It has been a long time coming, but the Java library for RSS and Atom utilities called ROME has finally made it to version 1.0 (changelog). Thanks to all of the contributers and the hard work on the dev team for making it possible!  

New to ROME? For a quick tutorial on how to get started, check out my piece on XML.com : “ROME in a Day: Parse and Publish Feeds in Java“.

Fox News has an “Automatic Transcription” feature for its videos.  The disclaimer of “may not be 100% accurate” is understated by 95%.  Here’s the presidential oath of Barak Obama, the way their transcription software heard it:

“I. — Barack Hussein Obama I solemnly swear Barack Hussein Obama do solemnly swear. That I will execute the office of president of the United States faithfully — execute … Get off faithfully the president the office of president and — I just — the United States — wheels. — the best of — ability and will miss my children. Preserve protect and defend the constitution of the United States. Preserve protect and defend the constitution of the United States so help you got so homey — congratulations mr.”

"I will miss my children."

Woops.  To be fair, there were two people talking at the same time, which is a nightmare for voice recognition software.  

But you’ve got to love phrases like “Get off faithfully the president”,  ”will miss my children”, and “so help you got so homey.”   Maybe Fox News should hire out the transcription software as a writer for Saturday Night Live… it’s funnier than most of the people they’ve hired.

Ever wanted to defragment a certain file or collection of files on your Windows PC, without defragging the entire hard drive? Here’s why and how you can do it:

Don’t Bring Me Down

I recently noticed that one of my oft-used Windows applications was getting slower and slower. After checking the usual suspects in Task Manager (Windows Search, Norton AV, you know who you are), I also checked to see if my hard drive needed to be defragmented. At first glance, the answer was no: the defrag tool reported “You do not need to defragment this volume”. I looked at the volume report, however and saw that many of the worst-fragmented files were used by my oh-so-slow application.

Any time an application needs to read or write to heavily-fragmented files, it has to go on a treasure hunt all over the hard drive platter. Since disk I/O is an expensive operation, defragging those files can boost application performance considerably. It might also save you from some nasty crashes.

The problem is that there is no guarantee which files the Windows Defrag Tool will touch. You can defrag the whole disk only to find out it skipped your files anyway. Yeah, that happened to me. Twice more than I care to admit. Mr Gates, I’d like my 2 hours back.

So I did a treasure hunt of my own, and found a fast and free tool designed to solve this very problem…

Contig To The Rescue

Contig v1.54 is a free command-line tool that works on Windows NT, XP, 2000, and Vista. It will analyze and defragment a file or a set of files matching a wildcard. Contig is fast, tiny at 55KB, easy to use, and can even be killed in the middle of processing without corrupting your drive. Here’s how to start single-file defragging in 5 minutes, or your next pizza is free:

1. Download Contig.zip, and extract Contig.exe in a directory of your choice.
2. Open a command line, and type in the location of Contig.exe, followed by the -v switch, followed by the location of the file you want to defrag. If either location has a space in the path name, be sure to enclose both locations in quotes. Here’s how it looks in action:
   C:\>"C:\tools\Contig.exe" -v "C:\System Volume Information\catalog.wci\00010005.ci"
...
Found a free disk block at 14025352 of length 32740 for entire file.
Moving 32688 clusters at file offset cluster 0 to disk cluster 14025352
File size: 133890048 bytes
Fragments before: 1126
Fragments after : 1
3. If you want to defrag a set of files using a wildcard pattern, then just use the -s switch and a wild-carded path. Like so:
   "C:\tools\Contig.exe" -s "C:\music\*.mp3"

It’s really that easy. Contig also has a couple of other switches to either just analyze the files or run quietly. See the home page for documentation. Happy Defragging!

Photo (CC) by Justin Marty

I happened across Jonathan Feinberg’s Wordle (”Beautiful Word Clouds”) visualization recently.  Pretty fun, but I instantly wanted a way to create one from an RSS feed. I didn’t see a way to do it, so I checked the FAQ confirmed there wasn’t one available:

How about a field to enter a blog/web page/wikipedia article’s URL?

