River2 in EC2 

I'm working on an EC2 image that, when you boot it up, is a River2 installation. Since it's outside any firewall or NAT, it's ready to wire into the realtime feed network. Cloud-enabled feeds connect into Amazon's cloud. It's almost mathematical. I'm lovin it. I think we're getting close to the promised land. Hah.

I need a Domain Name Server with a REST interface 

Here's what I need:

1. A server I can use to manage hosts for a domain that I own that am currently not using. I have many. I will pick one.

2. Ideally I don't even want to run the server myself. Someone from the community of people who read this blog who are interested in distributed realtime message systems and want to play a role in their development. This project will not use a lot of bandwidth or server resources. It's primarily for development. The other users will be geeks like you and me.

3. The server must have a REST interface. I need at least one call. It takes three parameters (that I can think of, there may need to be more). The three parameters are: name of sub-domain (something like george), record name (I'll explain below) and the value. The same call can be used to change the value. Probably should send a string that's a MD5 hash of all the parameters plus my password. Something like that. You can tell me what it should be, but nothing too fancy.

The record name is a DNS record name. Not A or MX maybe TXT. The value is the address of their cloud-enabled feed. So george.loose.ly would be the name of George Metesky's realtime feed. If you want to follow him, you wouldn't have to use his feed address you'd use george.loose.ly. The client would just do a DNS lookup to find his feed.

4. If no one is willing to operate the server, I'll operate it. It must be something that runs on EC2.

5. I need it soon. I want to start developing a prototype. Tomorrow? Friday? Please, no later than Monday. It seems like a fairly easy thing to do.

Anyway that's the idea. Comments welcome of course. And DNS gurus if I've made some egregious errors, please let me know, gently.

Do you have a cloud-enabled feed? 

It's been over a week since Wordpress shipped their plug-in that added rssCloud capability. There are a bunch of feeds out there that are now cloud-enabled, actually a few million.

If you know of any especially interesting ones, news-oriented feeds that are frequently updated -- they could be pro or amateur, bloggers or BigPubs, commercial, academic or open source, left-wing or right, it doesn't matter -- what matters is that they are interesting and that they're real-time.

I'm looking for feeds to include in the default set of the next release of River2 which is coming together now. So if you know of some, either post a link as a comment here or send me an email with a link to the email address in the right margin on scripting.com.

What's wrong with this picture? 

It took me a few minutes staring at it to figure it out.

With a hat-tip to David Rowland, iPhone developer, who sent it to a mail list I'm on.