Derek Scruggs

Re: Rim Bray’s essay about Counting Subscribers to an RSS feed, I like the idea of a unique hashcode, but I think many people will hate the idea of giving out their email address to generate it. One of the great advantages of RSS is that the subscriber never has to worry about getting spammed.

Here are a couple of different techniques I’m considering to accomplish the same thing:

• HTTP 301 Redirect – Whenever someone access a feed for the first time, generate a unique subscriber ID and issue an HTTP 301 permanent redirect that includes the subID as a parameter. So http://myfeed/file.xml becomes http://myfeed/file.xml?subID=xxx
  In my limited tests, this approach does not work very well, mainly because not all aggregators support HTTP 301. Also, generating a unique URI is frowned on by some in the RSS community.

• ETag – Similar to above, whenever an aggregator accesses a feed for the first time, issue an ETag header that includes a unique subscriber ID. I’ve just started playing with ETag, so I don’t know how widespread it’s use is on the aggregator side. Also, it may violate the spirit of what ETag was designed to do, which is represent the state of the object on the server, while my approach represents both the state of the object and the relationship between the subscriber and the object. Still, I like this approach because it’s really simple to implement.

  The way I do it, the ETag consists of two parts delimited by a hyphen. The first part is a timestamp of the last modification of the RSS document; this represents the true state of the object. The second part is the unique subscriber ID. In theory, aggregators should submit the last ETag received from your URI, which in my case looks something like 12345678-9876543. On the server side, I strip out the the part to left of the hypen and use that to determine whether to return the full document or just an HTTP 304 header. And I can use the digits to the right for logging unique subscriber activity.

  The first time an aggregator accesses a feed, it won’t have an ETag, so I generate one (and I can log this too, so I know how many new subscribers I’ve gained in a given period). If the aggregator is following the HTTP spec, it will include the ETag on all subsequent requests. As my RSS file is updated, I’ll issue a new ETag in which the left side changes. The right side will be generated on the fly based on the ETag submitted by the aggregator.

CNET News.com – Spam blockers may wreak e-mail havoc

News Flash: they already wreak havoc.

Ever wonder how Gator works? A guy at Harvard did, too, and now he’s doing some interesting research.

Or at least we was doing research. Gator blocked him yesterday.

Below is the
announcement I received from NewsGator developer Greg Reinacker’s href=”http://www.rassoc.com/gregr/weblog/”>Weblog. The cool
thing is, I’m posting this directly from Outlook using NewsGator 1.2 – pictures too!. It’s almost as easy as
forwarding an email. Great work, Greg!

NewsGator 1.2 has been released!  I won’t
duplicate the release announcements…here are the important links:

title=http://www.newsgator.com/news/archive.aspx?post=10
href=”http://www.newsgator.com/news/archive.aspx?post=10″>Announcement /
Change List

title=http://www.newsgator.com/news/archive.aspx?post=11
href=”http://www.newsgator.com/news/archive.aspx?post=11″>Press
Release

title=http://www.newsgator.com/downloads.aspx
href=”http://www.newsgator.com/downloads.aspx”>Downloads

title=http://www.newsgator.com/plugins/default.aspx
href=”http://www.newsgator.com/plugins/default.aspx”>Plug-in
information

title=http://www.newsgator.com/plugins/developer.aspx
href=”http://www.newsgator.com/plugins/developer.aspx”>Plug-in developer
information

 

Posting support is title=http://www.newsgator.com/plugins/default.aspx
href=”http://www.newsgator.com/plugins/default.aspx”>available today
for:

• Blogger
• Radio Userland
• BlogX
• dotnetweblogs.com
• Movable Type (courtesy title=http://www.mattberther.com/ href=”http://www.mattberther.com/”>Matt
  Berther)

• EraBlog.NET.

Here are some screen shots of some of the
visual items that have changed. This is only a small subset of the
feature set…and we’re only highlighting changes since 1.1.

 

The NewsGator menu has moved to the
toolbar:

src=”http://www.rassoc.com/gregr/weblog/postimages/ng12rel7.gif”
align=baseline border=0>

New post items have been added to the
menu…

src=”http://www.rassoc.com/gregr/weblog/postimages/ng12rel1.gif”
align=baseline border=0>

And of course new configuration
options:

src=”http://www.rassoc.com/gregr/weblog/postimages/ng12rel2.gif”
align=baseline border=0>

Outlook auto-preview, which works well
with NewsGator, was always hampered by the links at the top of every post,
which would fill up most of the auto-preview. There is now an option to
move the links, for “clean” auto-preview:

src=”http://www.rassoc.com/gregr/weblog/postimages/ng12rel3.gif”
align=baseline border=0>

Prior to Outlook 2003, it was unfortunate
in that you could never see the URL that a link was going to open; NewsGator
1.2 adds tooltips to most links:

src=”http://www.rassoc.com/gregr/weblog/postimages/ng12rel6.gif”
align=baseline border=0>

If you like the NewsPage, you’ll like it
even more with inline post excerpts:

src=”http://www.rassoc.com/gregr/weblog/postimages/ng12rel4.gif”
align=baseline border=0>

And also on the NewsPage, you can now read
all posts from the “unread posts” section by expanding each
feed…

src=”http://www.rassoc.com/gregr/weblog/postimages/ng12rel5.gif”
align=baseline border=0>

Enjoy! We look forward to your feedback
and comments.

[ href=”http://www.rassoc.com/gregr/weblog/archive.aspx?post=593″>Greg
Reinacker’s Weblog]

NewsGator 1.2 is out. It rocks!

Joel on Software makes an interesting argument against prototyping (I don’t think I’ve heard anyone take this stance), but it seems to me he’s using the worst case scenario.

Prototyping is extremely valuable in the web design process because most customers only have a vague idea of what they want out of a site or application. My preferred method is wireframing, which is built into the Fusebox Lifecycle Process aka FLiP.

Are you ready for personalized PageRrank? Apparently some researches have found an algorithm that’sfive times faster than those currently in use and eventually may be used to personalize search results to your specific tendencies.

Note to self. Don’t drink coffee near computer keyboard. More specifically, don’t spill coffee on the keyboard. I just spent the whole morning trying to fix the darn thing before giving up and going to Best Buy.

Interesting discussion within the blog community: Google may change the way they index blogs

Busy busy busy… I’ve been consumed with RSS, doing nearly non-stop coding over the last week or so.

I hope to have something cool to show soon, but if you’re curious about RSS and what it means to marketing, read this article. Then download NewsGator.