If you know of an interesting text source that exposes a JSON interface, then I’d be happy to add a field for it on the “create” page. Unfortunately, a web site that doesn’t expose its data via JSON is not useful to Wordle, because Wordle does all of its text processing on your computer, in the browser. A JSON URL can be dynamically retrieved without hitting the Wordle server.

Yahoo Pipes immediately came to mind. I noodled around with the Term Extractor module in Pipes, a handy way to pull significant words from the items in an RSS feed. Thanks to the permissive Creative Commons license used by Wordle, I copied the necessary resources to my server, added a new JavaScript function to Wordle’s code to call the new Pipe, get a JSONP callback, and push the resulting feed terms to the Wordle Applet.

Voila: http://labs.techbrew.net/wordle/

The CC license on the mod stands, so if Mr. Feinberg finds the mod useful, he’s free to grab it, clone the Pipe, and put it back into Wordle proper.

A video demonstration of software is often far better than static screenshots, and is often more convenient to distribute than arranging for a live demo. This tutorial will show you how easy it is to record a video “screencast” of most applications with the free (as in lunch) Windows Media Encoder software.

Caveats and Installation

• WME won’t work with applications which draw directly to the screen. If the application has to run full screen or requires a decent video card, it probably draws directly to the screen.
• Check the System Requirements  page to understand what your computer’s hardware will be capable of doing with the software.
• If you want to record audio (like a voice over), you’ll need a microphone. If you’re using a laptop with a built-in microphone, it probably sucks. Try to get something that you can get closer to your mouth and that has a windscreen.
• Download Windows Media Encoder and install it. Other than picking an directory, the installer is basically hands-free.

Setting Up a Screen Capture

Getting the screen capture going is really easy once you’re familiar with the settings to use. (You’ll find the hard part is “performing for the camera” once the capture has started.)

Feeling a bit recursive, I used WME to demo a copy of itself, showing a quick walkthrough of the setup. You can watch it on YouTube or download the original techbrew.net_wme_walkthrough.wmv generated by WME itself. YouTube’s transcoding is unfortunately pretty fuzzy, so I recommend taking a look at the original to see what was actually captured.

Here are the basics of setting up a screencast, with some advice about settings along the way:

1. Run the software via Start->Programs->Windows Media->Windows Media Encoder.

2. Select the “Capture Screen” option in the New Session dialog and press the “OK” button.

3. Choose your capture settings. The new session wizard will show you options for doing a screen capture:

• Specific Window – Select this if the software you want to screencast is in only one window with minimal dialogs or popups. Dialogs and popups will only show up if they are in front of and smaller than the main window. Anything which extends outside of the boundary of the main window will be cut off in your video. If you choose this, you’ll need to start up your application and have it running before you go to the next step. Also keep in mind that the size and aspect ratio (length vs. width) of the video display will be the same as your application window. If your screencast is destined to be played in a video player like YouTube, for example, the aspect ratio can matter a great deal. If you can’t resize the window to be what you need, you might want to pick one of the next two options.
• Region of the Screen – Select this if you want to section off a portion of your desktop for capture. Any window, cursor, menu, tooltip in that region will be recorded. This is an easy way to make sure that the aspect ration of your video is exactly right. Getting everything you want to show to happen inside that region can take some careful planning and thought, however.
• Entire Screen – If you want to simply record your entire screen and everything that happens, this is the option to choose. Keep in mind, however, that if you have a really high resolution monitor, you’re going to be capturing a ton of data. You probably don’t want to create a video file that has to be played back at the same resolution in order to make out the fine details. If possible, drop down to a lower resolution before you do the screencast. Something else to keep in mind: If you only have one display, the WME window will be on your taskbar while you are recording. If your computer is capable of using two displays, you can use your secondary display as the capture screen to avoid seeing the taskbar.

4. Check (or don’t check) the Capture Audio option. If you want to record a voice-over at the same time you’re running your application, then check it. Be forewarned: doing a smooth voice-over while running the software can be pretty tough and takes a ton of practice runs. If you have access to video editing software, you may want to re-do the voice-over when you don’t have to concentrate on operating the software.

5. Click the Next Button.

• If you chose “Specific Window” or “Region of the Screen”, the wizard will prompt you to choose the window or specify the region. Do so and click the Next button again.
• If you chose “Entire Screen”, go to Step 6.

