No code in this one, it's more me just spouting off a theory that I came up with when I was extremely tired... Anyway, I have a theory on why IE's market share has dropped over the past year and how it relates to the economy. The number of unemployeed individuals has increased to 8.1%, the underemployed/unemployement rate is anywhere from 14% to 30% depending on whom you ask. That leaves a lot of people with free time to search the web from home. IE is primarily used in offices as the defacto browser, thus with the layoffs we have more people using whatever browser they use at home. FF, Chrome, Safari, etc. are a lot more popular at home, thus their market share has increased. On top of that, the worst hit areas for the economy includes states like California, NY, etc. where the concentration of Mac users is much higher than other portions of the nation (which would mean more people using something other than IE). You add all of this up and in my head, it explains the numbers that come out of NetApps. There is no huge shift in the market, even if I would love it if people used FF more, just more people unemployeed... So maybe IE market share going up would be an indicator of a recovering economy?

I guess I should start out by saying what the RSD format is and what it's used for... One of the main issues that developers have had is the inability to really connect to and interact with web sites without knowing intimate info about the way that site was set up. So eventually, someone who was annoyed with that fact, came up with a file format called RSD. RSD stands for Really Simple Discovery. RSD has one purpose, to let applications know what services are available on a website and where they are located. And while the format is simple, I decided to create a couple classes to help out.

RSD.zip (4.30 kb)

There are only three classes with minimal code. The basic RSD file is really just an XML doc that consists of only a couple fields. Specifically the file has the name and link to the engine that created the RSD file, the link to your website/blog, and the list of APIs. The APIs themselves only contain the name, whether it is preferred (so a client app knows which item to try first), the link to the API, and the blog ID (usually just the link to the blog and can even be empty). That's it really. It would be more interesting if there were a couple fields that needed explaining but it's really simple (go figure considering the name).

Now finding an RSD file takes a bit more work. For that, you need to either look in the header of the web page/site to find a link tag like the following:

<link rel="EditURI" type="application/rsd+xml" title="RSD" href="Link to the RSD file" />

And if that isn't there, the default is http://www.whatever the website is.com/rsd.xml... And if it isn't there, there is no RSD file (or at least not one that you're going to find). Anyway, try out the code, leave feedback, and happy coding.

This is similar to my RSS loader, but is really only designed to load a BlogML file (it's still a work in progress). Anyway, for those of you that have no idea what BlogML is, it's an XML format designed to export/import content from a blog. It has the ability to contain most of the information within your blog with some, specific holes. But in those cases, you can usually copy the info or simply don't need it.  All of that being said, you'll probably never need to use the format. And even if you do need to use it, most blog engines out there support it or someone has built something to help you convert from the format to something you can use. However, in my case, I have to be able to load the information from this blog into another source that doesn't support it. I could use the default code on the main site but I felt like creating one myself. Thankfully I didn't need to create an exporter as well, since BlogEngine.Net supports BlogML. As such, all I had to do was to create a loader.

BlogML.zip (12.04 kb)

The zip file contains a bunch of files (BlogML.cs is the main file used to load everything). And as I said before, it's still a work in progress as I still need to add functionality for exporting it back out, some of the fields. that I didn't really need, etc. When I finish that, I'll put it out within the utility library. Hopefully this code, though will help someone out. So give it a try, leave feedback, and happy coding.