The RSS Advisory Board has had a checkered past and its share of run-ins with Dave Winer over RSS 2.0. There have been times where it was right to question how relevant it had become.

This announcement by Netscape lends a great deal of credibility to the Board-sans-Winer, and hopefully will increase the adoption of their RSS Profile work.

The RSS specification documents, DTDs, and help files for the first versions of RSS (v0.9, v0.91) are being moved to RSSBoard.org, where they will be hosted by the RSS Advisory Board in perpetuity. Netscape will continue to host these files (via redirect) on the My Netscape domain (my.netscape.com) until August 1st, 2008.

…

All websites that produce RSS 0.9 or RSS 0.91 feeds will need to either convert to using the current standard (RSS v2.0), or if desired, convert their v0.9/v0.91 feeds properly using this guide, provided by the RSS Advisory Board, by August 1st.

Syndication historians will note that although Winer’s RSS 2.0 is the undisputed winner of the Syndication format race to date, Netscape actually invented RSS by name. (Winer’s “scriptingNews” format did precede that by 2 years, of course, but it was a home-grown spec intended solely for Scripting News itself.)

It is interesting that Netscape chose to hand over the keys to the RSS Advisory Board, but not to Winer or Harvard Law.

Newsgator has announced that a bevy of their RSS/Atom clients, including the excellent FeedDemon is now free:

FeedDemon 2.6, NetNewsWire 3.1, Inbox 3.0 (beta), and NewsGator Go! for Windows Mobile 2.0. Each of these is a pretty major release on its own – tons of new features in all of them.

But second, every one of those applications is now free! Free as in beer, that is. And add to the free list NewsGator Go! for BlackBerry as well. And not only are they free, but our online services (including synchronization) are now free as well! Not to mention our iPhone reader, HTML mobile reader, and all of the other applications that are part of our online platform.

Hat tip to CleverClogs for spotting the news.

The literary world – especially academics – has a number of readability metrics that show how “hard” a given work is to read in English. If you are a writer, these metrics can give you a pretty good swag at how easy it will be for people to read your work.

In this article, I’ll show you a very simple way to gauge your own readability by using your RSS or Atom feed. (I’ll also talk about a fun way to analyze the word-smithing prowess of your readers.)

Qualitative Wordsmithing

Readability metrics use factors like words per sentence, multisyllabic frequency, and so on. These are three of the more common ones:

• Flesch Reading Ease: Measures sentence structure and complexity to determine how easy it is to read without stopping and re-reading, etc. Higher is better, but between 60 and 70 is a good score.
• Flesch-Kincaid Grade: What grade of school you will have needed to complete to handle the writing style and structure. Needless to say, this doesn’t reflect subject matter. A score of 5 that deals with quantum mechanics will only apply to 5th graders who already understand quantum mechanics. A score of 17 is something best left to grad students, who will probably curse you for it.
• Gunning Fog: Measures the obfuscation of meaning; the lower the number, the better. TV Guide is a 6. Government cover-ups and legal papers score 20 to 30.

Online Tool Time

Running the stats for these metrics by hand isn’t something a human needs to do. There are several online tools that will analyze your website/blog and give you readability scores. My personal favorite is the Readability Test by Juicy Studio.

The problem with such tools is that they only look at your homepage, so the results are skewed by static content like navigation or “About Us” blurbs. They are also – in most cases – only getting a small working set of articles to score. If you have reader comments showing up on your home page, that content will change your score as well.

The fact of the matter is that you probably don’t want to analyze your homepage, you really want to measure the readability of your content. There’s good news here: although the online tools like the one by Juicy Studio were intended to analyze web pages, they can be used in a much more powerful way.

The Feed Shows How You Read

Here’s a easy way to get better scores without static content interference and with more content to analyze: Use your full-text RSS or Atom feed URL instead.

The online readability tools are designed to ignore HTML markup, so they happily ignore the XML markup in RSS or Atom as well. That leaves you with a pretty high ratio of real content to be scored. Most feeds have 10 or 20 items in them, which is way more content than is on the typical home page.

The main caveat here is that you need to publish a full-text feed to get a realistic score. A smaller caveat is that some feed configurations will duplicate the content (partial text and full text in the same feed item), but that won’t have much effect.

For example, The Juicy Studio tool scores the TechBrew site and feed with these differences:

As you can see, the feed provides a much larger sample of content. I’m pleased to note the Flesch Reading Ease scores are consistent, but it would appear that you’ll need to be nearly in 7th grade to be a happy subscriber. (For an explanation of the scores, go back to the top of this article. You skimmer.)

