Eat Me

I'm sorting out docs, one thing I remembered I don't have in place yet is a syndication feed for these things. An absolute didn't I do that aready?.

Like, I have history in this space. I caught the tail end of the RSS wars. Such a daft (multi-fronted) war. Initially I was religiously RSS 1.0, the RDF. But despite my dogmatism, I was already aware at the time how awful RDF/XML was as a format in practice. It was an easy one to get sucked into, I was enchanted by the RDF model (still am, a sweetspot IMO, but it did need Turtle syntax and named graphs to properly make it viable for a regular dev). Good folks I knew were on that side and Dave Winer could be such a massively annoying arse. Really really massively.

In retrospect, respect where it's due, Winer did push things forward. Ok, a lot of that was in folks thinking about how to do this thing right, to counter his approach, which had an overabundance of ego at it's heart. That was a bit annoying itself, an intelligent, creative guy, you know I could begrudgingly call him visionary. Except it was overshadowed by narcissism and belligerence.

Heh, I nearly put "IMHO" there. But that reminds me of an interchange I had with him where he was incredibly dismissive of my points, passive-aggressively using Valley acronyms. I responded with "UYB". I had made it up on the spur. But apparently it had made it into the urban dics, I lost the high ground.

But with the naming of RSS 2.0 he showed some serious genious. Marketing-wise, awesome.

Anyway, back to my ego. I've contributed content to 10 printed books. The only one I was the lead author on was Beginning RSS and Atom Programming. Heh, combined rating of 1.6 on reviews there. It was probably pretty good. Not through my efforts directly, but Wrox Press at the time had a legion of expert/expert-ish reviewers that forced you to revise, think, revise. Also Andrew was very good at his stuff. I can't check, I gave all the copies I had away... oh wait, I might have the Turkish translation...(mouldy shelves...) Nope. That is Web 2.0 Teknolojileri. Wtf did I do for that? Was the same period as the RSS. Probably something with that, shoehorning in RDF somehow.

Oh yeah. Gorblimey, quite a lot of this looks like my stuff. FOAF!

Over the decade or so I was doing the freelance writing stuff, I did learn how to play the publishers somewhat. Engage the reviewer, not the reader.

Code examples in Python ffs. So I must have learnt a little bit of it at some point before forgetting it again. Also XSLT involved (on RDF/XML, eek!). But XSLT was a good language, despite the horror syntax. Jeni Tennison frequently sent me dizzy with the elegance she pulled out of the hat.

It is surprising what still lives. I recently rediscovered this Pet Profiles thing I did in, er...2004. Most of the associated code around there is now totally broken. But Sambuca's Profile, using CSS on RDF/XML, sweet. Has exactly the same little layout probs I didn't get around to fixing 20 years ago.

I've not quite finished with my ego

So in this fog of RSS war, some righteous folks came up with a cunning plan: Atom.

I get an ack on RFC4287.

OK, ego spent.

I was all-in with Atom Format, but kind-of backstepped out of the Protocol, RFC5023. I'd love to say it was because I saw the redundancy of that on top of Fielding-compliant REST, but really it was because the other folks were shitloads better at protocols, I was out of my depth, had nothing to offer. In retrospect, good move. Now I see the redundancy. And the Web stage has shifted to make absolutely awful practices that have issues dating back to SOAP. I'm sure, hope and pray (in an atheistic manner) timbl has many years left on this mortal coil, because he has a hella lotta grave-spinning backed up.

Yeah, in retrospect, Atom was the right idea. The folks around microformats, (hat tip Tantek) had a valid point that HTML could easily carry the same information just as easily, no need for a different content format. But pragmatically, one sliver of a little toenail towards the Winer, it does now make sense to use a different format. I can still get on a high horse about content negotiation being there if you want it, so merrr!

#:todo check media types/extensions known by nginx

Anyway, however long ago I got to desk this session, I had feed on mind. This is a nice little exercise. With my current workflow & tooling, how long will it take me to add a feed to this site?

On my own I would guess maybe 2 very stumbly hours. I have to remember how to use the templater I've got here, I've not looked at for a few months (nunjucks - it looked best at the time) and also some of my own code from a day ago... (#:adhd is a thing).

But I don't want to waste my own scant cognitive resources on something like this. Claude understands my setup, I made it so for his kind.

#:timestamp 23:58

(I will need a pee, cigarette and another mug of beer first, dear Countdown Clock)