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Clues for testing your rssCloud app

Thursday, September 10, 2009 by Dave Winer.

This is a frequently asked question. 

If you're doing a cloud-aware app, a feed reader, skimmer or aggregator of any flavor or genre, you need feeds to test with. That was an issue a few weeks ago, but today it's not an issue at all. There's a huge variety of cloud-aware feeds updating all the time, for you to test with. 

The original feed is one of mine that's announcing three new states every 15 minutes, day and night rain or shine. Not very interesting, but quite reliable. 

Then there are the cloud-enabled feeds I've created from the people I follow on Twitter. Robert Scoble is the Old Faithful of this class. He's updating a lot, all the time. I have a changes.xml for all of these feeds, so you can see who's been updating.  

Any of my feeds will also show up on the log page on my server, as will your registration. If you're not getting through you won't see anything there. It's very important for debugging. 

And the new exciting way to generate a test feed is to create a wordpress.com blog, and post to it. Your feed has a cloud element and it will notify your app when you update. You control when it updates, so this makes it easy for testing. 

InBerkeley.com, a Wordpress blog we host ourselves is cloud-enabled. 

The feed for Scripting News is cloud-enabled as is the feed for Rebooting The News and Bad Hair Day. 

Of course you should refer to the Implementor's Guide as you implement.  

And finally, the punchline, the reason for all this michegas -- CNN has the first real news feed that's cloud-enabled. And it's a gem. When I got this one running in River2, I had to stop and pause and say, we got there.