6. Name an output file – The wizard will prompt you for an output file name and location. The video file it creates will be a .wmv video file.

7. Choose the capture quality – The wizard lets you choose a capture quality setting of Low/Medium/High. You have to weigh the trade-off between file size and video clarity. If you have access to video editing software or the means to convert the file format later on, choose High so that you have the best-possible source to start with.

8. Enter the Display Information – You can enter some video file metadata like title and author if you like. The metadata will only show up if the video file is played in Windows Media Encoder, however. If you’re going to edit or convert the file, you don’t need to bother with this metadata.

9. Press the Finish button.

The wizard will close. Now you’re actually in the Windows Media Encoder proper, set up and ready to go according to the wizard settings you chose. (The Properties button on the toolbar will show you the myriad of settings available for a whole slew of use cases. After you’ve used WME for awhile, you’ll may want to dig in here and start experimenting.)

If you’re in Europe or a region that displays video in the PAL format, you can change that setting via the Tools->Options menu. The General Options tab has a “Default Format” setting which lets you switch between PAL and NTSC.

10. Press the Start Encoding button.

WME will record your cursor movement and screen activity, whether in a window, region, or full screen. If you chose to capture audio, it will record that as well.

The default behavior of WME is to minimize to the taskbar when you are recording. Restoring the WME window will pause recording. If you don’t want the minimizing behavior, perhaps because you aren’t doing a full-screen capture, you can turn it off via the Tools->Options menu under General Options.

11. Press the Stop button.

WME will stop recording and show you a summary screen of the screencast content. You can close the dialog or use the “Play Output File” button to view your handiwork.

12. Save your session settings. Use File -> Save to save all your settings to a file that can be reused for another screen capture. As you use WME more, you’ll probably start fine-tuning the settings for your particular needs. Saving those settings for repeatable screencasts will become increasingly more important.

13. Experiment, lather, rinse, and repeat. There is a lot under the hood in WME, including the ability to push a live video stream to a Windows Media Server. Play around and see what it can do, and don’t forget [F1] – the help files for WME explain the various concepts and settings in the tool.

Happy screencasting!

The RSS Advisory Board has had a checkered past and its share of run-ins with Dave Winer over RSS 2.0. There have been times where it was right to question how relevant it had become.

This announcement by Netscape lends a great deal of credibility to the Board-sans-Winer, and hopefully will increase the adoption of their RSS Profile work.

The RSS specification documents, DTDs, and help files for the first versions of RSS (v0.9, v0.91) are being moved to RSSBoard.org, where they will be hosted by the RSS Advisory Board in perpetuity. Netscape will continue to host these files (via redirect) on the My Netscape domain (my.netscape.com) until August 1st, 2008.

…

All websites that produce RSS 0.9 or RSS 0.91 feeds will need to either convert to using the current standard (RSS v2.0), or if desired, convert their v0.9/v0.91 feeds properly using this guide, provided by the RSS Advisory Board, by August 1st.

Syndication historians will note that although Winer’s RSS 2.0 is the undisputed winner of the Syndication format race to date, Netscape actually invented RSS by name. (Winer’s “scriptingNews” format did precede that by 2 years, of course, but it was a home-grown spec intended solely for Scripting News itself.)

It is interesting that Netscape chose to hand over the keys to the RSS Advisory Board, but not to Winer or Harvard Law.

Newsgator has announced that a bevy of their RSS/Atom clients, including the excellent FeedDemon is now free:

FeedDemon 2.6, NetNewsWire 3.1, Inbox 3.0 (beta), and NewsGator Go! for Windows Mobile 2.0. Each of these is a pretty major release on its own – tons of new features in all of them.

But second, every one of those applications is now free! Free as in beer, that is. And add to the free list NewsGator Go! for BlackBerry as well. And not only are they free, but our online services (including synchronization) are now free as well! Not to mention our iPhone reader, HTML mobile reader, and all of the other applications that are part of our online platform.

Hat tip to CleverClogs for spotting the news.