Trolling for Comments

Less practical but more fun is when you use this same technique on a website’s comment feed. Many blogs provide an RSS or Atom feed of just posted comments. That feed provides a unique – but admittedly not very sophisticated – way to measure the sophistication (or obfuscation) of a site’s reader base.

For example, here are the Flesch-Kincaid Grade for the reader comments at some well-known sites:

• Robert Scoble: 5.70
• TechBrew.net: 4.81
• TechCrunch: 4.56
• Gizmodo: 2.99

I’ll let you draw your own conclusions on this one.

Word Power: Better Readability, Next Time

I’ll conclude with a practical tip: Take a look at your own feed and check out your scores. You may see something you’d like to improve.

If you have Microsoft Word, you’ve actually got a nice set of readability metrics right at your fingertips. Use Tools > Options and in the “Spelling and Grammar” tab check the “Show Readability Statistics” box. (The grammar and style checks are also pretty thorough, if you can stomach them.) Whenever you finish your spellcheck, a Readability Statistics dialog will show you your stats. (Click the image to the right to see a larger sample.)

Happy editing!

“Half my life is an act of revision.” – John Irving

Nov 14, 2007 Update: Revised to improve flow. I had to eat my own dogfood on this one.

RSS and Atom guru James Holderness just issued a report on the how well namespaces are being handled by feed readers that understand Atom. The results are dismal:

…Matters haven’t improved much since this issue was first discussed nearly two years ago.

… Of the thirty-odd products I tested, ten ² were incapable of subscribing to a feed that used prefixed names for the Atom elements.

… More of an issue was the xhtml prefix, which caused problems for nearly two thirds of the aggregators tested.

… Of all the products I tested, there were only three that managed to pass every one of the test.

Appalling. This isn’t a reflection on Atom, however, but rather on how programmers are parsing XML itself.

In olden days (2001-2003) I worked for a company that was building a native XML database. At the time, namespace handling was probably the biggest headache around. Our product didn’t do it well, but few others did either. Considering how many parsing libraries and products there are now on the market, and how ubiquitous XML has become, I would have hoped that namespacing problems would be a thing of the past.

<bubble>burst</bubble>

All too often our applications are filled with XML seemingly drawn with crayons when the authors should have used a drafting pencil and a straight edge.

I believe one of the fundamental problems with XML is that nearly every app developer uses it, but few actually grok how to model data in it. Note that I said model data… not just dump it. Elements versus attributes, namespaces, attribute scopes, self-closing versus empty-value… these decisions can make or break a data model. If your data matters, then the form in which you represent it – and the precision derived from that form – should matter as well.

The Atom spec has model and precision down pat. Now we just need feed readers to be as careful consuming XML as the specification was in creating it.

The RSS Profile is a really helpful document that helps developers use best practices and avoid typical pitfalls when handling or producing RSS feeds.

That said, why isn’t the RSS Advisory Board – the very people who created the profile – following the profile recommendations in their own feeds?

The Feed Validator now produces warnings according to the profile, but this table shows nearly all of the individuals on the board aren’t following their own advice.

To date, these board members have valid RSS 2.0 feeds that don’t conform to the profile: Eric Lunt, Jake Savin, Jenny Levine, Brent Simmons. Matthew Bookspan and Randy Charles Morin don’t even have valid RSS 2.0 feeds at the time of this writing.

One might reasonably argue that the members shouldn’t put the profile into practice until it is ratified. That wouldn’t be a bad thing, but it is a lost opportunity to show that the profile is easy to follow. Besides, the profile was ratified a week ago. Time to eat your own dog food, guys.

Full disclosure: TechBrew’s RSS feed doesn’t meet all the recommendations of the profile either.

Service Burp: Our hosting provider decided we were taking up too many resources and has moved us to a quieter server.    If you couldn’t get to us while DNS was updating, our apologies!   (If you couldn’t take our survey for this reason, please give it another try.)

Full Feeds:  One of our reader survey respondents has complained about our partial-text RSS feed.    Partial feeds suck, we heartily agree.  The problem is, we have a full-content feed.   See for yourself. (You’ll need to view the source XML).    I did a bit of poking around in FeedBurner – turning off Smart Feed, forcing the type to be RSS 2.0 – with the hopes of convincing every feed reader out there we do in fact have the full goods.

