Ah, beautiful! Bruce Williams has worked up a Movable Type plugin for the !okay/news syndication format. Bruce has been a great support, reporting bugs and testing CVS from time-to-time. The plugin leverages Ingy’s YAML.pm, so Perl users now have some code to build their news from.
A few words about !okay/news. It’s not much. That’s okay, though. The goal is to start very simple and provide something that can cut the size of your RSS feed in half and doesn’t require anything other than a YAML parser. YAML.rb will parse the codedbliss feed without any special libraries.
irb(main):001:0> require 'yaml'
=> true
irb(main):002:0> YAML::load( File.open( 'index.yml' ) )
=> {"items"=> ... , "title"=>"cb.blog(:now)",
"description"=>"the view from here",
"link"=>"http://blog.codedbliss.com/",
"updatePeriod"=>"00:60.00"}}
The plan is to either expand !okay/news or to build a new format with different goals, because I believe there is much more that can be done with syndication. One of my thoughts is to open the door on attaching data to news items. Comments, media, trackback, links.
# A news item with content attached
- !okay/news/^item
pubTime: 2003-03-11T02:01:49.00-05:00
link: http://blog.codedbliss.com/archives/000007.html
description: |-
Release of v0.8b of the okay/news (YAML syndication) plugin for MovableType
attached:
- !^comment
from: _why
message: >
Ah, beautiful!
- !^reference
context: YAML syndication plugin
link: http://blog.codedbliss.com/archives/mt-okaynews-0.8b.pl
Contextual links could really add a lot to a feed. An aggregator could build statistics based on the information and build relationships between the information across various sources.