Ben Abernathy writes a poignant observation about computer science and the kinds of people that come (or don’t come) out of college programs.    The first group ditches computer science altogether, the second delights in making things work, but the third strives for something more elusive: elegance and beauty.  Ben is right to note that if you’re looking for beauty in software, you can very well end up a miserable idealist.

Personally, I’ve had to come to a place where I resolve to plant beautiful code wherever I can, even if it is surrounded by weeds I’m not allowed to pull.  Even when I fail at it, I find that the effort of striving to improve, rather than just make do, makes me a better and happier software engineer.

Having been in software for over a decade, I have found one easy way to spot the differences between coworkers and competitors in Group 2 (”Get it done”) and Group 3 (”Make it beautiful”): Regard, or disregard, for craft.

Doghouse Software

It’s pretty obvious when you look at carpentry, masonry, or cooking which people care about their craft, and which people just “got it done.”  Unfortunately, craft it much easier to see in the physical space than in software.  Even a gorgeous GUI can hide some unspeakably gnarly code.

I heard Grady Booch speak at Java One many years ago.  He said that most people build applications like they build doghouses:  Bang together some wood, and if the dog is mostly dry, you’re done.  Enterprise applications, he noted, are usually skyscrapers composed of a bunch of doghouses duct-taped together.

Doghouse software is built with little regard for craft.   This problem may not show up right away, but as soon as the requirements or use cases expand, the shoddy craftsmanship becomes painfully clear.   Ask anybody trying to retrofit web services on a legacy architecture, and you’ll see what I mean.

Process and Craft

Process, I must say, should not be confused with craft.  Craft should involve some process , but I’ve never seen process generate craftsmanship.  (I have seen beautiful code in CMM-4 shops and in startups.  I’ve also seen hideous crap in both.)  The difference invariably comes down to regard for craft by the individual.

Questions Asked and Unasked

“Does it work?”  If software is just a job, this is where a programmer stops asking questions.  If she cares about craft, she also asks questions like:

• “Can I prove it will work reliably? (It it testable?)”
• “Is it easy to use, does it eliminate excise?  (Is it usable, user-friendly, intuitive?)”)
• “Can I easily swap out visualizations? (Are there clear boundaries between model, view, and controller?)”
• “Will it work if it becomes modestly or even insanely popular? (Is it scalable?)”
• “Will it work if I have to add new features, or change the persistence layer, or play well in SOA?  (Is it modular, loosely-coupled, platform-agnostic, maintainable?)

These questions get at the heart of true software craftsmanship: Be in the business of building products that will stand the test of time, not one-offs with zero shelf life.

Application-wide craftsmanship can be, as Joel Spolsky rightly notes, “incredibly expensive. “  I firmly believe, however, that individuals can improve their craft and stay on budget in most situations. I have found that improving my craft improves my productivity and the maintainability of my code.

Go to the Source

Source code it often a great way to tell whether a programmer cares about craft.    Is it clean and easy to read?   Are design patterns leveraged?  Was attention paid to loose coupling, encapsulation, dependency injection?  Are there an appropriate amount of comments?   Are complex methods broken down into simpler ones?  Are there unit tests?  Does the code, and the compiled product, look like something the programmer took pride in?  Or does it “just work?”

Finding Craftsman

My quest for interviewing new hires is not just to discern talent, but a regard for craftsmanship.   It is rare that a candidate can present source code, however.  I’ve found it difficult to really learn in an interview how much a person cares about the quality of his work.

Joel of Joel on Software uses summer internships to find the kind of people he wants, but most companies can’t reproduce his model or, honestly, draw that level of internship talent.  And, lets face, it, you can’t bring in senior engineers as summer interns.

Can craftsmanship be discerned in an interview without having the source code?   If you have any suggestions, please share them in the comments below.

Wondering if your New Years’ resolutions will make it past February? While there is no substitute for personal discipline and all that stuff, it is nice to have some help along the way. Here are some ways that technology can make that resolution just a little bit easer to keep:

Get Things Done

Do you just need help remembering all the stuff you didn’ get around to last year? Go no further than Remember The Milk. This free service has it all: To-do lists with calendering, email/SMS/RSS/instant message reminders, and integration with everything from the iPhone to Google homepages.

If you want to embrace hard-core efficiency, read Getting Things Done and then check out this list of GTD software tools. The list has both buyware and freeware for Palm, Pocket PC, Linux, and Windows.

