Writing Online

What's News?

Something happened. This is the thing. More information on the thing here.

It's news to me when the list of allocated IP addresses changes. Some other things have to be updated when that happens, most of them more promptly than others.

When we syndicate our websites with RSS files, we're passing messages around over HTTP, though the transport could just as easily be Jabber, NNTP, or SMTP. RSS is just one message format among many, that's more or less easily machine-readable. In the process, we're recreating change notification, message queues, and parent-child relationships, because existing mechanisms have too much overhead to meet our needs.

When I was at AP, we needed a way to accept updated scores from the Olympics. One of the elements of the contraption that eventually went into production was a mailbox on a Linux host. The scores, in an IOC-speficied format, were mailed to this address, where the MIME encoding was removed, the messages were parsed, and the data inserted into a database — from which the data was released over the wire.

1:37:13 PM # Google It!
categories: Messaging, Writing Online