I rarely repost something by another author, but this one is important. In the hopes that by spreading the word we can help this family come home safely…
Repost of original by Leo Laporte on Fri, 2006-12-01 01:36.
I just received this disturbing news. If any of you knows anything please help…
CNET editor and former Fresh Gear contributor and Lab analyst James Kim has been missing since Saturday. ANY word, especially from people in the Oregon area is appreciated. The information is all below from the official investigation by the SFPD.
Missing Family Includes: James, Kati, Penelope (age 4.5) and Sabine (6 months). Last name is Kim
Overview: The Kim Family left San Francisco on November 17th on a road trip to the Pacific Northwest. They had Thanksgiving in Seattle with family and then drove to Portland. They were last seen by their friends in Portland whom they had brunch with on Saturday, November 25. According to their friends, their plans were to drive out to the town of Gold Beach on the Oregon Coast and then make their way back to San Francisco. James was expected back at work on Tuesday, November 28th. When no one had heard from him by Wednesday morning employees at the Kims’ two stores and his colleagues at CNET began to make phone calls to his family and friends to inquire of his whereabouts. Presently, the SFPD is investigating the case.”
Update Dec 4, 2006:
Kim, Penelope, and Sabine have been found and are safe. James is still missing.
Update Dec 6, 2006:
Sad news. James Kim died on his trek to find help for his family.
These feeds are well-hidden on the site at the moment, so there is no way of knowing just how many feeds there might be coming out of DHS.
If you would like to see an official directory of RSS feeds on the DHS site, I encourage you to drop their webmaster a note through their contact form. (Select “website issues” from the dropdown list, then proceed.)
“RSS is the world’s most successful application of XML.”
“The dream of Atom is easy to understand: Every cellphone, every camera, every spreadsheet, every word processor, every browser should now have a ‘Publish File.’”
So says Tim Bray, who is a major contributor to the XML and Atom web standards. He is the Director of Web Technologies at Sun Microsystems.
I transcribed his comments (starting about 3:20 into the clip) below:
Matthew Langham: What’s your take now, on let’s say, the syndication formats? Have you seen - what sort of outlook do you see for Atom or even for RSS and/or Atom?
Tim Bray: Right, okay, so RSS is the world’s most successful application of XML. You know - immensely, hugely successful. RSS, for simple, human-to-human, news-oriented blog feeds is perfectly satisfactory. It doesn’t work very well for me because I like to write my own XML and use XML syntax characters in my titles, so that blows up RSS readers.
So, the Atom syndication format is getting pretty good uptake. All the major blogging engines now support it - not all by default, but [unintelligible] them support them by default. But the interesting part of Atom is the Publishing Protocol…
So the Publishing Protocol is an incredibly thin very simple layering over HTTP to pushing anything - words, pictures, movies - onto the web. What’s astounding is that we don’t have a good protocol for doing that. The closest thing is WebDAV. But WebDAV, the implementations are shaky, and the problem is that what we want to do is empower everything, starting with these things [holds up cellphone] to be publishing platforms.
And so the big trick about Atom is if you want to put something new on the web, you don’t have to say its name. You just say, “Here’s the text, or here’s the bits for the picture” and the server comes back and says, “Okay, here’s where I put it, here’s the URL for where I put it.” So the server owns all the problems of managing the service…. a much better division of labor.
So the dream of Atom is easy to understand: Every cellphone, every camera, every spreadsheet, every word processor, every browser should now [have] a “Publish File.” You know, [it] should be: “File Save” and “File Publish.” Everything should be publishing-enabled. So Atom is the protocol to underlie that. And I think it’s going to work… you know, Google’s implementing it, Nokia’s going to implement it on the handsets.
… From Microsoft Live Labs that takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, and displays them in a reconstructed three-dimensional space.
You can then navigate that space as though in a virtual world, looking at the pictures along the way.
Words and screenshots simply can’t convey how it works. See it for yourself:
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.
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 RSSModules and Extensions for RSS
As noted 