Get Fit

The coolest exercise gadget this year has to be the Nike + iPod Sport Kit. If you own a pair of Nikes that can accomodate a special sensor, this kit turns your iPod into a performance monitor and coach. At $45, it beats buying a new treadmill.

Need help with a exercise program and fitness tracker? Here is a Online Fiteness Tracker that helps you manage both your diet and your exercise plan, monitoring nutrition, and creating weekly and monthly reports of your progress. There is a free version of this service as well.

Eat Right

Counting calories? If you have a personalized Google homepage, you can add this Calorie Calculator widget. “Use the calorie calculator to see each meal’s calorie details and sum up your daily total. Use the settings to see your recommended average daily intake.” If you want something more portable, try the Nutrition Assistant. Or if you own a Windows Mobile device here is a roundup of diet software for smartphones.

Need to completely overhaul your diet? I personally recommend The South Beach Diet website. You get lots of tools to help shed the pounds, including a diet profile to track your progress, forums and diaries to share successes and struggles with like-minded people. Best of all, it has a meal planner that lets you pick and print recipes, including a coalated shopping list. (If you pick four recipes that each call for a 1/4 cup of minced onion, for example, the shopping list will combine the amounts and let you know to buy a cup of mixed onion for that set.)

Get Going!

Good luck in 2008! If you use any high-tech tools not listed here, drop a comment and let us know what works for you. Happy New Year from TechBrew!

If you’ve been looking for a good excuse to learn Ruby on Rails, now is a great time.

Sitepoint.com is giving away the full PDF of “Build Your Own Ruby on Rails Web Applications” through the end of the month of November. All you need to do is provide an email address and they’ll send you a link to the PDF download.

I started reading it last night, and it seems to be oriented to people familiar with building web applications but aren’t webdev pros. (If you’re the “just give me the API” kind of developer, this book is probably a little too verbose for you.) For details of what is inside, you can take a peek at the table of contents.

*Note: Free PDF offer expired: Saturday, December 01st, 2007 – 00:00:00 AM

I’ve been a user of the excellent IntelliJ Java IDE for 4 years on Windows. Even though the official Linux support by JetBrains is only for RedHat, you can also install IntelliJ fairly easily on Ubuntu. I’ve tested this with Xubunto 7.10 (Gutsy), Java 6, and IntelliJ 7. Here’s how to do it in four basic steps:

1) Get Java

Install the Java 6 JDK, which IDEA itself needs to run. (You can have other JDKs for your projects, but you’ll need this one to run IntelliJ itself.) For example, type this in a terminal:

sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk

Follow the prompts for root password, download confirmation, and eventually the Sun EULA to install Java itself. If it installed successfully, you should be able to type this at a prompt:

java -version

… to get several lines telling you the version of Java you have installed. If this doesn’t work, refer to Sun’s documentation on troubleshooting installations.

2) Get IntelliJ IDEA

Download the latest version of IntelliJ IDEA for Linux:

http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/download/index.html#linux

Once the download is finished, extract the archive using the correct filename according to your download. For example, to install IntelliJ in /usr/lib, do the following:

tar xfz idea-7.0.1.tar.gz ./usr/lib/

The IntelliJ installation will now be in a subdirectory indicating the build number, in the format “idea-xxxx”. In the case of IDEA 7.0.1, the app directory is “idea-7364“. (Once the extraction is done, you can delete the downloaded archive to conserve disk space if needed.)

3) Get Environmental

There are a couple of environment variables to be taken care of. First, you need to set a new environment variable that tells IntelliJ where your install of Java is. For example:

export JDK_HOME="/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/"

Use the “env” command, or just “echo $JDK_HOME“, to verify the variable is set.

Next, you’ll need to edit /etc/environment with superuser rights in the editor of your choice, adding the idea-xxxx/bin directory to your PATH variable. For example, you can edit the environment with the GUI mousepad editor like so:

sudo mousepad /etc/environment

The various directories in the environment PATH variable are delineated by colons (:). Append the current value (inside the quotes) with a new colon and then add the idea-xxxx/bin location. It should look something like this:

PATH="/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/lib/idea-7364/bin"

Save and close the environment file. You’ll need to “source” it for your system to pick up the new directory in the PATH. You can verify your changes by echoing the variable as well:

source /etc/environment

echo $PATH

If you see the path to IntelliJ returned in the output, you’re all set.

