This is an attempt to capture some work/events I have been involved with over the last few weeks regarding the rssCloud protocol. I hope this will provide some insights into software development and technical communication, and will be of use to others using the rssCloud protocol. I hope it will also demonstrate that it can be difficult to identify/isolate problems between multiple apps/web services/web sites, and that all involved in the discussion should adopt a mindset of “follow the data” and be open to input from others.
rssCloud is a notification protocol that uses a “cloud” element in a RSS feed. This element contains information on a cloud server that is supporting this feed. A feed reader app can read the RSS feed and register with the server listed in the cloud element to be notified when the feed updates. The producer of the RSS feed can then “ping” the server to let it know that updates are available, and the server can inform apps that registered that feed that updates are available. The cloud element was included in version 2.0 of the RSS specification.
The protocol has been supported in the blogging tools that Dave Winer developed since 2001 (Radio Userland (feed reader/blogging) and Manila (blogging)). Since that time, several other tools added support for adding the cloud element to RSS feeds (Django, Perl XML-RSS, and syndic-rss2). In 2009, Matt Mullenweg announced that WordPress.com blogs would support rssCloud, and that a plugin would be available for WordPress.org blogs. A unique feature of the WordPress implementation is that the WordPress blog itself is the cloud server. A result of this was that a user did not have to find a rssCloud server for their feed to reference – their own site could handle feed registrations and notifications to feed reader apps. This created a supply of literally millions of weblogs that could support quick notifications to their readers if their reading app supported the use of rssCloud. However, for the most part, only feed readers and apps developed by Dave Winer supported the protocol (River2 (OPML Editor app), River4 and River5 (Node.js apps), Radio3 (Node.js) and now FeedLand (Node.js)).
Some users noted issues with rssCloud support back in 2009 as WordPress.com rolled out its rssCloud support. One of the posts
