Cloud Testing Again

Sorry for the spew, I just need to regenerate a ping for a friend who is doing some testing of a reader.

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 17:36:08 PDT - Link

This feed is now RSS Cloud ready! (I Think!)

I'll admit it. I was way behind the ball when it came to RSS. I was following the discussions about it on Scripting News but I just didn't get it. Then one day I asked a co-worker, and he mentioned that he pretty much only read RSS anymore, and being a software genius (and brilliant cartoonist, but that's unrelated) he'd written a bit of code to scrape websites (including mine) to make RSS for his reader.

A few weeks later I got around to re-writing my hand-rolled publishing back end to generate my own RSS 2.0 feed, and at the same time I began to use RSS myself.

So you can imagine when Dave Winer started to talk about RSS Cloud, This time I paid attention.

After spending an hour at rsscloud.org I'd figured out that adding the feature was trivial. All I had to do was to add the appropriate cloud tag tot he RSS feed, and add a button to my publishing system to send a Ping to the appropriate cloud server.

This left me with the problem of finding an appropriate cloud server. Since it was way outside my poor Perl HaX0r skillz to write my own server, I had to wait for someone else to supply the open server.

On September 19, draft Media came to my rescue with a public server. It took me until yesterday to get around to actually hacking it in. (I have a kitchen counter and back splash rebuild that takes higher priority - just ask my wife.) After solving my bone-headed Perl bugs and some tweeks on the draft Media side it looks like I'm on the air.

My expectation is that at some point I will need to move to another cloud server — draft Media can't and shouldn't provide this service for free forever — but hopefully by then there will be a number of commercial options. BTW, I'll pay $10/year for this low flow feed.

Next, of course was testing the cloud feed. AFAIK the only reader that supports it today is Dave Winer's River 2, and since it didn't need to deal with NAT tunneling at Dave's house, well... it doesn't, and since we dropped our fixed IP addresses when we moved to our new house, I can't test my own feed yet. 'Doh. So... when I say "This feed is now RSS Cloud ready!" I'm just pretty sure it is.

Still, I figure that other RSS Cloud readers that are aimed at the general public are just around the corner — I totally get how much work that is — and I'll just wait until then.

In the meantime, if any of you are using River 2 or are testing some new reader, I'd be honored if you'd check my feed. I can promise you Cat Pictures and snarky blog entries, sometimes in the same post.

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 13:20:56 PDT - Link

This is another test of the RSS cloud

This is new data

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 12:09:19 PDT - Link

Testing RSScloud 123

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 11:58:03 PDT - Link