Personal Website of Yakov ShafranovichShafTek.org = SHAFranovich TECHnologies |
Bloglines, a web based reader, just came up with a proposal to restrict RSS feeds:
http://www.bloglines.com/about/specs/fac-1.0
The W3C has a similar (in spirit) proposal to use “?access-control?” instructions in XML standard itself. It restricts access by domain. This idea was also mentioned before by Greg Reinacker.
The BlogLines service has been going up and down the entire day. According to their official website (currently off-line) both database machines crashed this morning. Still waiting for them to come back to life it seems…
As a side note, it is interesting to note how much we have come to rely on online services in our daily lives. As for me, I gotta dig out that old OPML list of my feeds and try them in Thunderbird.
Since 9 AM EST, I haven’t been seeing any updated RSS feeds through Bloglines. However, their site and the blogroll services seem to be working. No clue what’s going on - but if they are really having problems, it would be VERY NICE to let the world know. Of course this just further highlights the need for hosted software to be more reliable than desktop - if it breaks on one desktop, it doesn’t affect others but if it breaks on the web, everyone goes down.
P.S. Seems I am not the only one having these issues.
UPDATE: They seem to have fixed it on late Friday and even responded to the email I send them. Still no peep on the official BlogLines blog. Meanwhile some people are leaving.
Google Alerts to monitor the news or even Google search for certain terms and return results via email. However, they currently do not offer RSS or Atom feeds. Fortunatly, Bloglines has an email accounts feature which lets you monitor email lists in Bloglines. This is perfect for Google Alerts - just create a new email subscription in BlogLines and put that email address into Google Alerts. Voila - you got RSS-like tracking of news alerts without clogging up your inbox.
BlogLines, a very popular web-based RSS aggregator is adding support for package tracking according to this story. Who knows, maybe they were inspired by my XML.com article or the track2rss project.
P.S. I do wonder how they got around the legal issues, most carriers severely restrict the use of their package tracking information.
UPDATE: Bloglines just posted a news item in their own blog. HOWEVER, as I am trying to add the package tracking feeds, I keep getting error messages. I matched the tracking numbers against the data from the carriers and track2rss, and they are fine. There seems to be a problem with BlogLines’s own service.
And of course, the legal issues are still nagging me. If you look carefully into the terms and agreements for most carriers, they are rather strict (which is one reason why I encourage folks to download track2rss). I am not sure how BlogLines got around those issues.
UPDATE #2: After I dropped an email to Mark Fletcher (the CEO of BlogLines) the problem was fixed. It is not often that a CEO of a company replies to you personally on such short notice (impressive enough to add his blog to my blogroll)!
I love startups 
Like many others, I use Bloglines RSS Reader to both read RSS feeds and provide a blogroll for my blog. Well, the mobile version is now having errors, with seemingly someone forgetting to close a tag:
An error occured:
Traceback (innermost last):
File “cgi.c”, line 1391, in cgi_display()
File “csparse.c”, line 291, in cs_parse_file()
File “csparse.c”, line 438, in cs_parse_string()
ParseError: [/var/bloglines/current/content/web/myblogs_subs.mobile.cs:29] Missing end ?> at evar:Lang.subXNew)
The Lesson Is: Check your code before putting it in production environment.
UPDATE: Five minutes after contacting Bloglines, I received a response that the problem has been fixed. Double checking it, indeed it has. Thanks guys!
Recently I ran across a mention of an certain blog that was maliciously hacked into and erased, with the personal information of the original author in its place. This specific blog which shall remain unnamed happened to be criticizing a certain organization, which did not make it popular with its members. The blog was hosted at one of these big blog sites like Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, etc. This of course makes it interesting how actually they managed to hack into the site. Three choices are possible: an inside job, an unknown security hole in that specific service, or most probably a weak or guessable password. Leaving aside the question of how it was erased, the more interesting question is whether the contents are recoverable. The original author did not make backups, and the content of the blog goes back about seven months, containing about 100 entries per week, with the total of about 30 weeks with 30,000 posts. That’s a lot of posts to lose in one shot.
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