If you’re still seeing a partial feed, please leave a comment with the feed reader you’re using.

Please take our reader survey. It has 7 questions and will only take about 1 minute. Best of all, taking this survey is guaranteed to reduce greenhouse emissions and lessen the effects of global warming, provided you stop driving your car while taking it.

At the beginning of the year I set up JetStream to monitor the top 100 CNET Blogs and see how the Technology A-Listers (according to CNET) were using tagging in their posts. I’ve been collecting data for nine months now, so I thought I’d share some of what I’ve learned.

To Tag or Not To Tag

The first thing I noticed is that many of the blogs don’t tag their posts at all. Those who do tag tend to fall into two camps: the Tags-As-Category camp, and the Semantic Tagging camp (usually individuals.) The former use a limited list of tags like “Gadget” or “News”, the latter like “iPod”, “numanuma”, or “youtube”. And, of course, there are some who do a little of both, as we do here on TechBrew.

Popular Tags of 2007

So far this year the 100 blogs have posted ~700,000 RSS and Atom items, and have used ~55,000 unique tags to label them. I should note at this point that uniqueness in JetStream is case-sensitive, so ‘iPod’, ‘ipod’, and ‘IPOD’ are in fact 3 different tags. I didn’t want to lose some interesting analysis opportunities by lumping all capitalization variants together.

The most popular tags – those used on the most items – are skewed toward the use of fixed category tags by some of the prolific blogs like Engadget and Gizmodo. Still, the top 30 tags used thus far paint an interesting picture of what the Tech blogosphere is talking about:

     TAG NAME               FREQUENCY OF USE

 #1: Gadgets.......................3796
 #2: apple.........................2900
 #3: Top...........................2054
 #4: Microsoft.....................2046
 #5: iphone........................1914
 #6: Home Entertainment............1875
 #7: internet......................1657
 #8: Cellphones....................1536
 #9: General.......................1505
#10: sony..........................1485
#11: xbox 360......................1478
#12: Video.........................1295
#13: ps3...........................1202
#14: Blogging......................1134
#15: nintendo......................1108
#16: wii...........................1096
#17: Portable Media................1053
#18: Peripherals...................1016
#19: Clips..........................998
#20: Google.........................976
#21: ipod...........................935
#22: Company & Product Profiles.....882
#23: japan..........................871
#24: Software.......................858
#25: news...........................840
#26: media..........................833
#27: Smartphones....................786
#28: windows........................769
#29: vista..........................761
#30: Original.......................746

I can’t help but laugh that ‘Blogging’ is used so often as a tag on blog items. Recursive or redundant, you decide.

Lets Get Semantic

It is easy to see who and what have been the newsmakers this year from the above list. Quite a bit can be inferred by the human brain, but there is a quite a bit of data mining and computer-based inference to be done as well.

To illustrate, anybody looking at the above list would be able to create some arbitrary semantic groupings:

{Gadgets, apple, iphone, Cellphones}

{Microsoft, xbox 360, windows, vista}

{xbox 360, ps3, wii}

The next step for JetStream, in my mind, is to derive such semantic relationships automatically. The algorithm would be essentially based on frequency of association between certain tags within blog items. The strength of these relationships, based on frequency of co-usage, would be an indicator of relevance.

This approach isn’t very complicated, but it works because people have been doing the work of semantic tagging on all the items. What I’m speaking of is simply a mechanism to reveal what people have already done. Sort of FOAF, but for ideas and things instead of people. (Danny Ayers, are your ears burning?) This kind of visualization hints at what can be discovered through tagging trends across like-minded populations.

(JetStream does have a semantic view that is sliced by a given day’s worth of tags. You can see the “Tag Constellation” view of the day’s most popular tag and anything associated with it. Click the bullseye icon above any tag to center it in the constellation. This is a fairly simplistic approach, but it gives a taste of what can be done with semantic inference and better visualization.)

So What’s Next?

I’m considering a way to express the semantic groupings in a RDF construct, and have been asking a couple of acquaintances their thoughts on the matter. It would be useful to have a standard way to express semantic groups of tags – probably represented as URIs – but this whole thing may be a little too obscure to standardize just yet.

I’ve talked about some of what I would like to do, but I’d like to hear from you. What would be interesting to you? Should I just release the data and let people play with it? What format would you like to see it in? If I gave it to you, what would you do with it?

