We’re another step of the way along our RSS 2.0 path. Autodiscovery now seems to work. Autodiscovery is an interesting concept. Basically, it’s an HTML link tag that specifies that your page has associated RSS feeds. This is very helpful because, if you’re using an RSS reader or any of the later browsers (like Firefox and Safari), you’ll be able to go to one of the ZATZ magazine Web pages and the reader or the browser will immediately know about associated RSS feeds for those pages.

Right now, it works for instances of the magazines (like DominoPower and OutlookPower, but eventually we should have it working for the other feeds we’re building (for example, we’ll be offering feeds for each of our authors).

As Pakistan and India were still floundering to respond in the early hours after the Kashmir quake, a convoy laden with supplies snaked its way along the debris-cluttered road to one of the worst-hit areas in Pakistan. The mission of mercy began with a simple SMS in Islamabad. The armies and emergency services of India and Pakistan were caught largely off guard by the Oct. 8 earthquake, which killed more than 73,000 and made millions homeless, but new technology is enabling ordinary people to step in and help in a major way.

Malicious messages that purport to be from the FBI, CIA or Paris Hilton generated the vast majority of virus-laden email traffic in November, according to security companies. The emails carry a new variant of the Sober worm in an attachment which, when opened, infects the recipient’s computer. The worm then attempts to disable antivirus programs and send copies of itself to any email addresses found on the hard drive. The Sober worm still accounts for close to 43 percent of all viruses being reported to the British antivirus firm Sophos.

OK, looks like I fixed it. Man, programming at 5am has its drawbacks. I kept putting the wrong parameters into the wrong routines. Some coffee and careful debugging later, and it seems happy. — David

It’s time for another test message. DominoPower readers are often developers, so we’re using DominoPower as our test environment, figuring if anyone could understand, fellow developers could. It’s 4:54am and the last test almost worked. ZENPRESS read in the new message correctly, determined it was a new message, but didn’t trigger the buildFeed routine. BuildFeed won’t run unless the changed flag for the feed is updated and, for some reason, buildFeed didn’t get notified the flag had changed. My current theory — and this message will test that theory — is that I was using the feedHasChanged routine (which returns true or false depending on whether there was a change in the feed), rather than the setChangedFlag routine, which actually toggles the flag based on whether there’s new items for the feed. Oops. — David

This is a short line item test to see if the new RSS 2.0 feeds automatically update at the top of the hour with new news items. Since it’s 3:20am, I’m hoping our news editor is in dreamland, so you’re going to have to put up with the basic, somewhat rambling, text message. Sleep well, all! — David

The first phase of the extreme RSSization process for ZATZ content appears to be ready for testing. Although we’ve had RSS 0.91 feeds since 1998, we haven’t updated our code for these feeds since, well, 1998. A lot’s changed.

We are now ready to roll out RSS 2.0 feeds for each of our magazines, at least as betas. These are fully-validated RSS 2.0 feeds, including content. We’re currently feeding news, but we’ll be adding more and more as we continue coding and adding more features.

Right now, you can get the feeds themselves. You won’t find the little orange XML icons anywhere, we don’t ping the RSS hubs, and pages don’t respond to autodiscovery requests. We’ll be adding those later.

In the meantime, please feel free to subscribe to the feeds and send feedback directly to david@ZATZ.com. I’d like bug reports, usage comments, and anything else you feel would be important as we move more heavily into this area. Here are the individual feed URLS…

Computing Unplugged Magazine

http://www.computingunplugged.com/feeds/newsDetails/rss20/feed.xml

Connected Photographer Magazine

http://www.connectedphotographer.com/feeds/newsDetails/rss20/feed.xml

DominoPower Magazine

http://www.dominopower.com/feeds/newsDetails/rss20/feed.xml

OutlookPower Magazine

http://www.outlookpower.com/feeds/newsDetails/rss20/feed.xml

WebSpherePower Magazine

http://www.webspherepower.com/feeds/newsDetails/rss20/feed.xml

Again, let us know what you think. This is definitely the time when feedback might well be acted upon. Be nice, though. A lot of time has gone into coding these features and you’ll see the results over the current months. — David

Demand for IT specialists could shrink as much as 40 percent within the next five years, according to Gartner analysts who unveiled a list of key trends for 2006. According to the market researcher, businesses will increasingly look to employ "IT versatilists," employees who not only specialize in IT but who demonstrate business smarts by handling multidisciplinary assignments.

IBM plans to announce on Wednesday that it’s giving away software to help customers and business partners adapt software written for Sun Microsystems’ Solaris operating system to its open-source rival Linux. The Migration Kit helps people assess software written in C or C++ programming languages and move it from Solaris to Linux.

Yahoo was set to unveil a new Really Simple Syndication feed alert service and integration of RSS feeds into its new Yahoo Mail beta, making the company the first to offer RSS in a major Web-based email system. The new RSS feed alert service will allow people to receive alerts via email, instant message or SMS message, just as they currently can receive alerts for news stories about a specified topic, stock moves and game scores.