RSS Garden
I started yet another side project a week or so ago and I thought i’d write a little something about it here.
In 2009, I was experimenting with ideas around simple publishing/blogging tools and “recipes”. Stuff that avoided bloat and over-complexity. Minimilist solutions. I enjoyed it and to be honest whenever I open up this WordPress blog, I get frustrated knowing how much bloat is under the hood of this thing. Sure, it looks ok up here where the 2 or 3 people who may visit this blog every month can see it. But I am a minimilist at heart and WordPress is quite the opposite is a lot of ways. But I continue to use it for this particular blog until I muster up the motivation and time to get rid of it. I can live with it. But lately I am writing some code to continue my experimentations in minimilist blogging.
This new project is called RSS Garden. I started with the rule that I had to base everything from RSS feeds. From the data store to profiles to social features. Everything had to be an RSS Feed first. I also set a rule that the server would deliver these RSS feeds (often static files) directly to the browser without any server-side rendering and instead let the client-side web browser use it’s own built-in capabilities and resources to do page rendering. To achieve this, I once again added the old technology known as XSLT to the minimilist stack. Together, they would be two pillars of this….. let’s just call it a framework for sake of ease.
Other tech involved includes very basic PHP (mostly just CRUD and XML construction and a small set of API related functions) and of course HTML, CSS and Javascript. RSS Garden supports multiple Themes via XSLT Stylesheets and the aforementioned presentation layer components for styling and UX. The default theme is nothing fancy and that’s the point. But I think it’s heading in a good minimilist direction for demonstration purposes.
The default theme emphasizes a Twitter-like experience with short-form posts and some social functionality like “Friend Following” and Replies/Comments. but a theme could skip out on the social networking type of stuff and just focus on blogging/writing or file sharing or link sharing. A theme could also be made to work like a media gallery and not like a blog at all. Obviously, their are no constraints to creativity when you understand some basic knowledge about web development. And at this point, that is required to build a theme. However, it is no more complex than a WordPress or Drupal theme. In many ways, it is actually simpler.
RSS Garden has some awareness initiatives too. I want to raise the issue about how web browsers hijack RSS feeds and dismiss a content publisher’s machine-readable instructions to use standards-based technology to render the output of the feed. I am talking about the XSLT stylesheet declaration in a feed that is meant to tell the web browser how to present the document. This applies to any XML document but when the format of the XML is discovered to be RSS, the web browsers think they know whats best for users and ignore the stylesheets in favor of their own built-in feed handling. I think this has gone on way too long and i’m hoping that in the future, web browser makers do the right thing. RSS Garden uses trickery in order to avoid this RSS feed hijacking.
Another issue that I want to raise awareness of is the lack of XSLT support in the stock Android web browser. This is very disappointing especially when the stock web browser on iOS devices handles XSLT.
This needs to change sooner than later.
And in general, RSS Garden attempts to show support for RSS, a powerful and meaningful data format that has changed the Interwebs for the better over the last 5-10 years. However, it is common for RSS to get dismissed these days as old, slow and increasingly irrelevant technology in light of centralized corporate owned services like Twitter, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and eventually Apple among many other smaller companies. RSS represents a wild uncontrollable technology (in the eyes of corporate interests) that is best suited for the Open Web and is hard to wrangle and monetize. It also gets a bad rap because the consumer-facing side of RSS has had limited success in comparison to things like social networks or even email. Yet, RSS is incredibly pervasive and continues to be important enough for many of the worlds most respected publications to incorporate into their flow. Their are also more recent efforts to reboot RSS as it continues to be deeply applicable to todays Social and News Info Ecosystem. Pardon my lack of references but i’m not trying to be thorough here….. just say’n 
So RSS Garden, for me, is a way to continue to have fun with code while demonstrating how a basic technology stack can be used by DiYers in the blogging and publishing world to remove dependence on corporate silos, challenge over-complex solutions (both open and closed) and contribute to federated and decentralized social pub/sub alternatives.
For more info and to check out the current state of the software, go to http://rssgarden.com.
Related posts:
Trackbacks 3:48 AM on May 19, 2012 Permalink |