Laughing Meme » privaterss

Private Feeds, and Atom as Open Pipe

Kellan — Tue, 25 Jan 2005 19:28:00 +0000

Tim Bray has a short entry on Private Syndication this morning, which I by and large agree with. Personal feeds make sense; they make sense from the perspective of business workflow , content model, and a scalability.

In order to make it happen we really need an updated list of what aggregator support which key features. HTTPAuth (at least Basic, if not Digest) and SSL are the fundamental building blocks of private feeds, with the addition that the major aggregator services need to be aware that content could be negoiated at auth time. The only list I know of is from July 2003.

I was puzzled and pleased to see his closing line:

One detail: I think that for this kind of content-critical, all-business feed, Atom is a more attractive choice than any of the RSS flavors.

Which is odd, because all of the time I’ve spent with the Atom community (which was admittedly still called Pie/Echo at the time) was focused on blogs to the exclusion of all else, and all arguments I made about the potential of pushing other forms of data over this new format were ignored/squelched.

For example, an Atom feed, requires every entry to have an author element, which is defined as a Person contruct. Who is the “person” in an Atom feed generated by your “bank account, credit card, or stock portfolio”?

Additionally perhaps the language of the spec needs to be updated with some namespace best practices, and some non-blog examples?

Magpie 0.6

Kellan — Sat, 24 Apr 2004 23:13:00 +0000

MagpieRSS 0.6 is out. It was a rather long alpha, hopefully that means people tried it, and it worked.

Key features are

support for private RSS feeds (via SSL, and HTTP Auth Basic) is working again.

refactored the code to support Atom’s “content constructs”, now supports: atom:title, atom:tagline, atom:copyright, atom:info, atom:summary, and atom:content. Thanks to Tim Bishop for feedback and encouragement.

update: – where “refactor” meant introduced bugs. MagpieRSS 0.61 is now out.

Atom

Quick review

Content is normalized. You can access core RSS elements using Atom field names and visa vera.
atom:content is stored in $item['atomcontent'] to avoid clashing with RSS modcontent.
content constructs are flattened (as if they were always mode="escaped")
Everything else is concatted into hierachical namespace.
I’ve made no attempt to support base64 encoding

Private RSS (and Atom)

To access a feed via SSL use the https:// scheme, e.g. https://example.org/index.rdf
To access a feed behind basic HTTP authentication include the username and password in the URL, e.g. http://username:password@example.org/index.rdf
And, no surprises here, you can combine them https://username:password@example.org/index.rdf

It would be useful if someone could step up and maintain a list of aggregators that support private RSS feeds, a matrix of support for SSL, HTTP Basic Auth, and HTTP Digest Auth, like Ted has done for GZIP encoding. (Danny started to put together a feature matrix but it looks like that project was stillborn.)

Secure aggregation, and private RSS feeds

Kellan — Thu, 06 Nov 2003 10:14:00 +0000

A partial list of RSS aggregators which support SSL/HTTPAuth

http://labs.silverorange.com/archives/2003/july/privaterss