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Salmon Protocol: Protocol Summary

2010 Jun 20, 2:05A more friendly summary of the Salmon Protocol -- the distributed commenting procotol. After telling Sarah I was reading about salmon, we watched the Salmon Dance video again.

2010 Jun 20, 1:18Protocol for doing distributed commenting and implemented by Google Buzz! "This document defines a lightweight, robust, and secure protocol for sending unsolicited notifications — especially comments and responses on syndicated feed content — to specified endpoints; along with rules to enable resulting content to itself be syndicated robustly and securely."

comment blog atom rss google buzz salmon reference specification protocol syndication technical

Easy: Connect your RSS or Atom feed to Google Buzz

2010 Mar 12, 1:28

It was relatively easy, although still more difficult than I would have guessed, to hook my bespoke website's Atom feed up to Google Buzz. I already have a Google email account and associated profile so Buzz just showed up in my Gmail interface. Setting it up it offered to connect to my YouTube account or my Google Chat account but I didn't see an option to connect to an arbitrary RSS or Atom feed like I expected.

But of course hooking up an arbitrary Atom or RSS feed is documented. You hook it up in the same manner you claim a website as your own via the Google Profile (for some reason they want to ensure you own the feed connected to your Buzz account). You do this via Google's social graph API which uses XFN or FOAF. I used XFN by simply adding a link to my feed to my Google profile (And be sure to check the 'This is a profile page about me' which ensures that a rel="me" tag is added to the HTML on your profile. This is how XFN works.) And by adding a corresponding link in my feed back to my Google profile page with the following:

atom:link rel="me" href="http://www.google.com/profiles/david.risney"

I used this Google tool to check my XFN connections and when I checked back the next day my feed showed up in Google Buzz's configuration dialog.

So more difficult than I would have expected (more difficult than just an 'Add your feed' button and textbox) but not super difficult. And yet after reading this Buzz from DeWitt Clinton I feel better about opting-in to Google's Social API.

technical atom google buzz rss social

The WHATWG Blog » Blog Archive » Sniffing for RSS 1.0 feeds served as text/html

2009 Sep 29, 10:54How Firefox and IE7&8 perform feed sniffing

rss feed atom mime mime-sniffing sniffing mimetype web browser html5 technical

Gimme Indie Game: the one button action film of AdamAtomic's Canabalt | Offworld

2009 Sep 2, 4:36"Consider it, maybe, the souped-up Tiger/Game & Watch LCD version of Mirror's Edge, then: you have one goal, and one button, and the goal is to run, and the button is jump, and the game comes from simply maintaining breakneck momentum as you leap from rooftop to randomly generated rooftop."

game flash mirrors-edge

Blog Layout and Implementation Improvements

2009 Jul 19, 11:44

I've redone my blog's layout to remind myself how terrible CSS is -- err I mean to play with the more advanced features of CSS 2.1 which are all now available in IE8. As part of the new layout I've included my Delicious links by default but at a smaller size and I've replaced the navigation list options with Technical, Personal and Everything as I've heard from folks that that would actually be useful. Besides the layout I've also updated the back-end, switching from my handmade PHP+XSLT+RSS/Atom monster to a slightly less horrible PHP+DB solution. As a result everything should be much much faster including search which, incidentally, is so much easier to implement outside of XSLT.

blog database redisgn xslt mysql homepage

XML.com: The Atom Link Model

2009 Jun 3, 9:55"A "via" link is simply a link back to the site where you found the article you're linking to. Atom has a link tag for this scenario: ." Is there an HTML version?

atom rss xml link syndication via

The Self-Describing Web

2009 Apr 7, 1:13A sort of vertical cross section of an overview of what the web should look like from HTTP & URIs to GRDDL & RDF. Oh, and there's a pretty graph at the bottom. "This finding describes how document formats, markup conventions, attribute values, and other data formats can be designed to facilitate the deployment of self-describing, Web-grounded Web content."

