Matthias just posted his favorite software of 2004. Glad to see we're on the list. Thanks Matthias!
Got a cool award in the mail yesterday from NY Press. NetCaptor won the 2004 Best of Manhattan award for best web browser. There's something really fun about an award you can put on your wall.
To many, the word shareware means try-before-you-buy software. I grabbed this from the MS homepage today. Looks like the biggest software company in the world is a shareware company.
The link takes you to the Microsoft Trial Software Center.
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I've been working on an RSS reader for NetCaptor for a while now, experimenting with direct aggregation and also the Bloglines web services API.
Most RSS implementations waste a ton of bandwidth. Even if you use a conditional GET, you still have to download an entire feed when a single item changes.
It makes me wish feeds had a version number, and each post is assigned to one of those versions. This could just be embedded in the RSS file itself... something like:
Everytime a post is added to a feed, the feed version is incremented, and the post is assigned to that new feed version.
Clients would query the RSS server passing the last version the client downloaded. The server would return any new or updated items only. Not only would this save bandwidth, but the aggregator would automatically know which items should be flagged as new instead of having to compare permalinks or guids.
Client would download a feed with a URL like...
...and the returned feed would only return updated items since version 1261.
I know, I know. This wouldn't work well for static feed servers. But for dynamic ones, it should be pretty simple to implement, especially for database driven servers.
