Scripting News: New RSS 2.0 spec site deployed

Scripting News, the weblog started in 1997 that bootstrapped the blogging revolution.

New RSS 2.0 spec site deployed

As I reported here and here, I've been slowly working on a project to "future-safe" the Harvard site that houses the RSS 2.0 spec. Yesterday, we started redirecting from the old site to the new one.

If you're pointing to the RSS 2.0 spec, you may want to point to its new location.

I found this project interesting, because I want to learn how to create a website that lives for decades, if not longer.

Here are some of the techniques I employed:

1. Everything is static. It can all be seved by a standard install of Apache, with no plug-ins or special software required.

2. It's self-contained. Every resource it uses is stored within the site's folder. That includes images, screen shots, example files, downloads.

3. Almost all the links are relative. As far as I know only one type of link is not, links to the blue arrow that marks an internal document link. If for some reason at some time in the future, cyber.law.harvard.edu should go offline, and the site has been moved to a new location, the blue arrows will appear as broken images. I may yet fix this one. I don't think there are any other hard-coded links in the site.

The goal was to make it so that a future webmaster, wanting to relocate the site, would just have to move the folder, add some redirects, and everything would work, more or less.

You can also download the whole site, from a link on the site's About page. You're free to mirror it if you like. And as always it's licensed under the Creative Commons, giving everyone the ability to create new things from it. (I also included the Frontier CMS tables the site was generated from, and the Manila site, in the Downloads folder.)

There was one example where I thought for a second about changing the spec, but I didn't; the <docs> element, which we say should point to the spec. It's an optional channel-level element. The example we provide is the previous location. I thought this was a good place for me to express the commitment to the spec being totally frozen, so I left it as it was. To change that value would have broken nothing but a promise, but promises are everything when it comes to specs that industries are built on, and the RSS 2.0 spec surely has become a foundation that many build on.

Of course if you spot any breakage, please let me know asap. Post a comment here, or send me a private email.

Last update: Thursday, June 3, 2010; 4:00:40 PM

~About the Author~

Dave Winer, 55, is a visiting scholar at NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. He pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software; former contributing editor at Wired Magazine, research fellow at Harvard Law School, entrepreneur, and investor in web media companies. A native New Yorker, he received a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, a Bachelor's in Mathematics from Tulane University and currently lives in New York City.

"The protoblogger." - NY Times.

"The father of modern-day content distribution." - PC World.

One of BusinessWeek's 25 Most Influential People on the Web.

"Helped popularize blogging, podcasting and RSS." - Time.

"The father of blogging and RSS." - BBC.

"RSS was born in 1997 out of the confluence of Dave Winer's 'Really Simple Syndication' technology, used to push out blog updates, and Netscape's 'Rich Site Summary', which allowed users to create custom Netscape home pages with regularly updated data flows." - Tim O'Reilly.

Mail: scriptingnews1mail at gmail dot com.

Mar May