Sam Ruby

A great summary why Atom is better [1]. Here's an oldie but a goodie regarding RSS vs Atom [2] [1]: https://ittavern.com/difference-between-rss-and-atom/ [2]: http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/Rss20AndAtom10Compared

Follow up: https://intertwingly.net/blog/2025/10/17/Frozen-String-Literals-Redux.…

I wholeheartedly recommend MacOS for people like my mom, who certainly doesn't need to fire up something like Emacs. However, for those who like to explore technology in creative ways (hackers, in other words), and want to deeply understand the systems they use, the freedom involved with a system like Linux is still the place to be, IMO. And for when you're just getting stuff done, I don't think it poses any major challenges these days; or at least it doesn't for me. If you're a graphics guy and need Photoshop, clearly things are different. Edit: http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/2011/08/09/Upgrade-Unavailable

The truth, (and a big part of the reason why we haven't already tried to solve this), is that it hasn't posed a problem for folks who are building apps in CoffeeScript. The transformation is straightforward enough that by glancing at the line number mentioned in the JavaScript, it's immediately obvious where the problem is in the CoffeeScript. That said, I'd love to have a true solid debugger. The browser vendors (starting as soon as Firefox 4, perhaps) have plans to add better support for compile-to-JavaScript languages. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=618650 http://intertwingly.net/blog/2010/11/25/Hobgoblin-of-Little-Minds

If you decentralize you don't need to monetize. (It's good for everyone except entrepreneurs). I've got plans in the back of my brain for combining linkblogs, the Atom Publishing Protocol and something like http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/2006/09/03/MeMeme into a decentralized version of reddit/digg/news.yc, but I already have too many projects on the go. The really nice thing about the idea is that it allows for a lot more experimentation with the best ways of aggregating and sorting through the massive quantities of URLs that are available. Right now only big players like Reddit and Digg and have big enough data sets to really experiment, and they're naturally reluctant to mess with a formula that's working for them.

Hot take: we should revive ATOM instead. RSS and ATOM are both nearly always machine generated and machine read so this may seem trivial to argue, but for those who are interesting in seeing the difference, this is a good article http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/Rss20AndAtom10Compared -------- When I wrote a forum software a while back, it was trivial to not only add a feed for new threads but also for new comments (per thread and board-wide). Made it very easy to monitor updates on all my devices. Most wikis have RSS/ATOM feeds for recent changes which is a great power feature for admins. Mastodon is atom-based, I believe. Early twitter supported RSS / ATOM feeds which arguably made it easier to follow hashtags or news accounts. Another benefit of RSS/ATOM is that you can plug them into chatbots or use them to mirror content. I would love to see syndication come back to the spotlight!

Some of these problems are inherent to PHP, but the WordPress team has decided to work with PHP, therefore the problems of PHP are also legitimate issues to raise with the WordPress team. That is to say, in accepting PHP as their language, the WordPress team must take responsibility for that choice, and that includes confronting the security risks that arise from the choice of language. Sam Ruby made this same point, and he said it much better than I can hope to (he is responding to Matt Mullenweg in the comments): "Those that contribute to PHP apparently feel the most pain concerning support of multiple versions. Yes, you can argue that they brought this upon themselves; but it is worth noting that at this point you are along for the ride. When I’m in similar circumstances, I tend to consider the karma implications of cursing the driver. In any case, some people who are along for the ride with WordPress happened to cross my path yesterday. Perhaps you are in a position where you can help them. To my eyes, I see a bug that was reported on WordPress 2.1, and the milestone on that defect is currently set to 2.3. Hopefully the users affected won’t have a tendency to kick, or scream, or rant too much." http://intertwingly.net/blog/2007/07/17/Popular-Sovereignty There is another way to look at this. Microsoft has faced 30 years of criticism of its decision to promote features rather than security, a problem that began with DOS and lasted at least until Vista showed…

If anyone is looking for a quick comparison of Atom and RSS formats: http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/Rss20AndAtom10Compared#samples I would also encourage Atom over RSS, the specification is simpler and less ambiguous.

