Much of my Saturday night, rather then being consumed by girls or studying or America's Army, was caught up in my obsession with making ATOM syndication work. It doesn't. But more on that in a minute. It all starts off with RSS. RSS stands for a lot of things, depending on who you ask. But the general consensus is that it all starts out with Netscape, so you know it's bad news to begin with. They had this idea about syndicating content, where you could embed content in simple text format that you could shoot along, and then others would syndicate the content, and it would be really simple and cool. Like your dot com magazine site inserting a news feed from ESPN's women's basketball section into your own site, updated automatically. It was a really cool idea. Of course, nobody understood the spec, there were no parsers to retranslate the crap back out, people who actually owned content worth reading noticed that there wasn't a way to get money back built into the system, oh, and it turns out people like eye candy (which is why you are reading this in a web browser instead of in gopher-space, which was information rich but eye-candy poor). So it died. Or at least, I thought it did. Turns out a dude named Winer and his company Userland kept it alive, and even expanded the original spec (Can you see where this is going?). So, of course, Netscape released their own update, which included most, but not all, of the Userland changes. And then Netscape died. But Userland had it's spec. Which of course, it wasn't. So they released yet another version. And by now weblogs had become popular, and suddenly content was sexy again (Because, apparently, we desperately need to know what Caoine thought of this Saturday's Pokemon episode.). So others started jumping into the make your own version game. Long story short, there are NINE different versions of RSS. Not that even the term RSS is even agreed upon. There's RSS, RDF, XML, and now ATOM. Which bring me back to Blogger. A short while ago, Blogger announced that they were finally supporting this newfangled RSS thing, and included easy to insert code, of which I did quite eagerly. I even validated it using Feed Validator. And then I settled back into my routine. Which leads to Saturday night. Which is when I had the brilliant idea of making a web page that would automatically syndicate content from other people's sites. I mean, this was the point of RSS, right? Here's the thing, tho: I have no resources. No access to a php enabled server, no money, and no time to really learn all this crap that's supposed to be easy, but never is. But that's never stopped me before. If you notice to the left, I already have an rss feed coming in, from Metafilter. Thanks to David Carter-Tod's Wytheville Community College News Service, it's easy to do. Essentially, their server calls up the feed, parses the xml, and spits out JavaScript code, which your browser then interprets into html, thanks to a simple two line JavaScript code I insert into my pages. There are a few others that do this too. But none of them support ATOM. Which is what Blogger outputs my site as. So, this sucks. Ahh, but all hope is not lost. IE5+ has an XML parser built in! In fact, if you click on my ATOM feed, you don't see XML, as if you were to look at Metafilter's 0.91 RSS feed. Instead, IE5+ has been nice enough to interpret the raw xml as pseudo html, and formatted it accordingly. IE5+ also supports something called XML data islands, where you can load an XML document into the browser, and then bind certain html elements (a table, spans, divs) to the XML data. It works really well. Except with ATOM. Somehow, the way ATOM is structured, you can't get IE5+ to read, much less bind, elements within the xml. It will format the raw XML so long as the file is a .xml extension, but within a .html document it will not interpret the raw XML. So for now, you simply can't syndicate ATOM feeds unless you run a php enabled server. All this took me an entire weekend of trial and error to discover, and is still eating away at my vacation. But I thought you might want to know. (Also, it seems that besides tech savvy nerds, nobody else on planet Earth seems to really care about this. When Microsoft finally releases their newsreader in the next version of Windows, I'm sure all these compatibility issues will finally fall by the wayside.) :: Bowling Update Game 1: 115 Game 2: 139 :: Sunday night was surprisingly hopping at the bar. After bowling one of the guys in the league asked if I wanted to join them at the bar afterwards. I wasn't working Monday, so I said why not. Everybody is at least 40 (with one exception) and has kids, so I figured it would be a slow hour and then I'd go home. Instead, we end up at The Salty Dog, a bar in Bay Ridge, where all the girls have ID's for 21, but you'd have to ask some hard questions before going home with them. My tolerance was good, for a change. I had a Rolling Rock to get all buzzed up, and then when it finally wore off, I could take two Kamikaze shots (an hour apart, tho). Talked to some girls, but wasn't in the mood to be hitting it up. I need to get some single friends my age that live in Brooklyn before that really takes off. Well, that and some better clothes (my bowling duds are nothing to write home about). It was nice tho, to really get out for once.