Marshall Kirkpatrick posted some good advice about how to keep up with all of the RSS feeds in your reader. Boiled down to the essence:

1) You need an efficient reading mechanism (I use and recommend Google Reader.)

2) You need to keep your feeds organized so they make sense to you

3) You need to keep your feeds visibility high.

On that last point, a couple of suggestions that I made to Marshall wound up in his post: Add the Google Reader Button to your Google Toolbar (if you use it), and get a view of your feeds into your browser homepage. I use iGoogle, so integrating the Reader widget is a snap. (The image to the right is how it looks.)

One section that I think Marshall is missing from his post is along these lines:

Be Brutal

Be brutal to your subscription list. If you find yourself skimming most of the items in a feed, either find a way to filter them out before you see them, or unsubscribe from the feed altogether. (Note to TechBrew readers: This does not apply to you. Step away from the Unsubscribe button and skim past this item.)

This goes back to an article I wrote called “The Top 5 Reasons Your Co-Workers Don’t Use RSS“. The second reason was that people get overwhelmed by information overload. My advice was, and remains:

It is pretty easy to over-subscribe to RSS feeds and feel like you’re drinking from a fire hose. The best suggestion I’ve found to help you keep from getting overloaded is: “Too many RSS feeds? Put ‘em on probation.“. Granted, it’s more a mental+organizational approach rather than a tech trick, but it works.

There are a variety of temporary email services out there in internetland, perfect for signing up at websites where you need the goods but are distrustful of the privacy policy. The ironic problem with many of these services is that you have to create an account and use your real email address.

One nifty alternative is Spam.la, a service of DreamHost that allows you to use any email address ending with @spam.la. Just pick a username to use as a throw-away email address, and any messages sent to that address will appear right on the Spam.la homepage. (The spam is coming in fast-and-furious, so you can filter the results based on your username.)

The disadvantage of this setup, of course, is that literally anyone can read your messages if they’re trolling the homepage. For many situations, however, that doesn’t much matter. The other disadvantage is that you have to constantly visit the site to see if any email has arrived. They don’t offer an RSS feed, so I thought I’d do a little mashup with some RESTful services and make an RSS feed of my own.

If you don’t care about how it works, just read “The Short Story” below, copy and edit the link, and you’ve got an RSS feed ready to go.

The Short Story

If your temporary email address is “bobby@spam.la”, this link will provide an RSS feed of your Spam.la email messages:

http://www.w3.org/2000/06/webdata/xslt ?xslfile=http%3A%2F%2Ftechbrewfiles.googlepages.com%2Fspamla.xsl &xmlfile=http%3A%2F%2Fcgi.w3.org%2Fcgi-bin%2Ftidy%3FdocAddr%3D http%253A%252F%252Fspam.la%252F%253Ff%253Dbobby%26forceXML%3Don

Since you probably aren’t using ‘bobby@spam.la’, just replace ‘bobby‘ in the URL above with your email name, and you’re ready to subscribe to it with an RSS reader. (Be sure to right-click and copy the link location, rather than cut-n-paste the above text. The display text has spaces to allow for line breaks.)

If you want to know how this works, keep reading.

The Long Story

The Spam.la webpage is very basic HTML. When you filter based on an email address, the URL starts like this:

http://spam.la/?f=bobby

The HTML isn’t well-formed, so we can’t treat it like XML just yet. As is, there’s not much we can do with it without writing a bunch of string parsing code. But thanks to the availability of some handy RESTful services on the web, we can transform it into RSS in a couple of passes. Here’s how:

1) Tidy up the HTML into XHTML with the free W3C Tidy parser service, checking “enforce XML well-formedness” to make sure it is ready to use. Passed into the parser, the XHTML of the filtered spam page is now:

http://cgi.w3.org/cgi-bin/tidy? docAddr=http%3A%2F%2Fspam.la%2F%3Ff%3Dbobby &forceXML=on

2) Employ an XSL stylesheet to turn the email links in the XHTML into RSS items. I wrote one and put it here: http://techbrewfiles.googlepages.com/spamla.xsl .

It is free to use and modify under a LGPL Creative Commons license.

