Scripting News - Latest Comments in DNS for RSS feeds (Scripting News)

Re: DNS for RSS feeds (Scripting News)

brianjesse — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 13:23:01 -0000

that's how I designed my rssCloud Rest/DNS server.. when you make a new zone like supercloud.org, it puts an A record there at the top level and then starts pumping out new TXT records for the subdomains

Re: DNS for RSS feeds (Scripting News)

Tommy Jones — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 12:15:38 -0000

Do popular DNS hosts support NAPTR record configuration? I didn't see support at the DNS host that I use.

Re: DNS for RSS feeds (Scripting News)

Dean Michael Berris — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 10:52:43 -0000

Right, but why not treat your browser as an aggregator? Do you know if there's a way to get this in JavaScript?

Re: DNS for RSS feeds (Scripting News)

dave — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 10:41:02 -0000

It's not for browsers, it's for aggregators.

Re: DNS for RSS feeds (Scripting News)

Dean Michael Berris — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 10:36:24 -0000

Hey Dave, are TXT records cached just like the A's and CNAME entries? And besides, this means application specific knowledge for fetching TXT records -- hardly something browsers right now support. Cool idea still.

Re: DNS for RSS feeds (Scripting News)

Fred Davis — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 10:21:16 -0000

Doh! thanks for the correction... haven't had enough coffee yet! Trying to
re-invent myself as a morning person (kid in middle school) and that's
fighting decades of late-nightism ;-)

Re: DNS for RSS feeds (Scripting News)

Steve Garfield — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 10:15:07 -0000

@Fred Your RSS feed is this:

http://twitter.com/statuses...

Re: DNS for RSS feeds (Scripting News)

Fred Davis — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 10:10:19 -0000

twitter.com/freddavis

Re: DNS for RSS feeds (Scripting News)

dave — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 10:04:02 -0000

What's the URL of your feed?

Re: DNS for RSS feeds (Scripting News)

Fred Davis — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 10:02:00 -0000

Hmmmm... got an error msg: "We couldn't read your feed, or it isn't valid XML." Twitter Fail Whale?

Re: DNS for RSS feeds (Scripting News)

Stéphane Bortzmeyer — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 04:04:30 -0000

A possible solution would be to create a new DNS Resource Record Type instead of reusing TXT once again.

This is the approach favored by IAB, in RFC 5507, "Design Choices When Expanding DNS"

Re: DNS for RSS feeds (Scripting News)

Henri Asseily — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 03:46:23 -0000

Hi Tommy, why not use NAPTR instead (or in addition)?
I just published a post explaining why I think NAPTR is much better than TXT for this: http://rikkles.blogspot.com...
Essentially, NAPTR gives the following advantages:
- service type and protocol
- order and preference
- regex replacement (not just mapping)

NAPTR works on any TLD as well.
I'd be interested to know your thoughts as to the relative advantages of DNS-SD and NAPTR.

And my own Disclosure: I work with Telnic, the registry for .tel. .tel domains extensively use NAPTR records for discovery of communication channels (any URIs, essentially)

Re: DNS for RSS feeds (Scripting News)

Guest — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 00:08:58 -0000

On a bit of a tangent, that raises what could be an interesting side-effect. The major client-side implementations (Apple Bonjour and Avahi) implement multicast DNS for advertising services to the local network using the "local." namespace. With an appropriately enabled reader it would in-effect be a primitive form of location-based discovery.

Re: DNS for RSS feeds (Scripting News)

Tommy Jones — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 23:29:48 -0000

The other protocol to consider is WebFinger: http://hueniverse.com/2009/...

At a high level, WebFinger can be used to map "user@domain" do a document describing the user. The document can link to just about anything, so WebFinger can be used to find the user's rss feed, avatar image and other user metadata that might be useful in the 140 char network.

Re: DNS for RSS feeds (Scripting News)

Tommy Jones — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 23:20:01 -0000

Note that a DNS host does not need to have specific support for DNS-SD as long as the host supports SRV, TXT and PTR records. DNS-SD does not define anything new at the DNS layer, but instead describes how to use existing DNS features as a service discovery mechanism.

Re: DNS for RSS feeds (Scripting News)

Guest — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 23:05:05 -0000

Re: DNS for RSS feeds (Scripting News)

dave — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 22:36:25 -0000

Thanks for the info and especiallly thanks for the disclosure. Everyone who pitches some product, service or protocol should say what interest they have in it, or say they have none if they have none. So seriously thanks.

