Mike Krus asks:
I wonder if you can write a aggregator driver in Radio8 which overwrites the default one for RSS? I'm not at home so I can't try...
But if you could, I'm sure Jon would find it useful . He could write a driver which strips the description field or cuts it at 100 chars or something when the feed is read into the aggregator. [ Too Much News]
Could do, but you'd have to deal with the multiple (and now growing) set of inbound drivers, for RSS .9x, 1.0, and now other stuff. Also, you might want to keep all the content locally for offline use. I still see this as best handled in a single option for outbound RSS production.
BTW, an interesting coincidence this morning. Mike's NewsIsFree reported a new channel, Nasa Liftoff. It's available as Nasa's non-RSS XML, and also as synthesized RSS. This is slightly misleading, though. Really, there are three channels:
What's scary here is that I just created those three feeds by cloning a local file twice, and changing two words. (I'm expecting someone will show me how I could have used the W3C XSLT service in parameterized way, in which case, this would have reduced to cloning an URL twice and changing two words.) Once Radio upstreamed those changes, I had added value to Nasa's news offering -- value that is instantly available to all RSS readers.
Rael said it nicely: blog locally, publish globally. And when publishing can also mean rewiring global infrastructure, you can start to see what's behind the Web services hype.
Former URL: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2002/03/19.html#a150