Post Xmas MLPs
I’ve been largely offline, distracted, on the road, away from the keyboard, with family, and spending quality time with my SO. Sorry for the quiet. Hopefully I’ll get some quality writing time in today, some of it might make it online, but in the meantime, my brain is in a buzzy off kilter state from taking Jazz to the airport at 6am this morning, and drinking 2 large cups of coffee to counter act the effects of seeing dawn. So, without further ado, MLPs!
RSS
nntp//rss is a hybrid RSS client and NNTP server, turning any NNTP client (e.g. Pan) into an RSS newsreader (ala NetNewsWire). This is cool! NNTP is a cool protocol with mature clients that is wasting away. I, for one, am disappointed that Jon Udell‘s predicted a brave new world of practical groupware through NTTP failed to materialize.(though over at TechFed we provide NNTP, and web board versions of our internal mailing lists) (via sweetcode)
Ian has a good, is slightly wonky, piece on outstanding issues with the RSS 1.0 spec, particularily cleaning up ambigous language, and making it safe for RDF. Follow along on RSS-DEV. And check Ian’s RSS category for more good stuff.
Ben notes that spam bots are reading RSS feeds, which reminds me of the cool proposal for hashing contact info in FOAF
And everyone is linking to Mark’s inagural XML.com article, What is RSS?, which is a relatively fair handling of the RSS format cacophany, and a good intro to parsing XML in Python, but can’t resist slagging RSS 1.0 in favor of Dave’s pet project. Kendall, Mark is amazing, just keep him away from the RSS stories, ok?
And speaking of RSS 2.0, with Rafe’s RSS 2.0 outputting patch I think we’re nearing a new release of XML::RSS, which will be the first to include my output encoding, and attribute parsing patches.
Plus, whomever asked me for the link to AaronSW’s RDF Primer, there it was.
Politics
I was never able to read the LA Times coverage of the mass roundups, but the BBC has a decent story on them, Mass LA Muslim arrests condemned
via Lessig
The Spam Problem: Moving Beyond RBLs is an interesting discussion of the problems with RBLs.
Creative Commons has a weblog.
More Smarter Clients
Transmit is a Rendezvous-awareFTP client, but I can’t find anything on what Apple did to make the FTP server Rendezvous enabled. Or more importantly, is anyone adding this to Apache?
JRobb of Userland has an interesting entry on his ideal email client. He hilights the importances of threading and categorization, some of the same stuff I’ve been talking about with mail archives, and mentions. Reminds me, I keep meaning to check out zoe.
Very cool essay on the Agent Framework at the heart of Chandler.