web w3c xml html http semanticweb microformats xhtml atom grddl rdfa rdf

A Reporter at Large: Atomic John: Reporting and Essays: The New Yorker

2008 Dec 29, 2:20"But the most accurate account of the bomb's inner workings-an unnervingly detailed reconstruction, based on old photographs and documents-has been written by a sixty-one-year-old truck driver from Waukesha, Wisconsin, named John Coster-Mullen, who was once a commercial photographer, and has never received a college degree."

via:swannman bomb atom-bomb atomic-bomb history goverment nuclear physics security research science

Investigation of a Few Application Protocols (Updated)

2008 Oct 25, 6:51

Windows allows for application protocols in which, through the registry, you specify a URL scheme and a command line to have that URL passed to your application. Its an easy way to hook a webbrowser up to your application. Anyone can read the doc above and then walk through the registry and pick out the application protocols but just from that info you can't tell what the application expects these URLs to look like. I did a bit of research on some of the application protocols I've seen which is listed below. Good places to look for information on URI schemes: Wikipedia URI scheme, and ESW Wiki UriSchemes.

Some Application Protocols and associated documentation.
Scheme	Name	Notes
search-ms	Windows Search Protocol	The search-ms application protocol is a convention for querying the Windows Search index. The protocol enables applications, like Microsoft Windows Explorer, to query the index with parameter-value arguments, including property arguments, previously saved searches, Advanced Query Syntax, Natural Query Syntax, and language code identifiers (LCIDs) for both the Indexer and the query itself. See the MSDN docs for search-ms for more info. Example: search-ms:query=food
Explorer.AssocProtocol.search-ms	Windows Search Protocol
OneNote	OneNote Protocol	From the OneNote help: `/hyperlink "pagetarget"` - Starts OneNote and opens the page specified by the pagetarget parameter. To obtain the hyperlink for any page in a OneNote notebook, right-click its page tab and then click Copy Hyperlink to this Page. Example: onenote:///\\GUMMO\Users\davris\Documents\OneNote%20Notebooks\OneNote%202007%20Guide\Getting%20Started%20with%20OneNote.one#section-id={692F45F5-A42A-415B-8C0D-39A10E88A30F}&end
callto	Callto Protocol	ESW Wiki Info on callto Skype callto info NetMeeting callto info Example: callto://+12125551234
itpc	iTunes Podcast	Tells iTunes to subscribe to an indicated podcast. iTunes documentation. C:\Program Files\iTunes\iTunes.exe /url "%1" Example: itpc:http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast.php?id=35
iTunes.AssocProtocol.itpc
pcast
iTunes.AssocProtocol.pcast
Magnet	Magnet URI	Magnet URL scheme described by Wikipedia. Magnet URLs identify a resource by a hash of that resource so that when used in P2P scenarios no central authority is necessary to create URIs for a resource.
mailto	Mail Protocol	RFC 2368 - Mailto URL Scheme. Mailto Syntax Opens mail programs with new message with some parameters filled in, such as the to, from, subject, and body. Example: mailto:?to=david.risney@gmail.com&subject=test&body=Test of mailto syntax
WindowsMail.Url.Mailto	Mail Protocol
MMS	mms Protocol	MSDN describes associated protocols. Wikipedia describes MMS. "C:\Program Files\Windows Media Player\wmplayer.exe" "%L" Also appears to be related to MMS cellphone messages: MMS IETF Draft.
WMP11.AssocProtocol.MMS	mms Protocol
secondlife	[SecondLife]	Opens SecondLife to the specified location, user, etc. SecondLife Wiki description of the URL scheme. "C:\Program Files\SecondLife\SecondLife.exe" -set SystemLanguage en-us -url "%1" Example: secondlife://ahern/128/128/128
skype	Skype Protocol	Open Skype to call a user or phone number. Skype's documentation Wikipedia summary of skype URL scheme "C:\Program Files\Skype\Phone\Skype.exe" "/uri:%l" Example: skype:+14035551111?call
skype-plugin	Skype Plugin Protocol Handler	Something to do with adding plugins to skype? Maybe. "C:\Program Files\Skype\Plugin Manager\skypePM.exe" "/uri:%1"
svn	SVN Protocol	Opens TortoiseSVN to browse the repository URL specified in the URL. C:\Program Files\TortoiseSVN\bin\TortoiseProc.exe /command:repobrowser /path:"%1"
svn+ssh
tsvn
webcal	Webcal Protocol	Wikipedia describes webcal URL scheme. Webcal URL scheme description. A URL that starts with webcal:// points to an Internet location that contains a calendar in iCalendar format. "C:\Program Files\Windows Calendar\wincal.exe" /webcal "%1" Example: webcal://www.lightstalkers.org/LS.ics
WindowsCalendar.UrlWebcal.1	Webcal Protocol
zune	Zune Protocol	Provides access to some Zune operations such as podcast subscription (via Zune Insider). "c:\Program Files\Zune\Zune.exe" -link:"%1" Example: zune://subscribe/?name=http://feeds.feedburner.com/wallstrip.
feed	Outlook Add RSS Feed	Identify a resource that is a feed such as Atom or RSS. Implemented by Outlook to add the indicated feed to Outlook. Feed URI scheme pre-draft document "C:\PROGRA~2\MICROS~1\Office12\OUTLOOK.EXE" /share "%1"
im	IM Protocol	RFC 3860 IM URI scheme description Like mailto but for instant messaging clients. Registered by Office Communicator but I was unable to get it to work as described in RFC 3860. "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office Communicator\Communicator.exe" "%1"
tel	Tel Protocol	RFC 5341 - tel URI scheme IANA assignment RFC 3966 - tel URI scheme description Call phone numbers via the tel URI scheme. Implemented by Office Communicator. "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office Communicator\Communicator.exe" "%1"

