded Web browser pane.
• FIXED: Changing the maximum item age for a feed does not refresh the feed and download old items still available in the feed.
• FIXED: Synchronizing feed lists caused exceptions if categories were renamed, moved or deleted.
• FIXED: Feeds that use 302 redirects with relative URIs as the location no longer result in 'Unsupported URI format' errors
• FIXED: Fetching feeds behind a proxy no longer results in 'The remote server returned an error: (407) Proxy Authentication Required.' when the feed references a DTD
• FIXED: Duplicate entries when the title of an item changes
• FIXED: Relative URIs in images and links show up with about:blank as their base URI for certain XSLT templates.
• FIXED: Space bar sometimes does not always move to the next unread item
• FIXED: Environment variables are not accepted within Options|Remote Storage configuration protocol "File Share"
• FIXED: Toolbars don't remember that their visible state on restart when RSS Bandit closed via system tray context menu
• FIXED: Feeds returning HTTP 410 status code now disabled automatically and report the error "The requested resource is not longer available"

[Via Dare Obasanjo Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life]

Let me know, if you really like to have a installer supporting also the .NET 1.0 Framework.

Recently I found a link from the Rss Bandit referrer stats that points to the Microsoft Technet Security Site: there you can read about RSS, but more important you find a link to the security bulletin feed! Subscribed.

Geeks that know about RSS version(s) may already have thought about what should happen to the post date of an yet published item: don't think more about it - keep it as it is!

Why? This provide some kind of "permanent" web page(s) - the same thing as we want to have with the permaLinks of posts.

And here is the other reason. Ian Hickson posted an update of the state of the WHAT Working Group. BitWorking referred to it in his post 3270 Redux from June, 6th 2004 as I did just some words before. Now a RSS Bandit user complained about, Ian's feed is not displayed/processed correctly in the list of items. The item post date in the feed source is of 2004-06-29T16:26:32+00:00, but it displays June, 6th 2004! How comes?

This behavior is not a failure in feed parsing/processing. We read the date(s) in correctly, I double verified that. But if you look carefully you will note there are only a few (or at least one) item(s) where the date is "wrong". E.g. "State of WHAT" as of June, 29 2004, but only if you also have subscribed to the BitWorking feed.

I assume here, especially this item is a edited post (as of date above) after it was published (before the date you see in Bandit for that item)^{(see correction note below)}.

As you know we display item relations in threads. So our Relation Cosmos implementation is so smart, it corrects the item date(s) if it detects "invalid" relations from one item to another. So it does for Ian's post with an referrer item posted at June, 6th 2004: this mean, Ian's post must be already published that time, because the referrer has the link to it. So the date of that particular post is "corrected" back to be a few seconds BEFORE the item post date of the referrer post. The time line of posts is now correct again.

Conclusion: leave the item post date unchanged, if you really have to "correct" the posted content of an item! Or a smart software does it for you! (Or even cannot display a time line of posted items in a thread or any other visual representation like ThreadArcs). Or: one can even "migrate" to Atom, that maintains also a changeDate of items if you really need it...

Edited correction: As Dare Obasanjo tolds me, the story was BitWorking edited an old(er) post to contain a link to the newer one (Ian's). But left the post date unchanged (as I suggested). How common ist that? What do you think? As it is somewhat unclear what item post date we had to correct, we will left it untouched in the future... :~

Was nice to watch and see my Rss Bandit coworker alive

Hey, partitially good news: my local RssBandit beat build 109 does not fail anymore on Sam's test feed, if it is compiled with .NET 1.0: http://intertwingly.net/stories/2004/01/12/broken.rss. It display the Not so smart quotes post with content Postels law. But IE and also the validator still fails and complain about:

The XML page cannot be displayed

Cannot view XML input using XSL style sheet. Please correct the error and then click the Refresh button, or try again later.

---

An invalid character was found in text content. Error processing resource 'http://intertwingly.net/stories/2004/01/12/broke...