3) Use the W3C XSLT Servlet service to transform the XHTML with the above stylesheet. This is also a REST service, so the result is a long URL that contains the tidy Spam.la page and the XSL stylesheet. It is uglified with URL encoding, but it works:

http://www.w3.org/2000/06/webdata/xslt ?xslfile=http%3A%2F%2Ftechbrewfiles.googlepages.com%2Fspamla.xsl &xmlfile=http%3A%2F%2Fcgi.w3.org%2Fcgi-bin%2Ftidy%3FdocAddr%3D http%253A%252F%252Fspam.la%252F%253Ff%253Dbobby%26forceXML%3Don

Voila! You have throw-away anonymous email where your RSS reader is your inbox. Just edit ‘bobby’ with the username of your choice, and you’re done.

If you found this handy or have improvements, please leave a comment or contact us.

With the announcement that the Atom 1.0 specification is essentially done, it now moves into the process of becoming a full-fledged IETF specification. Atom has been a promising alternative to RSS 2.0, but has only a fraction of the market share of syndicated feeds. Can it really compete?

Pros and Controversies

For those who are only marginally comfortable with XML, Atom is more intimidating. At the same time, it is more precise. The bungling of HTML markup (double-encoding, anyone?), confusion over enclosures, and the typical flailing we see with RSS can be addressed directly. Atom holds the promise that such problems, when they arise, can be addressed in a standards-compliant way.

The RSS 2.0 spec is supposed to be frozen, so the problems you have now in RSS will always be there… maybe. The RSS Advisory Board, divorced from inventor Dave Winer, continues to make micro-changes (against his wishes) to the RSS spec in an attempt to solve such problems. (Here’s our humorous Plumbing Fable on that soap opera.) The vitriol on this topic makes American politics look rather tame. [Editorial opinion: RSS still needs an enema.]

The Standard is the Key

The real secret to the success of Atom could very well be official stamp of approval by the IETF. This is nothing to be scoffed at: There are thousands of powerhouse U.S. corporations and defense contractors who are required by their own policy to use a official standard whenever possible in their software. As soon as Atom becomes an official IETF-blessed product, RSS as a de-facto standard won’t count anymore.

I have a coworker who is documenting my employer’s software practices for a government checklist, and one of the criteria is whether or not we are standards-compliant. If we’re using RSS instead of Atom, it would be easy to get dinged by somebody who is paying attention.

We know that the U.S. government is in fact paying attention to the RSS vs. Atom debate. Last fall, I wrote about the decision made by the U.S. Intelligence Community to go with Atom 1.0 instead of RSS. (The article also distills why RSS doesn’t work for their purposes.) They set a precedent that will make it way into policy along with the “only official standards” mandate in the defense software industry.

GoogMuscle and FeedBurner

To further muddy the waters, Google’s recent acquisition of Feedburner has the geekosphere wondering whether some GoogMuscle might get flexed to push Atom over RSS.

RSS 2.0 inventor Dave Winer is already mustering the troops to demonize (or at least discredit) FeedBurner. That camp is convinced of a vast corporate conspiracy to control RSS… and perhaps destroy it. Google has a track record of promoting Atom in the past, so it is at least possible that FeedBurner might make Atom its default format sometime in the future.

Conspiracy or not, if RSS can’t stand the test of time – frozen as it is – Atom may eventually win.  Giant corporate backers like Google who make policy decisions could very well be the deciding factor. As Richard MacManus rightly notes, “Google has the potential to be the kingmaker in the Syndication Wars very soon.” (Richard does a great recap of said Wars to date.)

Beta was Better. Long Live VHS.

All of these issues, from corporate/government standards to Google adoption is only a matter of potential, however. In the meantime, Rogers Cadenhead says Atom’s marketshare is about 16%, and appears to be declining. Standards-track or not, there is no telling if that will ever turn around. Will Atom become the Betamax to RSS’s VHS? I guess we’ll know in a couple of years.

First off: It’s a girl! The TechBrew baby squad has a new addition with Anna Ruth Woodman. (No word yet when she’ll be blogging.)

When a geek dad like me is stuck in waiting rooms and hospital guest chairs for hours on end, coupled with lack of sleep, we tend to get a bit carried away with wanting hi-tech solutions to age-old problems. Here are the top three things I wish I had for birthing in the information age:

#1. Mobile Cervix Monitor with RSS and Twitter Capabilities

You just never know when baby will come until mom’s cervix does its thing. Rather than wait for the doctor to check (or water to break), use the Mobile Cervix Monitor to keep tabs on baby’s pending arrival.

The MCM is a standard latex diaphragm installed with a low-power bluetooth chip and a pressure sensor built into the rim of the diaphragm. Cervical dilation and effacement data would be monitored and beamed to mom’s cellphone, which would both alert mom to changes and update an RSS feed for dad. Really social moms could enable the option that sends updates to Twitter as well.

