Some components for the "other" information infrastructure on the internet (rss feed etc)

Disclaimer: this started essentially as note-to-self listing a few interesting projects to spare me another internet search session.

RSS feeds (and their twin brothers Atom) are ubiquitous over the internet making it possible to easily get a summary of the latest publications of a given website.

Interestingly a huge amount of websites produce this kind of feeds (most blogs obviously but also sites like  twitter[en]) and from this point of view the RSS format is quite lively.

But on the consumer side, I'm pretty  disappointed with the "offer" in terms of RSS readers. Over the time I've tested several well-known desktop readers (liferea, rssowl, thunderbird...) and most of then ended up synchronizing with Google Reader. This one has consequently come to be my main newsreader and it appears to me as clearly dominating the world of internet based newsreader. However such a predominance is not that much a good sign ((a quick glimpse at HackerNews shows that people are regularly trying to reinvent the newsreader service so there is hope I guess)).

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Yapsy 1.9 release

A new version of Yapsy, my fat-free DIY plugin framework,  has just been released ! The project went (again) dormant for a bit more than one year during which a couple of bug reports and features requests eventually waked it up :)

More details on the new release are available on sourceforge and so are the downloadable files.

And the first big news is that there is a version compatible with Python3 at last !

Another big news is that this gave me the occasion to search a bit over the internet and realise that there are actually people talking about yapsy here and there.

You find traces of it already on the famous stackoverflow (yes as far as I can tell, and as of 2011/12 they are all mentions of 'my' yapsy, very moving indeed :) ), on this quick inventory of Python plugin systems and more anecdotally on pastebin

And for the specific projects that use this library, so far I've found:

And of course this adds up with the great people I already had the occasion to thank in my latest post about yapsy.

Let's face it, this ridiculously small piece of code is h-y-p-e... (ok I may be overdoing it a little but if I don't do it who will ?)