A new Syncato user

Syncato picked up a new user today, Darryl VanDorp has his Syncato site online. As far as I know Darryl is the first Syncato user other then myself.

He wasn't afraid to jump in and roll up his sleeves to fill in some of the holes in the current system. In his case that meant getting the Blogger and Metaweblog APIs working.

To commemorate the occasion here's what Darryl had to say about his switch. This is direct from the source.

By direct from the source I mean this post is linked directly to the content in Darryl's post via an XPath query in the URL. Here's what I put into my post to make this happen.

<remote-xpath-query>http://randomthoughts.vandorp.ca/syncato/WK/blog/623//p[2]</remote-xpath-query>

This shows the use of post relative XPath which is something I don't think I've ever talked about before. In this case, since I know the specific post I want to extract content from, I can just run the XPath against that post rather then against the entire database. You do this by including the post ID before the XPath you want to execute.

This kind of thing is fun, but there are some things to consider as this is a live link. Any time Darryl changes the content of the post it will change the content of my post. It's also potentially fragile in that if he were to add a paragraph before the one I'm quoting, it would change the location, and my post would then reference the wrong paragraph. Also, if he removes the post the content will also be removed from my post. All kinds of interesting implications come out of that.

Some of the other benefits of this type of thing is that it pushes the processing closer to the source so that you have less content traversing the network. Since I was only interested in one paragraph, that's all I had to request. A more traditional system, even if based on XML files, would require you to request and transfer the entire document and then process it locally. Syncato will also minimize the hit on Darryl's site by caching the result of the query.

I've been calling this kind of thing XML fragment management, but it can also be considered microcontent This is a new term that has begun to circulate. Jon Udell talked about this and mentioned Syncato in his recent XML.com column. Syncato is definitely an enabler for a microcontent web.

Posted by Kimbro Staken