(Updated 2008-10-27: Added feed, im, and tel from Office Communicator)

technical application protocol shell url windows

Tag Metadata in Feeds

2008 Aug 25, 10:13

As noted previously, my page consists of the aggregation of my various feeds and in working on that code recently it was again brought to my attention that everyone has different ways of representing tag metadata in feeds. I made up a list of how my various feed sources represent tags and list that data here so that it might help others in the future.

Tag markup from various sources
Source	Feed Type	Tag Markup Scheme	One Tag Per Element	Tag Scheme URI	Human / Machine Names	Example Markup
LiveJournal	Atom	atom:category	yes	no	no	, (source)
LiveJournal	RSS 2.0	rss2:category	yes	no	no	`technical` (soure)
WordPress	RSS 2.0	rss2:category	yes	no	no	, (source)
Delicious	RSS 1.0	dc:subject	no	no	no	`photosynth photos 3d tool` (source)
Delicious	RSS 2.0	rss2:category	yes	yes	no	`domain="http://delicious.com/SequelGuy/"> hulu` (source)
Flickr	Atom	atom:category	yes	yes	no	`term="seattle" scheme="http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/" />` (source)
Flickr	RSS 2.0	media:category	no	yes	no	`scheme="urn:flickr:tags"> seattle washington baseball mariners` (source)
YouTube	RSS 2.0	media:category	no	no	no	`label="Tags"> bunny rabbit yawn cadbury` (source)
LibraryThing	RSS 2.0	No explicit tag metadata.	no	no	no	n/a, (source)

