Chris Finke, a senior engineer at Netscape, has joined the RSS Advisory Board.

Finke's a Netscape.Com and Netscape 9 browser developer as well as the creator of the Mozilla Firefox extensions RSS Ticker and OPML Support.

Netscape played a formative role in the development of RSS, publishing the first RSS specification in 1999 and spurring adoption by encouraging publishers to create feeds for the first aggregator -- the recently relaunched My.Netscape. Netscape published RSS 0.90, the common ancestor of both RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0.

For the past eight years, Netscape has hosted the RSS 0.91 DTD, a document type definition that receives four million hits a day.

Welcome to the board!

The proposal to create and publish an RSS Autodiscovery specification has passed the RSS Advisory Board with members Matthew Bookspan, Rogers Cadenhead, Jason Douglas, James Holderness, Eric Lunt, Randy Charles Morin and Jake Savin voting in favor and no one voting in opposition.

Both Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 and Mozilla Firefox 2.0 support autodiscovery, an effective way for publishers to let readers know that their sites offer a syndicated feed.

If you're using one of these browsers or another that supports autodiscovery, you might have noticed an orange icon on the right edge of the address bar when you load some pages.

This icon, the common feed icon, indicates that the site offers a syndicated feed. You can click it to subscribe to the feed in the browser's feed reader or another reader such as Bloglines, NewsGator Online or Google Reader. The board's web site uses autodiscovery to publicize our RSS 2.0 feed.

Comments and corrections regarding the new specification can be made on the board's RSS-Public mailing list.

Note: An earlier version of the same proposal passed on Nov. 27 with Bookspan, Cadenhead, Douglas, Holderness, Lunt, Morin, Paul Querna and Savin voting in favor and no one voting in opposition.

The real estate search engine Propsmart, created by the same team that developed BookCrossing, has launched an RSS 2.0 namespace for representing real estate properties in a feed.

Propsmart allows data feed partners to provide bulk property data by sending us a data file or providing a web data feed. ...

The feed should be provided as a URL, which we will crawl on a regular basis. The accepted format of the data feed is RSS 2.0.

They've been responsive to feedback. When I contacted the company about a couple of minor nits that prevented the feeds from being valid last week, they were quick to correct the problems.

James Holderness and Paul Querna have joined the RSS Advisory Board.

Holderness is a software developer working on the Snarfer RSS reader for Windows whose past projects include the WebFerret search utility and Delrina CyberJack Internet application suite.

He's also an active participant on the board's RSS-Public mailing list who contributed to the RSS Profile, a set of best practice recommendations for RSS in ongoing development.

Querna is a software engineer at Ask working on Bloglines, one of the most popular web-based RSS readers.

He's also a member of the project management committee for the Apache web server and formerly a developer of voice over IP communications systems at BitStruct.

Welcome to the board!

The proposal to revise the RSS specification has passed 7-0 with RSS Advisory Board members Matthew Bookspan, Rogers Cadenhead, Randy Charles Morin, Greg Smith, Loïc Le Meur, Jenny Levine and Eric Lunt voting in favor.

The specification has been edited to reflect http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification as the document's permanent URL and RSS-Public as the mailing list where users should post RSS-related questions and comments. No other changes were made.

All edits to the specification are logged. This revision of the document has the version number 2.0.8.

Read Older Entries