geek ramblings » Atom

Atom Publishing Protocol Clients?

Dougal — Sun, 21 Jan 2007 06:38:44 +0000

Does anyone have a suggestion for a blog client that implements the Atom Publishing Protocol API? I’d prefer a client that runs under Linux, but I could also deal with a Windows-based client using Wine. I’d particularly like to find something that actually attempts to deal with media resources (images, sound files, etc). I’ve got a couple of Firefox extensions (Atomic and Yulup), but they both seem to have shortcomings that prevent me from using them for in-depth testing.

“Testing what”, you ask? Hopefully, you’ll find out pretty soon…

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The State of FeedLounge

Dougal — Mon, 05 Dec 2005 16:25:42 +0000

Alex has posted a moderately detailed article explaining The State of FeedLounge. For any newcomers who don’t know what FeedLounge is, it’s a web based feed aggregator, not unlike BlogLines. But FeedLounge is a next-generation web service that looks and acts more like a desktop application than a web site.

I’m one of the lucky alpha testers who have had access for the last six months. I committed to using FeedLounge as my only feed reader, dumping SharpReader and the RSS capabilities of Thunderbird. I’ve watched FeedLounge go through some rough spots, and it always came back better than before. Alex and Scott have done an outstanding job with everything from the great AJAXian user interface to the invisible backend. When the time comes, if the price is right, I’m going to be a paying customer.

But you don’t care about all that, do you? What good is it to read about a service that you don’t have access to? All you care about is knowing that FeedLounge will be open for public beta on January 16, 2006.

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Google Blog Search

Dougal — Wed, 14 Sep 2005 21:31:24 +0000

I may be a little late coming to this party, but Google has introduced Google Blog Search, which limits searches to just blogs (well, in theory, anyhow). The most interesting thing about this, to me, is that GBS provides the search results for your terms as Atom and RSS feeds.

It seems that Google is leveraging blog feeds to get structured data, and monitoring ping sites for timely updates. This is something that lots of people speculated about way back before Google bought Blogger. RSS/Atom feeds from blogs are such a rich source of structured information, it only makes sense that a “mainstream” search engine should take advantage of it. I can only wonder what took them so long?

The next feature I’m looking for: “Search within X miles of location Y”, using geotagged blogs. This would be great for searching for information written by other bloggers in your vicinity.

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