      <description>Postel

Sorry

This feed does not validate.

line 15, column 25: XML Parsing error: <unknown>:15:25: not well-formed (invalid token) [help]
      <description>Postel’s law</description>
                        ^

Looks like, we "simply gathering the data" now...

But note: if I compile against .NET 1.1, it fails parsing on invalid character in the given enconding. 
So .NET 1.0 uses a more lazy XML implementation? 

Should we switch back to just "gather the data"?

Today I stumbled on a project posted by Matthew Hazlett. He wrote a tool that convert the feedlist.xml to .opml. It may help you to setup scripts to sync. with other tools that support .opml anyway without having Bandit running (you know we have already build in export your feeds to .opml file). Would be cool, he would also support the way back...

Full story.

As I posted here, the new version with the modified UI is now available. The "Update All Feeds" button is back, but the visibility is configurable. The search feature will be further enhanced: currently we search over all items in title, link, subject and content. This will be optional next, also the search method (string compare, regex, or XPath). And not to forgot: searches are persistable in the near future...

Flags will be also enhanced. Stay tuned!

Found via Jon Udell: an email-to-RSS gateway called MailBucket. Very useful to reduce the amount of filter rules needed in Outlook to sort them out... The impermanent feeds aren't really a problem. An Rss Reader seems to be more and more important like a Web Browser, or e-Mail Client. BTW: where is the NNTP-toRSS-gateway?

[Der Schockwellenreiter]

Cool feature: feedster in AIM, Yahoo and MSN. [The FuzzyBlog]

Clemens Vasters: I think they exist. [Aggregation by category]

Agree, here is a suggestion for another category domain -- the common NNTP groups should also work well: The item-level then looks like this:

 dotnet.framework.interop
 alt.religions

But it is still only a suggestion to an aggregator, how to group items. Don has some related nice ideas about Filters in News Aggregators.

A new one on the horizon: dasBlog. It's free, it's .NET based and seems to be the first official code branch of BlogX, that is still the most active GDN workspace with currently 297 members, followed by RSS Bandit (Aggregator), with 180 members.

ScottW points here to an article of Jeff Julian. But this is only the first step. One step further you ends up at bloglines.

Update: Thanks Jeff - I refreshed the link targets!

Found on Don Park's: Funky Defined. The first time Don Box post valid and funky is good, I feel bad about my feed wasn't funky. But now I'm happy to be not funky according to Dave. Good RSS, easy to aggregate. Currently no reason to replace it. But following the discussions about Echo, e.g. here, most of the people think of Echo as an RSS (2.0) replacement, that's still the wrong point of view. The idea behind it was to propose a standard to post items and comments to blogs. If you are a w.bloggar user (like me) you may have seen the setup screen with a huge list of different blogger backend API's. That's the point: the whole list should be replaced by one item: Echo. All the things like BlogThis, IBlogExtension, CommentAPI etc. including RSS itself, but not only can be expressed by Echo. Isn't that nice? That is the point, point.

I'm back from my holidays. It was a beautiful time in Italy/Venedig, but everything has once an end. Now I go on reading what happens while I'm offline:

• BlogWorks 1.2 will include new nice features, awaiting the end of the beta phase.
• RSS Bandit release 1.1.0.16 is available.
• GDN Workspaces will move to a improved version: my personal highlight is the new VS.NET Addin for the GDN source control.
• Comment API was changed.
• Pottermania leads to a Pottermeter on Amazon ).

Would be nice BlogWorks will be aware of spam on comments. Sam Ruby points to an interesting paper (and project) about semantic blogging: blogtalk.pdf Will Feedster be rolled over by commercial competition?

