There Is No Cat - Funky, Funky!

Wednesday, June 18, 2003

Funky, Funky!

In recent days, it has become de rigeur in certain neighborhoods of Greater Blogistan to comment on the funkiness of the RSS feeds of various blogs, blog tools, and other RSS infested sites. Such pontification is, unfortunately, limited in the scope of the sites it can cover, however. If the Lord of Funkiness doesn’t stoop to your level, how will you ever know if your feed is funky or not?

Research scientists at There Is No Cat, LLC, have been working diligently in recent days, reverse engineering the heuristic analysis upon which designation as "funky" or "not funky" takes place, coding this analysis into an intelligent application that can quickly and scientifically determine if a given RSS feed qualifies as "funky" or "not funky", and designing a simple-to-use interface to this powerful tool. Ladies and Gentlemen of Blogistan, we present Da Funkidator.

Da Funkidator has been extensively tested on numerous RSS feeds across Blogistan, and appears to match the expertise of human judges on the funkiness of any given RSS feed with greater than five nines of accuracy (that’s 99.999% accurate for those unacquainted with telephone company jargon). Our research scientists should be proud of their accomplishments. With this tool, it is now possible for the unwashed masses of Blogistan to discover if they are unwittingly harboring a funky or not funky RSS feed.

Posted at 12:57 AM

Comments

dude, I’m not funky! (what does it mean that I actually didn’t know what Pat Boone looks like? or that I figured the identity of the strange white man was in the alt attribute?)

Posted by Elaine at 1:12 AM, June 18, 2003 [Link]

Funky and proud of it. Especially if His Royal Weblogging Highness lacks funkitude.

Posted by Mike at 3:01 AM, June 18, 2003 [Link]

So glad to see my hand-written script produces a non-funky feed, but what make a a feed funky?

Posted by Elaine at 8:14 AM, June 18, 2003 [Link]

Hmm. Da Funkinator thinks my feed is funky, but I don’t think so. Ok, I use the trackback and rdf namespace, but since RSS/pure doesn’t have anything like this, I think it’s allowed funkiness. Maybe we need a middle ground between funky and unfunky. How about HipHop? For feeds that are funky in areas that RSS/pure doesn’t support? Using dc:date when there is pubDate is funky, using trackback:ping is HipHop?

Posted by Georg Bauer at 9:37 AM, June 18, 2003 [Link]

It took a long time for me to find where what makes a feed funky was actually being discussed.

backend.userland.com/2003/06/14#a227

and the comments attached did provide some illumination.

Posted by Anita Rowland at 9:42 AM, June 18, 2003 [Link]

Georg, I’m sorry, but based on our research, the original spec on RSS funkiness doesn’t allow for gradations. A feed is either funky or not funky. If you’re using namespaces, your feed is definitely funky, no question about it. You use RDF? Funky, without a doubt. And you appear to know about Dublin Core metadata, which is also irredeemably funky.

That doesn’t mean your feed isn’t valid. Just that it’s funky.

Posted by ralph at 11:46 AM, June 18, 2003 [Link]

So your Funkidator says my feed is funky but won’t tell me why. I did everything as simple as possible and according to the spec. I use no namespaces and no RDF, AFAIK. How could it be funky?

software.ericsink.com/rss.xml

Posted by Eric W. Sink at 10:14 PM, June 18, 2003 [Link]

The use of <[CDATA[ to denote that you’re including HTML in your description tag is what causes your feed to be funky, Eric. Unfunky feeds never use such SGML-ish tags.

Please note that funkiness has nothing to do with validity. The two are orthogonal to each other. If you want to check for validity, I suggest the RSS Validator, which is linked to in any results. If you want to check for funk, Da Funkidator is the place to come.

Posted by ralph at 11:03 PM, June 18, 2003 [Link]

Here’s more on what is funky www.kbcafe.com/iBLOGthere4iM/default.aspx?date=20030619#19225318

sorry, you’ll have to restruct the URL, this editor is funky :)

Posted by Randy at 9:12 AM, June 20, 2003 [Link]