Phillip Pearson - web + electronics notes

Dave Winer: Brent Simmons has a feature request for the MetaWeblog API.

I sent Jake Savin a patch for Radio to implement exactly this over a month ago. No idea what's happened to it.

On the topic of things getting lost inside UserLand, I also sent Jake code to implement proper comment feeds for Frontier/RCS. That's why I haven't been doing any more work on the comment monitor; it's meant to be obsolete by now. It's still chugging along fine though, happily finding comments for me on my many Radio/bzero blogs. Anyone interested in getting bits of comment text in their aggregator rather than the one-line notes my service gives you, drop jake or dave at userland.com a mail to tell them to hurry up plugging in my code ;-)

Jon Udell:

This might seem like a trivial problem for veteran debugger-builders to solve. Having spelunked the scary depths of the Windows VxD architecture, isn't tracing SOAP packets pretty much like shooting fish in a barrel? It's "just" human-readable XML -- for some definition of "human," anyway.

Frank Grossman chuckled when I asked him that question, and agreed that on one level Mindreef is tackling an easier problem. But in another (and arguably more important) sense, the loosely coupled systems we are proposing to build out of XML Web services present interaction complexity of a much higher order than interrupt-driven device drivers and event-driven GUI applications. Frank thinks we ain't seen nothin' yet in terms of debugging challenges. I think he's right.

The ecosystem's been getting a lot of attention, due to Mark Pilgrim's new Recommended Reading application.

Seb Paquet writes in today:
Hi Phil, here's another idea for the ecosystem.
How about making three sections instead of two: links to a weblog, links from a weblog, and reciprocal links (blogs that are both linked by a weblog and link to that weblog)?

That's a good idea. I'll think about doing this.

BTW - anyone who thinks they should be on the ecosystem but can't find their blog, drop me a line. The crawler only looks at weblogs.com, so it misses rather a lot of blogs that should really be there. Sorry to Marc -- his blog should show up in the next day or two, when the current ecosystem refresh finishes.