The description tag is actually valid. That’s a self-closing xml element. It will parse and validate OK, but doesn’t contain any data, so it’s basically just a placeholder. Often, tools will automatically turn empty elements into self closing ones to save some characters in the file…

<description />

is the same as

<description></description>

When you say I can ping Blogdigger- is there an actual ping address for my group or or you just saying I ought to ping your blog??

Also, is there a limit to how much past feed content that Blogdigger will archive??

And is there anything in the works that might reduce duplicated items from multiple sources?

Lastly, your group login page really needs a means for recovering passwords I cannot find mine.

We have no limit to how much data we store. We save every post we crawl.

What kinds of duplicates are you seeing? We are taking measures to reduce the duplicates in our index.

Email me a new password, and I’ll update it. An update with password resetting should be coming soon-ish.

I will kvetch that although the empty-element tag is valid XML, it’s pretty gratuitous, since leaving the DESCRIPTION tag out altogether will have the same result as an empty DESCRIPTION tag . . . and leaving it out would conserve a few bytes of bandwidth!

I agree with you about Furl & Del.icio.us, Alan. I use Furl primarily as a personal web archive — Furl’s killer feature is that it archives a copy of every page you furl. I hate Furl’s categorization, though, especially since a good search obliviates the need for a taxonomy (cf Google’s dominance over Yahoo’s human-managed directory).

I’ve taken to using Furl keywords like I would Del.icio.us tags, and just searching against keywords or full-text. More effective for me, but less effective for people interested in what I’m furling, because keywords don’t show up for other users. Hence everything in my Furl archive is in the “General” category.

Unfortunately, Furl keywords (or even categories) don’t provide the social aspect of Del.icio.us tags. Someone who combines the social aspects of Del.icio.us with the archival capabilities of Furl is going to have a killer app.

Here is a recap of significant posts in the edublogging community from the past weekend.

Furl vs del.icio.us Two useful web services, both social bookmarking tools with overlapping functions but significant differences. You don’t really want to use both in parallel so what are the advantages and disadvantages of each? Q First what is socia…

Furl vs del.icio.us Two useful web services, both social bookmarking tools with overlapping functions but significant differences. You don’t really want to use both in parallel so what are the advantages and disadvantages of each? Q First what is socia…