Blogging Roller

I also read Mark Pilgrim's excellent new XML.com column The Atom API.  The column reviews the history of weblogging APIs and then provides details of the new Atom API. The article makes it pretty clear that the Atom API is a better solution than the XML-RPC based Blogger and MetaWeblog APIs. It is easier to implement and it takes advantage of XML features like namespaces and schema. Atom is simple and elegant, yet it remains SOAP compatible; a great example of a web services API.

In other weblogging tech news, two competing proposals for website newfeed discovery have appeared: FDML from Sam "it's just data" Ruby and friends and shortly after that myPublicFeeds.opml from Dave "it's just an outline" Winer. These proposed standards could be pretty useful to sites like Java.blogs that aggregate multiple blogs and JRoller which host a community of blogs.