The official Textpattern dev blog has a nice new post on upcoming support for XML-RPC. which will ‘soon’ be released as a separate package for 4.0.x and then moving into the core product.

• It uses Simon's IXR_Library which has been included in Textpattern for a long time, so no completely new RPC-libraries are required for textpattern.
• There is a new “wrapper“ to invoke specific Textpattern functionality which could be used in the future to add implementations of an atom-server, atom-clients or moblogging tools.
• Blogger API's template related methods are also implemented, this means you can edit your templates using a desktop XML-RPC client.

Its part of their Ask-A-Dev series which is still accepting questions.

The Feed Factory: RSS. Made Really Simple

A nice overview of what feeds are, what they contain, and what you can do with them written for the general BBC audience. Done well, its missing details of one important step—helping people actually get an app running somewhere handling the feeds you can now find.

The BBC does not have its own feed reader, but there are lots of different sites which review and recommend various readers. If you search for “feed finder” or “RSS reader” in your search engine, you will find some of the more popular ones.

While there are a great number of readers, aggregation sites, and browsers that handle subscriptions to sites it still feels like there was a chunk missing out of this otherwise good presentation.

[via Jeff Jarvis]

I’ve seen a number of initial reactions to the new “Mini Store” window in yesterday’s iTunes updates—most being quite alarmist and accusatory.

This post at BoingBoing raised the issue quickly, but through updates has become quite informative both on what is actually happening, what info might be passed and when, etc. And Forwarding Address OS X tells us that you can just hit cmd-shift-m to hide the window.

As for the underlying concern and privacy issues, I understand the gut reactions of most—and agree with the take that Apple should have been more upfront about the change, but in a world where many choose to pass information on habits around freely and within an apps that’s been associated with other information passing such as CDDB forever the hard fact is that this case didn’t turn out to be a real worry.

... has to buy me one!