I'm doing a big new thing with RSS, and that's got me thinking a lot about where I want to go after the first round of new functionality. I noticed that Andrew Shell came out with a new version of his open source rssCloud hub server, which we use here, that now supports WebSub. So I decided to find out if it was worth supporting.#
There isn't very much I'd have to do beyond adding two Atom elements to my feed, and an Atom namespace declaration in the top line of the file. So it's not an easy thing to do, because I don't see the need for Atom to be required for WebSub. How did they come to that conclusion? I can only imagine -- it's not as if RSS was unknown to them (I hope).#
I wish the WebSub group had gotten together with RSS people and come up with a neutral way to include a link to my WebSubHub. Bub, that's just good web sense. You want the max interop asap. Make it easy for people to support what you want them to support. You put personal jealousy ahead of interop, and that should be against the law in the Land of the Web. #
On the web our goal is interop. That's it. We should have worked together. Yeah I wish you wouldn't have done it, and proof you didn't need to is that Andrew was able to build it into his server, with some help from Claude btw. #
You know those obnoxious sites that pop up dialogs when they think you're about to leave, asking you to subscribe to their email newsletter? Well that won't do for Scripting News readers who are a discerning lot, very loyal, but that wouldn't last long if I did rude stuff like that. So here I am at the bottom of the page quietly encouraging you to sign up for the nightly email. It's got everything from the previous day on Scripting, plus the contents of the linkblog and who knows what else we'll get in there. People really love it. I wish I had done it sooner. And every email has an unsub link so if you want to get out, you can, easily -- no questions asked, and no follow-ups. Go ahead and do it, you won't be sorry! :-)