Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Update on My.UserLand.Com

Author:Dave Winer
Posted:5/8/1999; 6:36:04 AM
Topic:Update on My.UserLand.Com
Msg #:5830
Prev/Next:5829 / 5831

Source release on Monday

I'm finally getting to work on the release of My.UserLand.Com. Apologies for the delay, I've been busy this week and keep wanting to finish this job so other people can get started with their work. My plan is to get thru the work this weekend and then release myUserLand.root on Monday.

A distribution network

We're going to start a distribution network for these URLs.

Until now we've kept the URLs of the RSS files private. You can view the channel content thru our server, but you can't see the actual XML files behind them.

I did it this way so I could get a feel for how it worked before deciding whether or not to expose the URLs.

So in balance, based on a lot of subjectives, I've decided to expose the URLs, so people can build services that are competitive with My.UserLand.Com.

This has an advantage to us of positioning our registration page as a way to broadcast the URL of your RSS file to lots of other servers. This gives My.UserLand.Com another feature advantage over My.Netscape.Com. An open system for weblog registration.

Builds on XML-RPC

The URL list is open, but to access it you'll have to use XML-RPC. There are implementations of XML-RPC for all the major OSes and all the major runtime environments. A list of these tools, all freely downloadable in source, is at www.xmlrpc.com.

At first I thought I'd just do an XMLization of the services table, but then I imagined that people would want to be able to tell the server to only return the new URLs since the last time they checked. Then I imagined that people would want all the information in the services table about the channel. The problem started balooning.

I realized we had easy solutions worked out for this, if only I could use XML-RPC instead of straight XML. Sooooo.. I bit the bullet, there's a lot of value already in this info, and we're providing it publicly and for free, so it's OK with me if we use this to help suck XML-RPC clients out to all the servers that are dealing with RSS. We'll be able to do more useful things as we go forward if the clients are smarter.

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