Saletastic.com has announced a service whereby you can get an RSS feed of coupons from over 130 merchants. You do need to create an account (to manage your options), but you do not need to provide an email address. You can also add the coupons to your Yahoo, MSN, or Google Portal (ig) homepage. Very nice.

Here’s an example feed: http://www.saletastic.com/rss/userrss/test.rss

The RSS 2.0 feed has a couple of minor validation problems (as of this writing), but all-in-all a nice way to go. Since you don’t know until you sign up, here’s an exhaustive list of the merchants who currently provide coupons through the service:

Sometimes old ideas can still be good ones. Now where’s the coupon for those nose hair trimmers?

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.)

Mike Sansone did a BlogTalkRadio show this morning (listen here) that talks about how he gets business people up to speed on RSS, feed readers, and general tips for using RSS efficiently.

One point that Mike made is that non-technical people look at feeds like a microwave… they don’t want to know about the neutrons and the power configuration. They want to know which button to push to make popcorn. The real power of the RSS/Atom story isn’t in how it works, but in what it does for you.

This goes back to Greg Reinacker’s comment in 2005 that “RSS is plumbing.” The specification merits of RSS or Atom will only win over the geekerati. Everybody else just wants to know where the popcorn button is.

So how do we make RSS as easy as microwave popcorn? Personally, I don’t see this happening until every email client - desktop and online - has free, robust support for RSS feeds. The biggest barrier I see in my workplace is resistance to “yet another application to monitor.” If feed items show up with their email, suddenly it isn’t so bad. Unfortunately, few email client feed readers are both good AND free. If GMail ever integrated Google Reader, that would be a killer, killer app.

Now where’s that butter?

What does it mean when your name is used in a Splog?   This one popped up for me recently:

“Mark Woodman Ca. Prison Conservation Camp Firefighter“

Me, Canada, prison, and… firefighters.   I really don’t like where this theme is going.  Within the “post” are also mentions of comparative anatomy (!), chemical warfare, and Red Hat 8.

If this means something, I don’t wanna know.   I’m also not planning a trip to Canada anytime soon.

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.