Re: DNS for RSS feeds (Scripting News)

Guest — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 22:31:08 -0000

DNS-SD as method of finding a persons public services could be quite cool. For those not familiar DNS-SD uses PTR, SRV and TXT records to advertise services. To find services you look for PTR records name _servicetype._protocol.domain. So to find all the HTTP services associated with me you could look up _http._tcp.andrewtj.com. which might give you something like the following:

_http._tcp.andrewtj.com. PTR AndrewTJ's\032RSS\032Feed
_http._tcp.andrewtj.com. PTR AndrewTJ's\032FriendFeed
_http._tcp.andrewtj.com. PTR AndrewTJ's\032Twitter

\032 is how a space is encoded in a DNS name so the above would display a list like:
AndrewTJ's RSS Feed
AndrewTJ's FriendFeed
AndrewTJ's Twitter

Subtypes of services are also catered for - if you were just after RSS only you could look up _rss._sub._http._tcp.andrewtj.com, eg:

_rss._sub._http._tcp.andrewtj.com. PTR AndrewTJ's\032RSS\032Feed

To then resolve the service you grab the TXT and SRV records the PTR points to:

AndrewTJ's\032RSS\032Feed._http._tcp.andrewtj.com. SRV 0 0 80 andrewtj.com.
AndrewTJ's\032RSS\032Feed._http._tcp.andrewtj.com. TXT path=/rss.xml

Under DNS-SD only the target and port from the SRV record are used, in this case — andrewtj.com on port 80. The TXT record contains key=value pairs which are service-specific. In the case of _http._tcp., 'u' and 'p' have been defined for use as username and password key names along with 'path' for the path. The end result: http://andrewtj.com:80/rss.xml

More information on DNS-SD can be found at dns-sd.org.

Disclosure: I'm building a DNS-SD Firefox extension (bonjourfoxy.net) and a DNS-SD hosting service so I happen to think DNS-SD is kinda neat ;)

Re: DNS for RSS feeds (Scripting News)

dave — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 22:29:36 -0000

Okay thanks -- now no more selling of .tel. This is the last comment on this topic. We understand what it is. We'll use it if we want to. Thanks.

Re: DNS for RSS feeds (Scripting News)

Guest — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 22:13:52 -0000

Re: DNS for RSS feeds (Scripting News)

dave — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 21:56:31 -0000

What I like about it is that it's connecting up the lizard brain -- DNS with the cerebral cortex -- HTTP. They're at opposite ends of the evolutionary spectrum, but they're still a nice way to integrate them.

Re: DNS for RSS feeds (Scripting News)

Jeremy Felt — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 21:39:52 -0000

I like that idea, hadn't thought of a combo deal. :)

Anything where the user only needs to know one thing (their address) and the technology (browser/cloud app) figures the rest out seamless is a good way to start.

Re: DNS for RSS feeds (Scripting News)

dave — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 21:34:33 -0000

BTW, it's not at all impossible to have dave.supercloud.org redirect to my feed, even if it's just a TXT record, without doing anything horrible. The DNS would return the same IP address for all *.supercloud.org hosts, where the web server would look up the host's TXT record and redirect to it. Nicely loosely coupled, no hacks, it should work.

Re: DNS for RSS feeds (Scripting News)

dave — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 21:31:47 -0000

We're doing all this work, in part, to stop working for Twitter-the-Company, at least I am. I'm so fed up with these business models that have a line that says Over Here You Are And You Don't Get Paid and Over Here Are We and We Make Huge Money. Fuck it. If I'm going to make nothing I'll do it where no one makes anything. Telnic looks like Twitter except they don't have the critical mass. What are they offering us other than free use of their TLD. I paid $10 for supercloud.org. Okay that's a nice deal. I get $10 and...?

Re: DNS for RSS feeds (Scripting News)

playerx — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 21:12:23 -0000

To some extent, I can't blame them.
Everyone is just trying to make nice things out of prior art. :)

But you said it right there. "they've got a nice web app for editing my DNS profile";

So to some degree they just lowered another barrier for people who do not/cannot/will not run their own Internet enabled vCard and they also just happened to have the right amount of money for ICANN to bless them with control over a TLD.