Dear Amar Ghandi, Group Program Manager of the Windows RSS team,
You guys actually invented the RSS parser and feed API? Your patent claim is baffling:

“A content syndication platform, such as a web content syndication platform, manages, organizes and makes available for consumption content that is acquired from the Internet. In at least some embodiments, the platform can acquire and organize web content, and make such content available for consumption by many different types of applications. These applications may or may not necessarily understand the particular syndication format. An application program interface (API) exposes an object model which allows applications and users to easily accomplish many different tasks such as creating, reading, updating, deleting feeds and the like.”

That describes tons of applications both corporate and open source. Any programmatic API like ROME comes to mind. Did you create the RSS Platform in Windows Vista before all of them? Please do tell, I’m all ears.
(More objections by Dave Johnson here. CNET coverage here.)

Just announced:

A new release of the RSS and Atom Utilities (ROME) project 0.9 (beta) is now available on the project’s Java.net website. This new release includes fixes to Atom relative URI resolution, easier parsing for RSS feeds that use , better support for mapping of RSS to and from Atom and numerous small fixes.

Here are some quick links to the relevant release docs and files.
• Release page
• Change list
• Javadocs

Direct link to downloads:
• rome-0.9.tar.gz
• rome-0.9.zip

See Dave Johnson’s full announcement for more information on what’s included in this release.

Microsoft has released a beta version of UniveRSS to show off Windows Vista’s graphicy goodness. It is a 3D browser for RSS feeds… that’s right, 3D. If you’re scratching your head at the usefulness of that kind of environment, keep scratching.

I scratched, but I couldn’t resist. I don’t have Vista, but IE7 and .NET 3 are enough to get it working on my WinXPSP2 machine. The performance wasn’t great, but it was enough to see what they’re trying to accomplish.

The short story is: They’re showing off some really simple 3D stuff, not an RSS reader. It picks up feeds from your IE7 feeds folder, then displays a spinning cube with the feed’s image displayed on each side. Click the cube to get a in-world browser, and right-click to get out of it again. The browser doesn’t even support the full HTML set from IE7, so formatting is rudimentary.

Minority Report for RSS it aint.

With simplistic 3D presentation and substandard feed presentation, I’m scratching my head on why they released it. I’ll invoke “Remember Its a Beta” from my Microsoft Max RSS experience and give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt, for now.

However, I just don’t think this kind of interface makes for good browsing of RSS and Atom content. 3D space is better for link analysis and exploring hyper-dimensional data that can’t be easily visualized in 2D. (I’m doing just that sort of thing at work right now with Java3D, so I’ve got a little background in this opinion.)

In the meantime, here are some screenshots to let you see what UniveRSS looks like without needing to install it:

The Next Morning Update

It occured to me in the shower this morning that Microsoft probably isn’t trying to show off their 3D skillz, nor an RSS reader, nor a revolutionary way to display information.  They’re providing a demo with source code of Avalon AKA Windows Presentation Foundation.  Now that makes sense.

O’Reilly (the company, not Tim) asked me to put together a Short Cut on building RSS 2.0 feeds. The intended audience is people who would like a nice starter guide to building feeds and best practices, but don’t want to invest in a printed book just yet.

How to Build an RSS 2.0 Feed

Something unique to this piece is the stated intent to follow the RSS Advisory Board’s profile recommendations as much as possible. (AFAIK this is the first commercially-published work to do so.)

I’d like to repeat my hearty thanks to James Snell and Simon St. Laurent for their contributions.

The title page doesn’t give much of a sense what is inside, so I thought it might be helpful to give a full table of contents. The “Anatomy” chapter in particular goes through every RSS element in detail, giving examples of usage and identifying best practices where applicable.

HOW TO BUILD AN RSS 2.0 FEED
TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter 1: How an RSS Feed Works

• RSS and Other Syndicated Feed Formats
• XML: The Foundation of RSS
• The Basics of XML
• Digging Further into XML
• XML and the RSS 2.0 specification
• The RSS Advisory Board

Chapter 2: Anatomy of an RSS 2.0 Feed

• The RSS Document
• The channel Element
• [… Each subelement of channel; too many to list …]
• The item Element
• [… Each subelement of item; too many to list …]

Chapter 3: RSS Best Practices

• Cascading Style Sheets in RSS
• JavaScript in RSS
• Validating Your RSS Feed
• Browser-Friendly Feeds
• Using XSLT
• Third Party Hosting

Chapter 4: Building RSS in Code

• PHP 4
• Java 1.4 with JAXP
• Java 1.4 with ROME
• Podcasting with RSS

Chapter 5: Podcasting with RSS Modules and Extensions for RSS

• Dublin Core
• Content
• CommentAPI
• Geo
• Apple iTunes

Chapter 6: Great Ideas for Using RSS

• Blog Engines
• News
• Shopping
• Government and Public Service
• Weather Updates

Index of Terms

The feed I use powered by MySyndicaat to look for interesting RSS and Atom stories picked up an unusual hit this morning… a project on ScriptLance.com:

RSS/Atom Writer/Generator

In search of RSS 2.0/Atom writer/generator in the form of PHP class to extract defined specific data fields. The same concept as the RSS feeds (on the fly) like Flicker.com .I.E (http://www.flickr.com/photos/missfit666/)

It should be a simplified, reusable and commented code. It should also include Automatic site URL detection by simply referencing the siteurl , $file = somefile.php. etc..

I’ve seen and written a few manual RSS generators in PHP, but nothing that would approach a library like Java’s ROME. I’ve got to believe there is a robust PHP library out there already. Anyone know of one?