Lastly, you may want to change the VM settings of IntelliJ. This depends entirely on your project size and other factors, so you’ll need to base these settings on your own need. The settings are in idea-xxx/bin/idea.vmoptions.

4) Get Started!

That’s it. Now you can run “idea.sh” from a terminal in any directory, and IntelliJ should launch…

idea.sh

If you run into problems, be sure to double-check the readme files in the installation directory.

Give Back

If this article proved useful to you, please drop us a comment and let us know. Or, if you find problems/alternate solutions along the way, please share them for the benefit of others. Thanks and happy coding!

My mobile phone was getting a little long in the tooth, so I’ve been researching phones for a few months. As tempting as the iPhone is, I didn’t want to switch to AT&T. A couple of weeks ago I took the plunge and bought the HTC Mogul instead.

Here are the highlights that made the Mogul a perfect package:

• Slide-out full keyboard. I’m ham-fisted when it comes to tiny buttons, so having more keyboard real-estate than a Blackberry is a big win with me.
• Touch screen. You can use fingers or a stylus, the latter of which tucks into the phone shell. When you’re using IE or the Google Maps, the touch-screen functionality is indispensable. The on-screen dialing has nice big fat virtual buttons if you don’t want to use the stylus.
• Scroll-wheel. The wheel on the side is right where your index finger or thumb holds the phone, depending on which hand has the phone. If you use your mouse scroll wheel on your PC, you’ll instantly know why this is such a great little feature. It makes scrolling window panes or ripping through contact lists simply effortless.
• Wifi. If you have wifi at home, work, or lunch, you can get a pretty good connection and completely bypass your wireless plan’s data transfer restrictions.
• Windows Mobile 6. Since the Mogul has a touch screen, you get the full WM6 functionality rather than the rather disappointing “smart phone” variant.
  • With Microsoft Office mobile, Internet Explorer, and Outlook, you are carrying around a portable PC. I’m no Microsoft fanboy, but they sure come in handy.
  • Outlook Express Mobile makes it really easy to tap into my Gmail account with full IMAP support.
  • WM6 also gives you lots of flexibility when it comes to skinning the UI, ringtones, etc. Since you can turn any audio file into a ringtone, gone are the days of paying to download them from your service provider.
• Easy software development. WM6 has free emulators and .NET SDK support. This is a much nicer development platform than many phones give you.
• Oh, yeah, it’s also a phone! The sound quality is solid and it supports stereo bluetooth headsets.

The Mogul runs on the Alltel, Qwest and Sprint networks, and a friend tells me that Verizon will be offering it next month as well.

If you’re looking for a new phone and the iPhone isn’t a good fit for you, I highly recommend this one.

The literary world – especially academics – has a number of readability metrics that show how “hard” a given work is to read in English. If you are a writer, these metrics can give you a pretty good swag at how easy it will be for people to read your work.

In this article, I’ll show you a very simple way to gauge your own readability by using your RSS or Atom feed. (I’ll also talk about a fun way to analyze the word-smithing prowess of your readers.)

Qualitative Wordsmithing

Readability metrics use factors like words per sentence, multisyllabic frequency, and so on. These are three of the more common ones:

• Flesch Reading Ease: Measures sentence structure and complexity to determine how easy it is to read without stopping and re-reading, etc. Higher is better, but between 60 and 70 is a good score.
• Flesch-Kincaid Grade: What grade of school you will have needed to complete to handle the writing style and structure. Needless to say, this doesn’t reflect subject matter. A score of 5 that deals with quantum mechanics will only apply to 5th graders who already understand quantum mechanics. A score of 17 is something best left to grad students, who will probably curse you for it.
• Gunning Fog: Measures the obfuscation of meaning; the lower the number, the better. TV Guide is a 6. Government cover-ups and legal papers score 20 to 30.

Online Tool Time

Running the stats for these metrics by hand isn’t something a human needs to do. There are several online tools that will analyze your website/blog and give you readability scores. My personal favorite is the Readability Test by Juicy Studio.

