When we built RSS Replay we ran into an interesting problem. RSS Replay uses JavaScript (AJAX) to request and place content onto web page layouts. But JavaScript has a same-origin rule that restricts access to remote content to only other items from the same website. We got around this in Replay by building proxy server-side scripts that load and cache RSS content from remote sources. It works very well for our needs.

Well the clever folks over at nb.io figured out a way to use CSS import commands to capture RSS content. Interestingly, they still require a server-side script to break large feeds into multiple small chunks.

I guess there is more than one way to skin a cat.http://nb.io/hacks/csshttprequest/

Emilia, Kim and I have all been a little under the weather for a few weeks now. We've been passing some kind of cold thing between us. Last week it finally landed on me hard. I had managed to find a fix a few bugs in RSS Replay in the lab and I was just about to bundle it up and send it out the door when I got smacked down. So now I'm back up and code will begin to flow again. For those of you following along at home (or waiting because it was your bug that I fixed) the updates should be ready early next week (tuesday-ish).

MAMA (Metadata Analysis and Mining Application) is Opera's structural search engine that reviewed over 3.5 million URLs (pages); whereas normal search engines return results about the content of pages, MAMA returns results about site structure, including what doctype the page uses, whether it validates, what HTML elements and CSS properties it uses, what plugins, what scriping constructs, and much more. This is an invaluable tool for many individuals and companies involved in our industry, and Opera wants to share it with everyone -- so I'm going to help with a link. Here's their key findings

http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/mama-key-findings/

This is brilliantly useful information.