Tag markup scheme
Tag Markup Scheme	Notes	Example
Atom Category atom:category `xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"`	category/@term Required category name. category/@scheme Optional IRI id'ing the categorization scheme. category/@label Optional human readable category name.	`term="catName" scheme="tag:deletethis.net,2008:tagscheme" label="category name in human readable format"/>`
RSS 2.0 category rss2:category empty namespace	category/@domain Optional string id'ing the categorization scheme. category/text() Required category name. The value of the element is a forward-slash-separated string that identifies a hierarchic location in the indicated taxonomy. Processors may establish conventions for the interpretation of categories.	`domain="tag:deletethis.net,2008:tagscheme"> MSFT`
Yahoo Media RSS Module category media:category `xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/"`	category/text() Required category name. category/@domain Optional string id'ing the categorization scheme.	`scheme="http://dmoz.org" label="Ace Ventura - Pet Detective"> Arts/Movies/Titles/A/Ace_Ventura_Series/Ace_Ventura_-_Pet_Detective`
Dublin Core subject dc:subject `xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"`	subject/text() Required category name. Typically, the subject will be represented using keywords, key phrases, or classification codes. Recommended best practice is to use a controlled vocabulary.	`humor`

Update 2009-9-14: Added WordPress to the Tag Markup table and namespaces to the Tag Markup Scheme table.

feed media delicious technical atom youtube yahoo rss tag

Gmail integration with Internet Explorer 8

2008 Apr 3, 9:00

With the new features of IE8 there's several easy ways to integrate Gmail, Google's web mail service, for mail composition, searching, and monitoring that I enjoy using.

Composition: I made a Send via Gmail activity that allows you to select some text, a document, or link and via the activity menu open a new tab to compose a new message with the selection. Go to my activity page and click "Send via Gmail" (source) to install it. I found info on the gmail composition URL in the comments of this gmail howto article and used that in the activity. I talked about activities previously.
Search: I've made a search provider that searches your gmail account. See my search provider page and select 'Gmail' (source) to install the Gmail search provider. Search providers aren't new to IE8 but this fits in with Gmail integration in IE. Again in the comments of another howto I found information on a Gmail search URL.
Monitor: New to IE8 is authenticated feed support and favorites bar monitoring which combined with the Gmail inbox feed means you can see when you get new mail in your favorites bar in IE. To do this, navigate to the feed https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom, click 'Subscribe to this feed', then click on the Add button in the upper left (the star with plus icon) and select 'Monitor on Favorites Bar' to add this as a monitored item in the favorites bar. Next, right click on the new item in your favorites bar, open the properties dialog, and enter your Gmail username and password into the new username and password fields. Now when you get new mail the Gmail feed item will shine and bold and you'll be able to get to new messages in the dropdown. I described monitored feed items previously.

activity gmail search howto google ie feed rss opensearch

GML | GeoRSS :: Geographically Encoded Objects for RSS feeds

2008 Mar 4, 12:27A description of GeoRSS: "Geography Markup Language (GML) is an XML grammar written in XML Schema for the modelling, transport, and storage of geographic information"

georss rss feed atom geo reference standards xml

Amateur Time Hackers Play With Atomic Clocks at Home

2007 Dec 12, 9:21Article on amateur atomic clock enthusiasts

clock time wired geek technology science atomic-clock article via:boingboing

FeedSync 1.0 Spec (formerly known as SSE)

2007 Dec 6, 12:24The spec for FeedSync which allows for synchronizing RSS and Atom files among multiple machines.

sse rss atom feedsync feed specification microsoft

Date Time Formats

2007 Sep 27, 2:17Starting on a new simple project I wanted to get the history of my Delicious links. Delicious has an export tool available via the settings section so I thought I'd try that. However, the links aren't exported in XML not even in XHTML but rather in HTML. Shocking. An example:

"Don't Tase Me, Bro!" (UF Student Tasered Remix)

Remix of the 'Don't tase me, bro!' guy getting tasered.At this point I'm already not going to use this file because its in HTML but I'm even more disgusted by those date time values. Raymond Chen of the Old New Thing posted about recognizing timestamps and timestamp sentinel values. From the first blog post and with the use of a calculator for base conversion one can tell that those are UNIX style timestamps counting the number of seconds since 1970.

