intertwingly

It seems self evident to me that the Microsoft Feed API is going to be important enough that people are going to want to make sure that their feeds work well with this new platform.

However, not everybody is in a position where they have ready access to a machine running Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) with IE7 Beta 2 Preview loaded on it.

So, to make life easier, I’ve converted Dave Johnson’s program to a web application, and I’m looking for volunteers to host it.  If you are in a position to help with a public server, please leave a comment here with your URL.

Installation

I’ve made the source available in SFW and NSFW versions.

As this is an ASP.Net application, the interfaces provided by the msfeeds.dll need to be exposed via an interop assembly.  You can use tlbimp.exe yourself, or simply pick up the imsfeeds.dll I produced using this same tool.

The .aspx file goes into the C:\Inetpub\wwwroot directory, and the dll goes into a nested bin subdirectory.  Depending on your set up, you may need to define a virtual directory and adjust permissions to allow these files to be accessed.  All this can be done through the IIS console.

Usage

Usage is pretty straightforward.  Simply enter the URI of the feed, optionally select whether or not you want the results to be pretty printed, and click on the button.  What you should see back is the normalized feed that the Microsoft Feed API produces.

Depending on the browser you use, you may need to view-source to see the underlying feed.  But more importantly, you can copy and paste the URI of the feed into your favorite feed reader or Feed Validator.

Requests

While I understand the value of normalizing to a common feed format, I do have a number of requests:

• If you wish to normalize a valid feed with all the necessary pieces of information to a common feed format, please respect all the requirements and norms of the feed format that you chose.  If, for example, you want to convert atom:content to RSS 2.0’s description, consider resolving any relative URIs that might be contained therein.  There really is no need to stick it to the man.  If you pick RSS 2.0, by all means, get Dave Winer’s help.
• If you find the need to create extensions, please document them.  Things like cf:type, cf:id, and cf:read are not mentioned here.
• Consider adding a method to retrieve the original feed.  This can be important for applications that wish to support things like cf:sort.