VirtualBox News Atom Feed
A few days ago I decided I wanted a feed of the VirtualBox News page. I mainly wanted this to know when new releases are made. Whilst the application does update itself, sometimes I go a while without firing it up so seeing the release in Fever would be nice.
After some brief Googling I didn’t come across anything that was obviously designed to create feeds from Ruby (outside of Rails). So I opened up the Atom Feed spec and built the feed manually. The end result is a Ruby script and a feed (updated daily) at: http://home.wezm.net/files/virtualbox.atom. Thanks to the brilliant nokogiri this was relatively straightforward.
My script is below:
Death to the ‘feed:’ URI Scheme
Can people please stop using the ‘feed:’ URI scheme for links to feeds on web pages. Its annoying and unnecessary.
From what I can tell this URI scheme was proposed around Dec 2003 as an unofficial pre-draft RFC. The reasoning behind the proposal was:
…to provide a straightforward way for end users to subscribe to the data feed for a particular online resource while browsing the World Wide Web. The expectation is that clicking on a hyperlink that points at a “feed” URI will cause the Web browser to invoke the specified handler for the “feed” URI scheme which SHOULD provide the user with information about the data feed as well as the possess the ability to subscribe to the feed.
Fast forward to 2008 and all the major browsers have support for discovery of feeds specified by the link tag and a user interface to access them. Additionally they are able to auto-detect a feed when specified with the normal http URI scheme. With the built in support the browser is able to launch the appropriate feed reader on the system, be it within the browser or an external application; thus removing the need for the URI to be specified with the ‘feed:’ scheme.