RSS Web-Feeds, The Next Big Thing?

mi writes "Yahoo! carries an Associated Press editorial about RSS-based news feeds, and how they are pushing the spam-ridden e-mail and advertising-ridden web-pages aside and consolidate information from multiple sites. Slashdot itself is mentioned by the author as one of his sources." We've been exporting our headlines practically since the beginning. (note that RSS link in the footer). I still think the problem with RSS is the name. It sounds stupid. Let's all call it 'Speed Feed'. Cheesy rhyming will help the non techno elite remember it, and this is a technology that needs to be more widely deployed. (It's also worth noting that Slashdot's RSS feed will have more article contents for subscribers in a few weeks)

Comments

um

[Anonymous Coward]

sorry to break it to you, but you can't use cookies over rss. so good bye all those settings, etc..

Re:um

[Anonymous Coward]

Who stores settings in cookies anyway? Most sites use cookies only for storing the username and password, and this functionality can be replaced by HTTP auth for RSS purposes.

Re:um

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh. Your statement is as idiotic as Taco's about the name.

Re:um

[MoonFog]

I use it for news sites, meaning I get the news as soon as it is updated, and most news sites (at least not in Norway) doesn't require any form of log-on etc, so no cookies.

Also, some rss readers have browser capabilities, enabling them to store cookies iirc

Re:um

[znu]

There are easy ways around this. For instance, just put the user ID in the URL. My custom Slashdot RSS feed could be at http://slashdot.org/rss.cgi?user=31198 or something.

Re:um

[Anonymous Coward]

Erm. My statement does explain why not being able to use cookies doesn't usually cause you to lose all your settings, and that -in turn- debunks what the parent poster claimed.

Re:um

[idontsmoke]

RSS is just an XML flavour which most people serve using HTTP, so there is no reason why you can't use cookies alongside an RSS feed.

Re:um

[Anonymous Coward]

True. But from a user perspective cookies are pretty much linked to interactive web pages, and please, let us not get interactive RSS pages! And no, I don't want to fill in key/value pairs either. :)

The solution is simple and already implemented in many RSS clients though.. HTTP authentication.

Re:um

[Anonymous Coward]

It's only supposed to be a sound, stupid. Perhaps, though, it doesn't translate well to English but that problem doesn't concern me.

(And, yes, I'm replying to petty trolls because I'm very very bored.)

Re:um

[Anonymous Coward]

GOTO 10;

Re:um

[cmacb]

"I use it for news sites, meaning I get the news as soon as it is updated, and most news sites (at least not in Norway) doesn't require any form of log-on etc, so no cookies. "

See, this is what I don't get...

You re implying that when some news site adds a headline it send a magic RSS signal that wakes up your computer. This would be pretty cool if it were true.

Of course, if it were true, the same people who Spam would be waking up your computer about a thousand times a second to tell you about Viagra!

RSS is abbreviated HTML (the irony here is that the original HTML syntax was more efficient than todays RSS).

Add, to that the fact that you think this RSS data is being "Sent" to you somehow, when in actuality, something you are running is probably hitting those poor news servers once a minute looking for updates. Even if you go on vacation for 2 weeks leaving your computer turned on, you'll be hitting those servers 20160 times looking for an update.

There is nothing magic about this, rather something very tragic. We've made web browsing so complex and inefficient that we have to invent a new thing to make it simpler again. Only problem is that RSS doesn't replace HTML, it only augments it. You still have to click on those headlines to get the full story, which will take you to the Slashdot page where you will see ALL of the stories, plus headlines from hundreds of other servers that have just now been impacted (plus the fact that your client proggy is hitting those same servers as well).

We seem to have forgotten that the slow part of the man/computer interface is man. Having thousands of feeds updated silently in the background while we watch TV doesn't really make us that much more aware. Just makes us feel like we have accomplished more.

Re:um

[Anonymous Coward]

Who stores settings in cookies anyway? Most sites use cookies only for storing the username and password, and this functionality can be replaced by HTTP auth for RSS purposes.

I don't see how this solves the problem that the original poster points out, and I don't see why the original poster was modded a troll.

My /. front page draws articles from a variety of sections, according to my prefs. Someone else's may be different. You could do HTTP auth when fetching the RDF/Atom file, I guess; but then the server'd end up dynamically generating the headline file for the particular authenticated user each time, to provide them with the headlines of areas in which they've expressed interest. And in that case, RSS isn't buying the server much over a regular full HTTP session. Pretty much the only difference is not sending the images along.

Re:um

[vsync64]

And in that case, RSS isn't buying the server much over a regular full HTTP session. Pretty much the only difference is not sending the images along.

It's not for the server's benefit, but the client's.

Re:um

[Anonymous Coward]

My /. front page draws articles from a variety of sections, according to my prefs.

First of all, that isn't done by storing prefs in cookies. It's done by authentication via cookies and then purlling the preferences from the database. Thus, conceptually, there isn't much different. Strangely you admit this at the end of your post, though you seemed to have forgotten the point you were trying to make by then.