Don Park ideas about a newspaper GUI found here and here are point two on my TODO list for RSS Bandit. I would be pleased to be allowed to welcome Don as a member of the team! It seems he has already done the first steps implementing it.

coral aka Crystal Flame writes about opinionated linking. That sounds very interesting and perhaps get supported by feedster.
But how about a special opinion namespace on xhtml:

<a xmlns:my="http://semantic.web/link/opinions" class="positive" my:opinion="positive">positive link target</a>

...and the spider/aggregators life will be much easier.

Simon, Dare Obasanjo, Sam and Chris had a discussion about Extensibility. In general it is good idea to have them. On a complete new design it is always nice to have a look to current existing solutions: that of the VS7 IDE itself (was not a big change from VS6) or more interesting that of SharpDevelop (uses the framework to program the framework). They use a combination of xml/native API (interfaces) that works very well: xml describes the plug-in/add-in while the add-in itself use native API to communicate. To get the ideas take a hour to examine the code. A nice plug-in for an RSS reader would be an editor/blog post program. Also: for an blog maintenance program like w.bloggar or BlogX it would be nice to have a reader plug-in. So what is the "master" application to workaround the hen egg problem?

Syndirella dev. seems to be over. I had the same feeling as SharpReader and Harvester appeared on the horizon. But hey: giving up because coding goes out of fun and will be real hard work? Should not be a problem if the product succeeds. Just make the features a bit better and the product more stable and all folks will love you

Hey, nice: BlogX moves to GotDotNet. Welcome!

Following the discussion (Sam, BlogWorks,...) about how to implement CommentAPI, what (SOAP or XMLRPC) and why, trackback mechanisms, ping back etc. my feeling is that the overall direction will be somewhat like a NNTP network for RSS. All the blogs are simple small NNTP servers that "listens" each other (aka ping back) and provide the feed consumers with the posts (aka rss.xml), who has answered on it's own blog (aka trackback) and who has posted a direct comment. So why they all does not agree to the well proofed NNTP protocol (or similar in SOAP) as the basic and extend it by the RSS spec? Why they all start in the beginning? And each one try to make his solution the best over all and: a bit different than all the others. To be compatible now he starts to implement interface XYZ, because it is yet there and seems to be popular. Next, he also implement YZX... It really looks like that there should be a kind of agreement (may be handled by W3C). This would make the frontend programmers more happy ::no one need two tools that handles RSS (reading, posting):: and all the backend's interoperable.

Interesting and a must have for RssComponents: XHTML in the body. Sam seems to develope a syndirella clone that supports blog posting, so the result may be a similar tool like OExpress/NNTP but for RSS. Should have a closer look how they incorporate comments and trackback mechanisms.

Added today a cool feature to RSS Bandit: subscribe to feed(s) that should go to local installed Userland or AmphetaDesk applications. So a user can just click on these icons and get the "Add New Feed" dialog to provide the title and categoy, and press ok. A few more things (bugs, bad behaviors) are fixed now. Still missing: tray icon and "navigate to next unreaded feed item"... Joe Gregorio talks about the Comment API. This together with the trackback feature would match my idea of a a threaded view of feed items. Still listening what's going on there...

Looking around the last week at some available feed reader clients, I have found my personal favorite: FeedReader. Really handy tool. At first my favorite was NewsGator as I have outlook always open/running and the integration of the tool works well. But you have to invest some money (avowed: only a few $) and you cannot structure the feeds, that's important if you don't read only a handful feeds. Also looked over the NewsMonster, but it's really like it's name: a monster. At first, NS7 starts (10 sec's on my Latitude CPx H500GT ~497 Mhz), refreshing the feeds with the monster takes another 15 sec's startup of the java WebStart app and needs overall around 80 MByte RAM (20 NS7 / 60 the java app). Scott suggests another reader: NewzCrawler. Just like FeedReader, but a bit of overkill for my needs and I have to spent some $ again. Very interesting things happen on .NET: RSS Bandit, or some other tools addressing the handling of own blogs, like that Outblog (Exchange involved), or BlogX. Awaiting the moment to switch my own blog (together with the provider) to a .NET app...