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More Updates: RSS and Uplinks

Live and direct from the Web Applications as Content Waypoints School, Berylium2 took a big step toward release day with the reworking of some very important features: uplinking via XML-RPC and RSS newsfeed rendering via Feedsplitter.

The whole point of these blog things, once you get over the diary/journal aspect of it-- everything is a journal, move on-- is that they make it easy to spread ideas around.

Traditionally, ideas were spread around the Internet by search engines. Googlebot would come and index your site, and make the results available to the search form on their homepage.

But that's not very distributed. So a whole slew of really clever folks have spent the last decase devising technologies to foster the automated spread of ideas, things like RSS newsfeeds, RDF metadata, and XML-RPC publishing (the "Blogger API", for instance). I'm sure there are others, but those are what I've been paying attention to.

Berylium does the heavy-lifting on all of those acronyms so that you don't have to.
  • Every folder on a Berylium site has an RSS 1.0 Newsfeed at index.rss.
  • RSS Newsfeeds can be displayed almost anywhere in Berylium using the [rss:newsfeedUrl] tag.
  • Members (soon anyone!) can republish any public document or image to their own weblog via XML-RPC. This is known as uplinking.
  • Writers and editors can publish to Berylium via XML-RPC as well. Which means you can cross-publish between Berylium sites.
  • Every object will soon include a fairly complete set of Dublin Core RDF metadata, everywhere it is displayed, so that robots can enjoy your site, too!

Er, you still can't email articles to other people, but of course that's on the list, too.

By Chris Snyder on June 17, 2003 at 4:05pm

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