#blogging

What is RSS?

I got an email from someone in relation to FeedBlendr, asking me what RSS really is, and what you’re supposed to do with it. He liked my reply so much that I thought I’d share it here for anyone else who’s having a bit of a tough time understanding all these acronyms (although admittedly I did use another one in my definition, but what the hey?);

“So basically RSS is a way for websites to make their content (normally time-based stuff like blog posts or news) available to people in a machine-readable format (a dialect of XML)”

Hope that helps someone (else) out there!

Blogging APIs

On the blosxom mailing list, someone was confused about the interaction between the different APIs for accessing blogging tools and formats. They asked what the story was, and I responsed with this summary of the market (available from the blosxom mailing list archives) (which was current at the time, but getting a little dated now);

From: “Beau” <beau@d…>
Date: Tue Mar 9, 2004 4:00 pm
Subject: Re: [blosxom] APIs, new blogging things, etc.

Ok Steve, I’ll take a bash at some of this, since I’ve been working with blogging APIs for a couple years now in effect, I’ve come across all the ones that you’ve mentioned 🙂 Someone else please fill gaps or correct me if I slip up somewhere 🙂

Ok – so, in approximate chronological order of time of appearance on the scene;

* Blogger API 1.0
– http://plant.blogger.com/api/
The original – based on XML-RPC [1] calls, gave access to most (all?) of Blogger’s original functionality, and was pretty darned easy to use. You POST an XML doc with encoded requests in it to a specific URL, and the response is another XML doc which you can then use however you like. Ev Williams of Blogger knocked this up over a couple of days apparently, and it went crazy from there – I’m still using it today in http://www.beaulebens.com/avantblog and it still works (usually :P)

* metaWebLogAPI
– http://www.xmlrpc.com/metaWeblogApi [Added 2004-07-07]
Effectively a derivative of the Blogger API (and also XML-RPC based), this one came up to support Radio, I believe Dave Weiner knocked it up, and there was some animosity between he and Ev Williams over whether they should combine to create a unified blogging API (Radio and Blogger being the big 1 at the time) or go their separate ways. I believe one of the main reasons things went this way was because Blogger didn’t need/want title field support, but Radio did,
thus the metaWebLogAPI, intended to be more universal.

* Blogger API 2.0
– http://www.blogger.com/developers/api/documentation20.html
Blogger realised that with their new versions, support from Google etc, they needed to clean up their API-act, so they started working on API 2.0. This one supports title fields and a number of other things, and is accessed via XML-RPC as well. As you can see at the URL, the draft specs were released in Feb 2003, but a couple months later, it was revoked and people were instructed not to use it, because there was no support for it and Atom (then called Echo) was going to be used in prefence… which brings us to…

* Echo… Necho… Atom API
– http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/FrontPage
– http://www.atomenabled.org/
Originally called Echo, then they decided that was no good, so it was refered to as Necho (Not Echo) for a while, and finally ended up being called Atom. This one is based on a REST architecture ([2], [3]), based on [4]. The Atom API sort of duplicates the efforts of RSS, in that it presents blog data in an XML format, but it also allows you to modify that data (thus API) via
REST-style interactions, involving PUT/POST/DELETE requests. I haven’t worked all this out just yet, but I have to so that I can update a few projects of mine (namely AvantBlog [5] and webpad [6]). There is also a SOAP [7] implementation of Atom, which I assume supports all the same sort of functions (retrieving posts/blogs, updating them etc), tho I haven’t looked at that at
all, as personally I hate SOAP 🙂 The idea of Atom is to provide a universal API which will be supported by all blogging systems (I believe MT and Blogger are already on board, others are likely to follow) so that we can write tools which will interop with all systems easily.

[1] http://www.xmlrpc.com/
[2] http://internet.conveyor.com/RESTwiki/moin.cgi/FrontPage
[3] http://www.xfront.com/REST.html
[4] http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/rest_arch_style.htm
[5] http://www.beaulebens.com/avantblog
[6] http://www.beaulebens.com/webpad
[7] http://www.w3.org/TR/soap/

Now, as for blosxom’s support for any of this mumbo jumbo – I know that sxtem [8] was written to provide Blogger API functionality for blosxom, and then you also have the atomfeed plugin [9] to provide an outgoing only (RSS-like syndication side of Atom, but not the modification side) feed for blosxom blogs. As for complete Atom API integration (allowing post editing etc via REST-calls), I’m not aware of any implementation allowing that so far, probably because the Atom spec [10] is still somewhat in flux, and even if it’s not, it’s a little hard to understand (for me at least :).

[8] http://www.blosxom.com/plugins/input/sxtem.htm
[9] http://www.blosxom.com/plugins/syndication/atomfeed.htm
[10] http://www.atomenabled.org/developers/api/atom-api-spec.php

So there you have it – as far as I am aware, that’s how the playing field lies at this point in regards to blogging APIs, and I haven’t even bothered to mention Movabletype (which, incidentally, implements a mish-mash of Blogger.com API and metaWebLogAPI functionality), so we’re doing quite well 🙂 The beauty of blosxom is that to some extent, it doesn’t even need any of this mumbo-jumbo – you can call FTP the blosxom API if you really want 🙂 When I eventually get an Atom toolkit operational, it’ll be written in PHP and linked from my Blogger API page [11], which is the current home of a number of other PHP-based blogging classes and function libraries. Until then – I’ll keep an eye out and play Lazy-web-style in the hope that someone else will beat me to it 🙂

[11] https://beaulebens.com/bloggerapi/

Cheers, and I hope that sums things up for you Steve (and others)

Beau

—
Beau Lebens
Information Architect
beau@d…
Dented Reality – www.beaulebens.com
Information Architecture, Usability, Web Development

Blogs: What Are They Good For?