#2. Daddy’s Diaper Monitor

The DDM would have a blue-tooth or wireless transmitter that velcro’s to the front of a diaper. Real-time data would be monitored by a network-aware app on your local PC, which not only can send out alerts (email, RSS, Tweets), but can provide statistical graphing on just how long it takes food to go from bottle to bottom.

#3. Mommy Wants Ice Cream Alert System

The MWICAS functions by simple electrodes placed on the scalp of the new mom. She is instructed to think about ice cream, and the system records the neural patterns. Whenever the pattern is detected again, the system sends alerts to dad right away. This system probably shouldn’t have an RSS feed, because a standard 15-minute refresh cycle on a typical Feed Reader is guaranteed to be 14.5 minutes too late.  (I recommend using the SMS option whenever possible.)

I’m feeling generous to the LazyWeb, so I haven’t patented these ground-breaking ideas. I’ll just be happy when somebody builds them and sends me a prototype. Thanks in advance. Oh, and I could really use #2 and #3 later today, if that isn’t too much trouble. I think somebody needs ice cream.

The plumbers union may be reuniting.  Dave Winer, inventor of RSS 2.0, has offered to re-join the RSS Advisory Board, albeit with a firm caveat:  The board will make no changes to the specification, just clarifications via a profile.

I will join as a member, if you want me to, to help give it legitimacy. At that point these time-wasting discussions can end. I would also suggest that you offer Sam Ruby a position, esp if he takes the first item here to heart.

The two things:

1. Recognize that the RSS 2.0 spec is on the Harvard server, and it is not going to change.

2. Change the mission of this group to working on a profile. Let’s come up with a memorable name for the profile that doesn’t sound official or mandatory, and let’s get to work on solving problems, and then promoting the result to the users.

All things considered, I think this is a great offer. It is one that might finally produce the clarifications to the spec that people have been seeking for years.  If Dave is finally willing to answer those clarifications, even in a “non-official profile”, it would be good for everybody.

Once upon a time, you had to go to a plumbing store to buy the stuff for a new sink. You’re going to need clamps, hoses, faucets… the works. An employee at the store with “Dave” on his shirt comes up and says, “I recommend the Really Simple Sink. I invented it, and it just works.”

Another guy named R.C. wanders over and agrees. “I love it. The faucets works pretty well, but there are a couple of extra parts you need to make sure it doesn’t leak. People make a lot of mistakes when they install it. So some of us have made a couple of minor changes to the seals and valve stems.”

Dave looks miffed, “The sink is fine the way it is.” He juts out his thumb at R.C., “Pay no attention to him. He only installs sinks, he’s not authorized to modify the design.” R.C. looks surprised, “You said I could, and you were even helping me.” Dave shakes his head, “I stopped helping, and never said you you guys could change anything.”

“Yes, you did.”

“No, I didn’t. The design is fine.”

“You discontinued this line, so customers can’t ever upgrade. To use the sink, people have to change some parts and get a better instruction manual.”

“No, they don’t!”

“Yes, they do!”

At this point the debate starts getting pretty heated. You get the sense they’ve had this discussion before. While they argue, you notice another employee in the next aisle. You go talk to him, noting the name on his shirt. “Hi Sam, I need a sink.”

He nods, “Try this one by Atom Manufacturing. It isn’t as popular as the older Really Simple Sink, and it is a little harder to install sometimes, but it serves the same purpose.”

“Will it leak?” you ask. Sam nods again, “Not usually, but anything can happen over the years. But if it does, you can upgrade it to a newer model. The design is actually an industry standard, so a bunch of plumbers are constantly working together on how to improve it.”

“So… what happens if the Really Simple Sink leaks?” He shrugs, “You’re out of luck; the sole inventor has discontinued that model. He’s focusing more on open-pipe machined levers these days. So, you’ll have to figure out how to plug the holes yourself. But that may not be so bad in a residential setting.”

“Oh,” you say, “But I have to install this one at work.” Sam raises an eyebrow. “You’ll want to be careful, then. Commercial plumbing has higher inspection standards.”

“I guess I’d better buy the Atom one, then.”

He smiles, “Oh, they’re both free. It’s the cost of owning one you have to watch out for.”

The End?

“Calling The Plumber” by Red Rover Studios

Click here to view the embedded video.