Nick Bradbury

IT Conversations accepting donations

IT Conversations - one of my favorite sites - is accepting donations.

If you haven't visited IT Conversations before, it features audio archives of events such BloggerCon III and Pop!Tech 2004, and interviews with IT luminaries including Tim O'Reilly, Steve Wozniak and Bruce Schneier.

Nick Finck Interview

Apparently the theme today is interviews with guys named Nick: here's an interview with Nick Finck of Digital Web Magazine fame.

MicroISV Interview

MicroISV just posted an interview with me.

Link Dump: Nov 29, 2004

RSS

• Amazon RSS Feed Generator
• Google News RSS Generator
• RSS Edges Into the Bureaucracy
• Syndication Wars: The Elephant and the Tiny Little Mice

CSS and WebDev

• The CSS Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks and Hacks (Chapter 1)
• An Introduction to Client-Side XSLT
• RuthsarianLayouts
• The Box Model Problem

Other

• The Worst Jobs in Science: The Sequel
• The True Effects of Piracy
• Tyranny of the Geeks
• U.S. Tech Workers: Wake Up

RSS and BitTorrent

The use of BitTorrent with RSS has been getting some attention lately, but there have been so many feed-related ideas tossed around recently that it's hard to tell which ones have any merit. For the record, I believe this one is very worthwhile. But before we jump into why BitTorrent is so useful here, perhaps a little background is necessary?

It all starts with enclosures, which provide a way to link multimedia files with items in an RSS feed. For example, this feed from IT Conversations uses enclosures to link to MP3 audio files. RSS readers such as FeedDemon often display enclosures in a manner resembling email attachments, but unlike email attachments, enclosures aren't automatically downloaded until you click on them.

Enclosures were a neglected part of RSS 2.0 until podcasting came along. Podcasting refers to tools which automatically download RSS enclosures and synchronize them with a portable media player such as an Apple iPod. For example, you might tell your RSS reader to automatically download audio enclosures overnight and sync them with your iPod, so that when you get up in the morning you can grab your iPod and listen to all the new stuff on the way to work. It's still very rough around the edges, and there's a lot of unnecessary hype about podcasting being tossed around, but it's an interesting concept which I believe will grow into something far more useful (and usable).

But there's a big problem: bandwidth. RSS has been blamed for consuming too much bandwidth, and RSS is just text. So how can multimedia files possibly be distributed the same way? The answer is BitTorrent. When you download a torrent file, BitTorrent shares the bandwidth consumption between everyone who downloads that file. The more people that download a torrent file, the more bandwidth there is available.

In a stroke of good timing, last week I spent some time integrating support for torrents into FeedDemon's support for podcasting. At the moment it's too unreliable to expose, and I've had trouble automating BitTorrent to do what I want, but given how "alpha" the whole idea of BitTorrent enclosures is, I don't believe it's important that FeedDemon supports them right away. However, I do believe it's important that I announce my intentions to do so. Which I've just done :)

Reminder

Several years ago I made the mistake of forgetting my wedding anniversary, and I promised my wife I'd never forget it again. Since I have such a lousy memory, I instructed my computer to remind me two weeks before our anniversary, and I believe I used the phrase "Don't forget your anniversary, butthead" as the reminder's text to make sure it got my attention.

A few years later I decided to get a new computer, so I gave my wife my old system. Yep, you guessed right - I forgot to remove the reminder. Which meant that one morning her computer greeted her with "don't forget your anniversary, butthead."

Luckily, she eventually figured out that the reminder was meant for me, not her - but I still wonder what went through her head before she came to that conclusion.

PS: My wife forgot our anniversary the following year, so my record is clean now.

Dexter Cartoon for Nov 26, 2004

Dexter RSS feed

RSS ads: what NOT to do

There's been a lot of talk about RSS ads lately, with companies such as Yahoo! and Overture already planning to insert advertisements into RSS.

I think we all knew this would happen, and many of us are understandably concerned that overzealous advertising will dampen the appeal of RSS. While I'm not opposed to the idea of RSS ads, given past experience, I'd say chances are good that I'll be opposed to the way that many of them are implemented. Already I'm seeing some useful feeds insert ads in such an annoying way that I've unsubscribed from them, and in some cases removed them from the default set of feeds included with FeedDemon.

If you're planning to insert ads into your feeds and don't want to see your readers unsubscribe in droves, please consider this list of DO NOTs when planning your implementation:

1. Do NOT insert an ad every time the user updates your feed. I've seen some feeds whose actual posts are several days apart, yet they insert an ad every time the feed is downloaded - resulting in far more ads than content. If you're going to insert an ad, only do so when you have new content as well.
2. Do NOT change the GUID, pubDate or link of an ad <item> just to get it to appear as new in an RSS reader such as FeedDemon. Resorting to tricks to get additional ad exposure will backfire in the long run.
3. Do NOT insert ads in feeds that contain only a summary description. If you're going to insert ads, at least let us read the full content.
4. Do NOT insert ads unrelated to the content of the feed. For example, putting mortgage ads in a tech feed makes you look like a spammer.

Remember, people are reading your feed because you're providing useful information. If you clutter that information with too many ads - or make ad delivery your primary focus - we'll stop reading. RSS is not email: if we don't like what you're doing, we'll unsubscribe - and chances are, we'll never come back.

CNET News.com adds TrackBack, Pingback

CNET News.com now supports TrackBack and Pingback (via Micro Persuasion).

TopStyle PDF Documentation

Giampaolo Bellavite just updated the PDF version of TopStyle's help and tutorial. Thanks, Giampaolo!