[Warning: Extraordinarily high levels of immaturity present in this post]

[Update: Ryan Rinaldi says that ASS is all wrong. He brings up the “and sometimes Y“ issue - Is “Y“ a vowel, or isn't it? Head over to Ryan's site for a in-depth look at why ASS is bound to fail, but why Ryan's “Sometimes Y“ extension might save it (one day after its release, and the community is already breaking up my spec - this sucks).]

I'm totally fed up with the RSS vs. ATOM debate, so I've decided to strike out on my own.

Rather than putting all my hopes in a community effort to arrive at a standard syndication format that works better than ATOM or RSS, I'm creating a brand new format entirely on my own (you're welcome), and I think you're going to like it.

I'm calling it "Another Simple Syndication".

And it really is going to be simple.

An ASS feed will contain only the following elements:

    title
    date
    body

The "title" element can be anything, but an ASS feed creator will automatically use the first seven characters of the feed's body as the title. This number of characters was not arbitrarily chosen, and you cannot change the number of characters used for the title. Choice would lead to pondering, and pondering would lead to confusion. ASS is not about confusion.

And, to avoid any disagreement over date formats, I've decided to go with something that we can all agree on: the Mayan calendar. We're going to use the standard Mayan calendar that we were all taught in school, which means that the 1st month will be "Pop" and the 18th month will be "Cumku". The correlation for the Gregorian to Mayan conversion will, of course, be 584283, so no big news there.

Since the Mayans didn't have Swatches, there won't be a timestamp, which further simplifies things.

The date can either be represented as a written Mayan date ("3 Ahau 3 Muan" - that would be 11/25/2003) or in the standard "long" format ("12.19.11.17.0" - also 11/25/2003). Since I'm using the two ISO Mayan date representations, I can't imagine that anybody will have any reason to complain.

I'm sure you're all rejoicing right about now, but that isn't even the best part.

The "body" element, rather than being a long and complicated string of so-called "items", is simply going to be the contents of a scraped web page. You will put the URL of your favorite web site (http://www.neopoleon.com, for example) into an ASS feed builder, and the site will come out in the "body" element, sans HTML tags.

Not only that, but because of my desire to make ASS more than just another syndication format, HTML tags aren't the only thing that'll be stripped out for the "body" element.

You see, I've heard that The Internet has been slowing down over the years because there's too much stuff on it. Everybody and his mamma has put up a "This is my big, dumb, drooling idiot dog" page, and The Internet is reaching its maximum storage capacity. In layman's terms (read: terms you'll understand (maybe)), the computer that The Internet runs on is running out of disk memory space, and it's because of all the stupid web pages that people have.

So, to help take the strain off of The Internet, the ASS spec dictates that all vowels be removed from content that will go into the "body" element. This will also take a major load off of any ASS feed servers out there, further contributing to making The Internet faster. Wouldn't you like to be a part of that? ASS promises to deliver The Internet at broadband speeds over a regular dial-up connection. Seriously.

I think ASS is going to usher in a new era of usability. Without all that markup, and without all those vowels that people don't need (except to distinguish one word from another), the content of an ASS feed will take up much less space on the screen than the original HTML representation of the same content. The result will, obviously, mean that you can:

    1. Read the content faster (your brain won't have to process all those stupid vowels)
    2. Buy smaller monitors (no vowels == smaller words == less screen real-estate required)

ASS is going to open a lot of doors while saving you time and money.

To get an idea of what to expect, check out these ASSified feeds:

    Robert Scoble
    Chris Sells
    Google

Is that awesome or what?

The final layer of icing on this grand cake of syndication is, oh, so sweet: Neopoleon.com has, for your ASSing pleasure, the first ASS feed generator on the FACE OF THE EARTH. You can start creating your own ASS feeds immediately.

To create a feed, just go to this page and follow the directions.

The only real problem right now is that nobody has created an ASS feed reader. I'm sure that's just around the corner, though.

Now don't say I never did anything nice for you.

Happy Thanksgiving you bunch of freeloading slobs, and remember to look for the .