Simon Willison’s Weblog

FriendFeed Blog: Simple Update Protocol. FriendFeed infamously poll RSS feeds on the 43 services they support millions of times an hour in an effort to keep their content as real-time as possible. SUP is a new proposal by FriendFeed for a sort of “master feed” of changes to a site—instead of hitting the Flickr feed for each of their users they would just poll Flickr’s SUP feed every minute or so to find out who had uploaded a new photo, and only retrieve the RSS feed for those users. 28th August 2008, 12:16 pm

Flickr Developer Blog: API Responses as Feeds (via) Flickr API calls that return a “standard photos response” (e.g. flickr.photos.search and flickr.favorites.getList) can now output eight different feed formats as well, including Atom, RSS flavours, geoatom, geordf and KML. Error codes are returned as X-FlickrErrCode HTTP headers. 25th August 2008, 10:20 pm

RSS Duplicate Detection. “Detecting duplicate items in an RSS feed is something of a black art”. I hadn’t realised quite how involved such a basic function of an aggregator could be. 22nd January 2008, 8:11 pm

HTTP Cache Channels (via) Interesting extension to the HTTP caching model by Mark Nottingham: caches can be told to subscribe to an Atom feed which alerts them to cached data that has gone stale. Group invalidation is also supported. 4th January 2008, 12:48 pm

Updates to template_utils. James Bennett’s Django template_utils library now provides tags for consuming external RSS and Atom feeds. Combine with template fragment caching for an instant mashup written just using templates. 10th December 2007, 3:25 pm

RFC 5023: The Atom Publishing Protocol. It’s done! 9th October 2007, 10:17 am

Atom Models. Building Python classes that act as utility wrappers around data stored in an lxml DOM object. 7th August 2007, 4:02 pm

Google AJAX Feed API (via) Simple cross-domain proxy to allow JavaScript to access any publically addressable syndication feed, with the same logic as Google Reader providing normalisation. 18th April 2007, 5:29 pm

Triplr. Ultra simple GET-based web service for converting RSS / Atom / RDF / Microformats+GRDDL to HTML / ntriples / RDF / RSS / JSON / Turtle. Small pieces, loosely joined. 30th March 2007, 3:30 pm

Pipes. New Yahoo! service for combining and remixing Atom/RSS feeds using a really sophisticated drag-and-drop UI. 8th February 2007, 7:52 am

Gmail Atom feeds. Could be useful as a pipe for creating an e-mail interface to an existing Atom-consuming application. 16th January 2007, 2:50 pm

Atom API for AOL Journals. AOL are doing some really cool things with the Atom Publishing Protocol. 10th January 2007, 11:06 pm