There is a serious niche waiting to be filled by a community driven, ad-free lyrics site. One that had elements of a Wiki would be great, or at the very least some feedback mechanism that kept the lyrics as accurate as possible. And throw some RSS in there too.
— Matt 
I’ve raised bugs against RSS Bandit to fix the issues Tim Bray pointed out in is post. You’re right that these aren’t problems with RSS but with clients. However since Tim Bray is primarily the spec authoring he [correctly] believes this is something that should be clearly spelled out in the spec instead of leaving it as implementation defined.
I’ll also look into fixing the 301 issue, can you provide the URL on your site which sends a 30 so I can use that for testing?
/xml/rss2.xml redirects to /xml/rss.xml
— Mark
“My brain hurts.”
Oh good. I was thinking it was just me.
I’d be all over a lyrics Wiki, provided that the people who used it respected the Wiki nature. Fourteen year old girls looking for the lyrics to the latest Christina Aguilera fluff may well panic, or mutilate.
— Raena
Faithless, awesome. And I agree with comment 1 about needing a decent lyric site. Be nice to tie it into the CDDB, but then who am I kidding right?
The problem with a community-based music-oriented anything is that it will not be allowed to last long. For instance, there used to be a really amazing web site devoted to collecting and making available guitar tablature. For those who don’t know, guitar tablature is a music shorthand notation for guitarists, which makes it very easy to learn to play a song without having to learn to read standard 5-line staff notation. Most of the “tabs” on the site were written by individuals who listened to a CD/tape/LP and transcribed the song, and thus were unlicensed. Some of the tabs were copied from commercial tablature transcriptions that were properly licensed and published in book form — you can find these at music stores. These copies, though, were unlicensed copies of the commercial transcriptions.
As you might be able to guess, the site was sued out of existence by the RIAA — in multiple countries, IIRC. The content hopped the pond to Europe, but the recording industry followed them. This wonderful little series of events happened a few years before MP3s became really popular, circa 1996 or so.
My memory is fairly foggy, so don’t hold me to dates or details. Chances are, though, Google or the Wayback Machine might hold references to the full history, if you are interested.
Point being: don’t hold out hopes for being able to collect lyrics without either paying for them or being sued.
— Peter Herndon
I hold a little hope. They tried to block blank audio tapes too and heralded it as the end of music as we know it. Eventually sometimes somethings sneak through and become normal. Like taping music compilations for a friend without being sued.
re: Twisted, I feel the same way.
It was covered in several seminars at PyCon … there may be notes online:
http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/moinmoin/PyConPapers
I have a vague memory of some lyrics site I used frequently that was sued and then forced to display the lyrics via some crappy java applet that didn’t allow you to cut and paste the contents, and scrolled the lyrics so fast that it was impossible to write them down manually. It effectively killed the site.
“This is getting way out of control.”
Agreed.
— David
Unfortunately RSS versions 4.0, 5.0, and 7.0 are all spoken for. There is a gap you could wedge something into for version 6.0. Also RSS 2000, and RSS ME have been premptively spoken for. Alas
http://use.perl.org/~gnat/journal/7774
— kellan
I want to kiss Paul Ford full on the mouth.
— Gina
“I’m happy to read your words in their native environment, but a simple change notification system would be nice”
I use Web Site Watcher (from aignes.com) which works pretty well to tell me when site have changed and then open them in their native environment. It has room for improvement, but does the job and covers non blog sites too (Useful for watching Ebay etc). What would be good, which it only half does, is download the presentation of a site and update the content as and when required.
Now that is one heck of a lot of links!
“I’m happy to read your words in their native environment, but a simple change notification system would be nice.”
I’m one of those rare people who doesn’t bother with aggregators, because I /have/ that change notification system in the form of a blo.gs powered blogroll. I keep up with a fairly respectable number of blogs without spending too much time doing it by only reading them when they pop up at the top of my blogroll. Of course, if they aren’t pinging weblogs.com or blo.gs I never find out about their updates (Zeldman is guilty of this) but generally it works just fine.
Re: Jeff Goldberg on MS Word and Doc Exchange
Jeff makes a great argument. For my senior project at NJIT, we’re using Word as a document exchange format. Two of my four teammates cannot open the files, which are “standard” Office 2002 .doc formats.
Unfortunately, Jeff doesn’t offer much enlightenment as far as alternatives are concerned:
http://www.goldmark.org/netrants/no-word/attach.html#tth_sEc2
I *want* to use open formats that can be shared effectively with other people (I gave OpenOffice a shot for about half of the semester before compatibility problems became prohibitive). But, what sort of tools are there available to leverage those formats in a way that is easy for a “knowledge worker” to understand and integrate?
Mark, I know that you use docbook as a format for writing extensive documentation. Are there any tools that you would recommend?
Buried in the Baen Free library are a series of essays by Eric Flint[1], called Prime Palaver[2]. The most interesting of these, in my opinion, are #4 (Macaulay on Copyright), #5, #6, and #9. They all make for interesting reading, though.
[1] http://www.ericflint.net/home.htm
[2] http://www.baen.com/library/palaver_index.htm
Re: docbook. I use Emacs with the docbook-ide mode and a few custom macros. Not really a mass-market solution.
— Mark
My brother uses Emacs to write docbook-based documentation too. Sounds painful. Reminds me of the days when I used to write books using vi and troff….
— ralph
Since when can you use your own user-defined schema in OpenOffice?
BTW, WordML is perfectly fine for document exchange.
— Anonymous
Lyrics.ch was once a pretty complete lyrics site (I found lyrics to some pretty obscure old songs there). Needless to say, it was forced to remove most of what made it a useful resource.
My bookmarks page (http://ucc.asn.au/~trs80/bookmarks.html) is fed by a dodgy python script that works on a line-by-line basis, ignoring various cruft, and diffing the result to get updates. Currently it supports variable checking times, but not much else. WebSiteWatcher looks great, except that I need something server-side since I use a variety of Windows/Mac/UNIX/Linux computers every week. My email is the obvious from my URL.
Mark: You probably already know this, but ditm.org/mt/mt-comments.cgi uses the old theme (with the circle).
— James
re: Chandler RSS
The RSS support in Chandler is a demo written by the product manager to illustrate extensiblity in product.
GZip support for RSS Bandit implemented and successfully tested against your feed.