I supplied the right link. I suppose we're reading the page differently. If you don't think that page is evidence enough that CoffeeScript inspired much of ES6 then I suppose we experienced the times differently. Here's a nice article showing that CoffeeScript was on Brendan's mind when he was working on Harmony (ES6): https://brendaneich.com/2010/11/paren-free/ He calls Ruby/Python/CoffeeScript "unsyntax" and he doesn't like it I think :P edit: apparently he does like it, he just doesn't think it would work on the web, he elaborates here: http://intertwingly.net/blog/2010/11/25/Hobgoblin-of-Little-Minds

It seems that RSS just caught on as the name everyone remembers. Atom is indeed better [0]. [0]: http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/Rss20AndAtom10Compared

Atom, in my opinion; it cleaned up some problems with RSS. http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/Rss20AndAtom10Compared

Atom: see http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/Rss20AndAtom10Compared for details but it basically boils down to RSS having gaps and inconsistencies which are compounded by the spec being essentially fossilized and David Winer being famously difficult to deal with.

This is FUD. Rails actually does have UTF-8 support, and it's on by default, to the point of fixing bugs in IE to make sure everything is UTF-8: http://intertwingly.net/blog/2010/07/29/Rails-and-Snowmen

Alright, I intended to post this: http://intertwingly.net/blog/2010/07/18/Community-over-Code which is about the link I posted, so...

I read this discussion when it showed up a few days ago, but at my work, fsf.org is accessible. Today, though, I was reading this article on Reacreational SVG (http://intertwingly.net/blog/2007/02/16/Recreational-SVG) and find that the linked Open Solutions Alliance page (http://www.opensolutionsalliance.org/) is blocked by my employer's filtering (BlueCoat), so I'm somewhat distressed. I gather OSA is a benevolent organization (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Solutions_Alliance) and certainly not 'Scam/Questionable/Illegal' as the blocking page claims. Ach, schade.

I wasn't actively involved, but as far as I know, the old Atom wiki was the birthing place of Atom. Sam Ruby hosted it on his site, and got a lot of discussion around the idea of a new syndication format. I believe it was called Echo for a long while. http://intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/FrontPage

Use delegation (indirection) to use one of those providers, but with your own URL. http://intertwingly.net/blog/2007/01/03/OpenID-for-non-SuperUsers This allows you to change the underlying implementation at any time.

I use Google Reader for low-volume feeds that I care about (i.e., I want to read every post). I set up a Planet Venus[1] page for high-volume feeds where I don't care if I miss some posts. It shows only the 100 most recent items, so if I don't check it for a few days they don't pile up. A cron job updates it every 6 hours, so I don't keep checking it for new items all the time. It's a static web page, and I included a simple version with no stylesheet for reading on my phone. 1. http://intertwingly.net/code/venus/

For news feed you should use a planet aggregator like Planet Venus: http://intertwingly.net/code/venus/ It generates a static html page that I read once a day. And why don't you switch to ff ?

I think this represents life before bug tracking systems: XML Parsing Error: not well-formed Location: http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/2008/07/18/Life-after-Bug-Tracking-Sy… Line Number 42, Column 101:String.fromCharCode(0xdc00+n%0x400);}else{return '&#'+ncr+';'}});for(var i=body.length-1;i>0;i--){if(cp1252[body.charCodeAt(i)]){body=body.substr(0,i)+'&#'+cp1252[body.charCodeAt(i)]+';'+body.substr(i+1);}} ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------^ But seriously, I'm curious what he has to say. In lots of companies the bug tracking overhead overwhelms the actual work done.

I haven't used Python since 2004, and never became an expert. But isn't is possible to achieve most of what LINQ does in Python? I know in Ruby it's possible to call sort with a block (http://snippets.dzone.com/posts/show/2120). IMHO, that code resembles the spirit of LINQ. That's without even touching on the ActiveRecord portion of Rails which achieves a lot of what LINQ does too. There's got to be a way to do this sort of thing in Python too, even if it requires a third-party library. UPDATE: Here's a better example for Ruby syntax compared to LINQ. http://intertwingly.net/blog/2005/09/29/Ruby-1-8-vs-LINQ

Look at Sam Ruby's Venus (which I've used): http://intertwingly.net/code/venus/ (Python) Or, his Mars version (haven't used): http://intertwingly.net/code/mars/ (written in Ruby, and newer)

I also didn't know much of the difference between the two, and I also used RSS for my Hugo site. At the bottom of the article there's, under "See Also", a link to this page comparing RSS and Atom: https://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/Rss20AndAtom10Compared#major It seems like the last update is from 2008, but the section on the differences has a few interesting items. I am not sure if it changed, but it says: "The RSS 2.0 specification is copyrighted by Harvard University and is frozen. No significant changes can be made (although the specification is under a Creative Commons licence) and it is intended that future work be done under a different name; Atom is one example of such work." The Wikipedia RSS page has also a small section comparing RSS and Atom: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS#RSS_compared_with_Atom "Technically, Atom has several advantages: less restrictive licensing, IANA-registered MIME type, XML namespace, URI support, RELAX NG support.[35]"