NOTE: This post was written in 2003 and in places is now out of date. WordPress is now the dominant self-installed blogging platform, and continues to gain more of the market. Updates have been integrated into this post.

What is a Blog?

In its ‘purest’ form, a blog is something akin to an online, personal journal or diary, taking the form of a series of chronologically-ordered, short, personal posts on a website. It is easy to update and normally works by adding short posts to a template design of some sort.

BLOG is short for weB LOG, and became recognised widely as a web-publishing format in about 1999, when, among others, Evan Williams (via Pyra Labs, now owned by Google) created Blogger.com, a free-to-access blogging tool which published your blog back to your own site by FTP. Blogger.com is currently one of the most popular blogging platforms in the world, along with WordPress, LiveJournal and MovableType.

Blogging (the process of posting an update to a blog) took off, as did the community around it. Bloggers proved to be a friendly bunch, and many of them linked to each other and other sites, creating a dense web of links and opinion. The personal nature of most blogs meant that blogs became one of the most accessible personal-opinion formats on the web.

Why Blog?

Why would anyone want to keep an updated record of their personal thoughts and opinions online? There’s a lot more to blogs than just that, but even for that purpose alone, it’s an amazing way to exercise a right to free speech, and to reach potentially millions of people with your thoughts.

There are a growing number of different applications of blog-technology, including:

  • Professional News Sites/Portals
  • Lightweight Content Management for all sorts of websites
  • To-Do Lists (personal or across a group)
  • Review Sites (movies, music, food, you name it!)
  • Corporate Knowledge Management (Knowledge Logs or K-Logs)
  • Project Management (recording work completed at ‘x’ time for ‘y’ project)
  • Podcasting (delivering audio segments periodically)
  • Vlogging (Video-blogging; delivering video snippets/segments periodically)

There will no doubt be more uses for the technology in the future, especially as blogs and related technologies evolve and mature more, and as different kinds of meta-data is stored within blogs.

How Do I Blog?

Most blogging systems have their own interface of some sort for posting blogs, whether it be via the web (like Blogger.com and MovableType), using one of the many desktop clients (like w.bloggar and MarsEdit), or even straight into a text file in a directory (like blosxom uses).

A common thread amongst each of these systems is that each ‘post’ is treated as a separate entity, which allows for a number of cool features (see below).

Today, there are tools of all sorts for posting to blogs, including 2 of my own, AvantBlog, for posting to Blogger.com from a handheld/Palm device, and webpad, a more powerful editor with access to a number of different blogging systems and number of HTML tools for managing post content.

Bells & Whistles

With blogs becoming more popular, a number of related technologies and extras have developed in the last few years. Some of the more popular features/extras are:

Comments
Allowing readers to contribute comments to a blog post creates a feedback loop and in many cases provides a simple discussion forum/community feel.
Categorization/Topics
Most blogging tools allow for some sort of categorisation of posts so that they can be organised according to topics. Different systems handle this in different ways, for example MovableType allows you to store a post against multiple categories, while blosxom stores a post in a single directory, representing a topic/category.
RSS/Atom
RSS allows other users to easily syndicate the content of your blog into their own, or into a news reader/aggregator of some sort (web-based like BlogLines, or desktop-based like NetNewsWire). In addition to content syndication, Atom also provides a programming interface for modifying posts made in a blog using other tools.
Calendar Navigation
Many blog tools offer the option of including a calendar on your blog, so that people can navigate your posts by jumping straight to a particular date and seeing all posts on that day/month/year.
Permalinks
Upholding the spirit of a ‘permanent location’ for everything on the Internet, so-called permalinks are automatically-created URLs which are intended to be the permanent location of a post, even after it ‘scrolls off’ the homepage of a blog (since only a certain number of posts will be displayed on the homepage normally).
Blog-roll
Since bloggers are such a friendly bunch, they often maintain a list of the blogs which they read regularly. This list is normally presented along the side of their own blog, so that you might also find other sites which interest you. This list is called a blog-roll (see blogrolling.com for more about blog-rolls).

Hopefully this has provided you with a bit of an introduction to blogging and blogs, and you can see that they are a great way to get information online quickly. Their personal and business uses are only going to grow, and it will be interesting to see where they go in the future. Sites like Technorati and BlogDex are probably good places to keep an eye on if you’re interested in the future of blogging.

So now, if all you want is to see a blog in action – jump over to the blog section of this site and knock yourself out!

blosxom rocks!

blosxom is the amazingly simple, yet endlessly powerful blogging application written by Rael Dornfest which is now running most of the DentedReality website.

I have made some pretty schmick “helper” scripts (even if I do say so myself), which allow me to manage a blog using directories, and you can link straight to a directory, and it will show you the blog entries via blosxom in that dir.