The problem with such tools is that they only look at your homepage, so the results are skewed by static content like navigation or “About Us” blurbs. They are also – in most cases – only getting a small working set of articles to score. If you have reader comments showing up on your home page, that content will change your score as well.

The fact of the matter is that you probably don’t want to analyze your homepage, you really want to measure the readability of your content. There’s good news here: although the online tools like the one by Juicy Studio were intended to analyze web pages, they can be used in a much more powerful way.

The Feed Shows How You Read

Here’s a easy way to get better scores without static content interference and with more content to analyze: Use your full-text RSS or Atom feed URL instead.

The online readability tools are designed to ignore HTML markup, so they happily ignore the XML markup in RSS or Atom as well. That leaves you with a pretty high ratio of real content to be scored. Most feeds have 10 or 20 items in them, which is way more content than is on the typical home page.

The main caveat here is that you need to publish a full-text feed to get a realistic score. A smaller caveat is that some feed configurations will duplicate the content (partial text and full text in the same feed item), but that won’t have much effect.

For example, The Juicy Studio tool scores the TechBrew site and feed with these differences:

As you can see, the feed provides a much larger sample of content. I’m pleased to note the Flesch Reading Ease scores are consistent, but it would appear that you’ll need to be nearly in 7th grade to be a happy subscriber. (For an explanation of the scores, go back to the top of this article. You skimmer.)

Trolling for Comments

Less practical but more fun is when you use this same technique on a website’s comment feed. Many blogs provide an RSS or Atom feed of just posted comments. That feed provides a unique – but admittedly not very sophisticated – way to measure the sophistication (or obfuscation) of a site’s reader base.

For example, here are the Flesch-Kincaid Grade for the reader comments at some well-known sites:

• Robert Scoble: 5.70
• TechBrew.net: 4.81
• TechCrunch: 4.56
• Gizmodo: 2.99

I’ll let you draw your own conclusions on this one.

Word Power: Better Readability, Next Time

I’ll conclude with a practical tip: Take a look at your own feed and check out your scores. You may see something you’d like to improve.

If you have Microsoft Word, you’ve actually got a nice set of readability metrics right at your fingertips. Use Tools > Options and in the “Spelling and Grammar” tab check the “Show Readability Statistics” box. (The grammar and style checks are also pretty thorough, if you can stomach them.) Whenever you finish your spellcheck, a Readability Statistics dialog will show you your stats. (Click the image to the right to see a larger sample.)

Happy editing!

“Half my life is an act of revision.” – John Irving

Nov 14, 2007 Update: Revised to improve flow. I had to eat my own dogfood on this one.

RSS and Atom guru James Holderness just issued a report on the how well namespaces are being handled by feed readers that understand Atom. The results are dismal:

…Matters haven’t improved much since this issue was first discussed nearly two years ago.

… Of the thirty-odd products I tested, ten ² were incapable of subscribing to a feed that used prefixed names for the Atom elements.

… More of an issue was the xhtml prefix, which caused problems for nearly two thirds of the aggregators tested.

… Of all the products I tested, there were only three that managed to pass every one of the test.

Appalling. This isn’t a reflection on Atom, however, but rather on how programmers are parsing XML itself.

In olden days (2001-2003) I worked for a company that was building a native XML database. At the time, namespace handling was probably the biggest headache around. Our product didn’t do it well, but few others did either. Considering how many parsing libraries and products there are now on the market, and how ubiquitous XML has become, I would have hoped that namespacing problems would be a thing of the past.

<bubble>burst</bubble>

All too often our applications are filled with XML seemingly drawn with crayons when the authors should have used a drafting pencil and a straight edge.

I believe one of the fundamental problems with XML is that nearly every app developer uses it, but few actually grok how to model data in it. Note that I said model data… not just dump it. Elements versus attributes, namespaces, attribute scopes, self-closing versus empty-value… these decisions can make or break a data model. If your data matters, then the form in which you represent it – and the precision derived from that form – should matter as well.

The Atom spec has model and precision down pat. Now we just need feed readers to be as careful consuming XML as the specification was in creating it.