I read this and wondered, "what Planet software is Planet Haskell using that it's doing these odd things - oh, it's Venus? https://github.com/rubys/venus ... wow that's old... and doesn't that use something like filesystem storage for the feeds and couldn't this happen if you stored the xml with no character set specified and the parser messed it up on the way back in? Which since it's ending up with a windows encoding...wait, why am I remembering any of this....oh. checks credits for Venus, recordscratch yes, that's me, wondering why I fixed venus to run on windows 18 years ago" https://github.com/rubys/venus/commit/210781768705d20dc3cbe672ec249012… Sorry about that. As I recall at the time I was the only person using Venus on windows, and I was just running a hacked up version on a local machine. There's some conditionals in there about whether it uses libxml2 or not (in modern python, it wouldn't need to), that call doesn't take a charset parameter and my guess is the problems begin as soon as libxml2 tries to parse the file on disk. I think my own version was frankensteined to the extent of using a sqlite back end so I didn't have to deal with windows files any more. The author of Venus, Sam Ruby, is on here (rubys) but it looks like he hasn't checked in for a long time; last I saw he was over at fly.io. Oh and the even funnier part of this all is, back when this was written, Sam's blog was THE go to place to look up the list of Mojibake mistakes you'd…

Maybe not "daily", but very frequently: here is a small selection of some of the small sites on my newsblur newsfeed list: [0] http://www.jamesaltucher.com : Much self-pity, but also sometimes quite funny. http://www.astrobio.net/latestnews_rss/news.xml : Is there life on other planets? http://kaygun.tumblr.com/ http://www.friday.com/bbum : Coding, hardware projects, generally interesting. http://bestyoucanbe.blogspot.com/ : Insights into the education system in regard to the raising of his neurologically non-typical son. http://blog.lmorchard.com http://ex-muslim.org.uk : Oppression of atheists in the Muslim world. http://clojurefun.wordpress.com : Clojure! http://scientopia.org/blogs/goodmath : Bad science, denialism. http://blog.willbenton.com : Music, logic, programming, etc. http://www.groklaw.net : Maybe not "small"; detailed analysis of important legal cases. http://hicksdesign.co.uk/journal : Web design. http://www.holovaty.com/ : "I'm co-creator and co-Benevolent Dictator For Life of the open-source Django Web framework" http://prometheus.med.utah.edu/~bwjones : Combines talented photography, photoessays, and study of the retina. http://lee-phillips.org : I regularly check my site to see if it's still working. http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca : Language issues; can be amusing or stupid. http://freethoughtblogs.com/maryamnamazie : Freedom for women in the Muslim world. http://math-blog.com : Infrequently updated, but often…

Less convenient? So, what happens when you're at a friend's house or public computer where you don't have your 1Passwd/Keychain database? Plus, once you're logged into your OpenID provider, you don't have to enter your password for any sites which you already trust, until you log out. That's part of the advantage of a single sign-on system. "Sites which don't support HTTPS can hardly be relied upon to be careful with my data, anyway." -- so, the vast majority of sites? People are going to use these sites either way. Most users don't even know what HTTPS is. While it's unlikely an OpenID provider would sell out to DoubleClick, etc, if you're paranoid it's also very easy to use your personal website URL as a portable OpenID (it's literally two extra HTML tags in your homepage's header). You can either run your own provider using a simple prepackaged solution, or do what I do and just delegate to another provider, which you can easily change in the future with a quick edit of you homepage's header. Here's mine: <link rel="openid.server" href="http://www.myopenid.com/server" /> <link rel="openid.delegate" href="http://tlrobinson.myopenid.com/" /> There's even WordPress (and I'm sure others) plugins to make this trivial for non-technical users. I agree OpenID is a little difficult to understand (as evidenced by some of the comments here) but it's actually very easy to set up a simple OpenID (many people already have one and don't know it... all AOL, Technorati,…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_(software) https://web.archive.org/web/20051029095046/http://www.planetplanet.org… https://intertwingly.net/code/venus/docs/index.html https://github.com/kgaughan/mercury