It reminds me of my hatred for the MIME date time format I developed working on my webpage's server side parsing of atom and RSS. Atom is of course my favorite as Atom uses the Internet date time format described in the following documents. Here's an example of one 2007-09-27T020:50:00.000-08:00

On the other hand the evil and villainous RSS uses the MIME date time format now described in the more recent IETF MIME standard. Here's an example Thu, 27 Sep 2007 20:50:00 -0800
The Internet date time format has the advantage of being so easy to sort. An alphabetic sort with normal C-style collation rules of strings containing Internet date times will also sort them chronologically. This is not the case for the MIME date time due to the preceding day of the week and the spelled out month name. This also means that when producing these you have to figure out the day of the week and when parsing them you have to match month names rather than just parsing out numbers. Anyway now days if I see mention of a date time in a new proposed standard or spec I be sure to point out the numerous advantages of the Internet date time format.

date xml html feed time technical date-time code atom rss

Video Woes

2007 Aug 15, 3:30I've been experimenting with adding video to my webpage. I tried to embed video in my livejournal blog posts previously however ran into some issues with that. When creating the LJ post I added an tag but when I submit that tags turned into an

 pointing to a page with my video. Only the first of these appears to work. The RSS item for the corresponding LJ entry has a tag instead of my video. This is even less
useful than the iframe because it uses some internal id to identify the embed rather than a URI or something I could actually use.<br />
<br />
As a place to store videos and possibly as a means around the previous issue <a href="http://www.youtube.com/sequelguy">I tried youtube</a>. YouTube provides <a href="http://youtube.com/rssls">RSS
feeds for their users</a> which is great for me since my page is made from combining RSS and Atom feeds. I've incorporated it into my site already although I'm still in need of a better icon, I don't
have a comments link at the bottom, and I'd like the text to flow around the video. I was able to hide the automatically added portion of the RSS item I didn't like using CSS. On the topic of YouTube
not giving me a lot of control over the description, it doesn't seem to allow HTML in the description of a video. I don't particularly care about free form HTML if only I could get some links!<br />
<br />
Well I didn't try very hard to get HTML into my YouTube video description so there maybe something I can do about that. Otherwise, I think the better solution is to post videos to YouTube only as
storage like I do with photos on Flickr and use LiveJournal to talk more about particular videos. To get around the LJ video issues, I'm going to try creating some new tags in my blog post that LJ
hopefully won't mess with and will hopefully make it cleanly into my RSS feed. At that point I can use XSL to turn the new tags into the appropriate embed/object tags for the video.

technical youtube video personal livejournal homepage

Atomic Raygun Attack!!

2007 May 24, 9:16Band has free mp3s including album based on the Futurama episode 'The Sting'

futurama music humor video mp3

IE7 Feed Display Update

2007 May 22, 3:22I've created an update to the IE7 feed display.

After working on my update to the XML source view I tried running my resourcelist program on other IE DLLs including ieframe. I found that one of the resources in ieframe is the XSLT used to turn an RSS feed into the IE7 feed display.

My first thought for this was that I could embed enclosures into the feed display. For instance, have controls for youtube.com videos or podcast audio files directly in the feed display. However, I found that I can't use object or embed tags that rely on ActiveX controls in the page or in frames in the feed display.

With that through I decided I could at least add support for some RSS extensions. Thanks to IE7's RSS platform which provides a normalized view of RSS feeds it was really easy to do this. I went to several popular RSS feeds and RSS feeds that I like and took a look at the source to see what extensions I might want to add support for.

For digg.com I added support for their RSS extension which includes digg count, and submitter name and icon. I added the digg count in a box on the right and tried to make it fit in stylistically. For the iTunes RSS extension I add the feed icon, feed author, and descriptions. I was surprised by how much of the podcasts content was missing from the feed view. I also added support for a few other misc things: the slash RSS extension's section and department, the feed description to the top of the feed display, and the atom author icon.

I wonder what other goodies lurk in IE's resources...

feed res slashdot digg resource itunes technical browser ie rss extension