Second, the specific problem you describe would be better solved by having separate RSS feeds for any possible front page view. Composing the view (where I define a view as a chosen selection of different sections and/or FP articles) would then happen as it happens now, meaning that anonymous users could choose from either the front page or any of the sections and logged in users could customize pretty much anything. At the bottom of each HTML view would then be an RSS link and there would be autodiscovery code embedded inside the HTML code. These RSS feeds could then be dynamic or static, or a combination thereof (e.g. static feeds for the front page, the sections and dynamic pages for custom views) as deemed most appropriate.

Re:um

[vsync64]

There is nothing magic about this, rather something very tragic. We've made web browsing so complex and inefficient that we have to invent a new thing to make it simpler again.

No, it's because of data overload. Using an aggregator allows one to skip past the million mostly identical shrieks of fury everytime something politically annoying happens, and look for the bits of original and unique content.

Re:um

[Anonymous Coward]

I like this, except

Second, the specific problem you describe would be better solved by having separate RSS feeds for any possible front page view.

If there are 12 possible categories you could pick as being "categories of stories to put on the front page", then that's 2^12 RDF files to maintain. I've never run a web server providing syndication, so I don't know if 4096 RDF files are easy to generate every 30 mins or not.

Re:um

[yoriknme]

So who gets the patent for all this work?

Re:um

[Anonymous Coward]

Hence "RSS feeds could then be dynamic or static, or a combination thereof (e.g. static feeds for the front page, the sections and dynamic pages for custom views) as deemed most appropriate"

E.g. there could be a fp.rss, apache.rss, apple.rss, ..., yro.rss and then there'd be a rss.pl?include_sections=fp,apache,yro&ignore_autho r=CmdrTaco for users who have things set up to be just perfect.

The next big thing?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure. Two years ago.

God I hope so.

[Clemence]

Evolution uses them, you can link it into your own web-page. It makes surfing more efficient, and more secure. Formerly CRAYON was, IMHO a great site for quick-surfing only the news you wanted to read, but all the news you wanted to read in one place. Sadly, a lot of (general news) sites have pulled old RSS feeds, or made them far to difficult to find.

Kudos Slashdot. Hiss to CNN.

Re:God I hope so.

[i_really_dont_care]

Kudos Slashdot. Hiss to CNN.

Yes, Kudos! But why don't we have a RSS feed for every section (Games, YRO and so on)...?

Re:God I hope so.

[stevey]

Ummmm they do.

For example I have the following two feeds in my snownews aggregator:

• askslashdot.rdf
• developers.rdf

Re:God I hope so.

[canajin56]

I used to use /.'s RSS, but once I queried twice in one hour, so my IP got banned.

Re:God I hope so.

[timothv]

You were probably querying it hundreds of times per hour, because twice per hour is fine with slashdot.

Re:God I hope so.

[AndroidCat]

Are there any rough guidelines for "this is okay unless they say not to" for RSS? (I've got the RSS 2.0 specs, but I doubt there's anything in there.) Is it like Usenet where half the standards are traditional rather than stone?

(OT: oh gawd. I just spent a few hours playing Black and White for the first time and now all my UI reflexes are twisted. I expect to be able to browse with grab and move as well as zoom in/out.)

Re:God I hope so.

[__past__]

I hope not.

RSS, and indeed the whole WWW (including blog) style of communication is a lot worse than the mail/usenet style in that it is basically one-way. If you get your news as an RSS feed, that's it - you just consume what others prepared, without an easy and effective possibility to reply, without the chance for a fair peer-to-peer discussion, and in particular without the chance to publish such stories yourself (of course, you can technically do that, only that nobody will subscribe to your private RSS feed, so you are basically invisible)

Spam and worms are not the problem IMHO, they are trivial to handle. Trolls you have anywhere, and they can be dealt with easily as well. The benefits of a fair mode of multi-way communication far outweight these annoyances. It is a general trend to view web-based services as inherently better than other, often older, internet services which is common at least since the start of september - take web forums vs. usenet for example, the web stuff tends to have tons of useless gizmos but be less usable for the actual task, communication. And it shows in the quality of the discussions taking place.

It is a little like the difference between the model of democracy where issues were discussed on the market place of Athens between all citizens (not that many inhabitants of Athens counted as citizens, but that is a different issue...) and the one where the citizens get to vote for a representative every few years. RSS is the TV of online communication.

Re:God I hope so.

[WCityMike]

Yes, Kudos! But why don't we have a RSS feed for every section (Games, YRO and so on)...?

You can.

http://slashdot.org/section name.rss,

i.e.

http://slashdot.org/yro.rss

Re:God I hope so.

[Anonymous Coward]

RSS, and indeed the whole WWW (including blog) style of communication is a lot worse than the mail/usenet style in that it is basically one-way.

Are you kidding? Virtually every blog I've visited has had the ability to add a comment. Two very popular technologies (Trackback & Pingback) relating to blogs were invented specifically to notify somebody that somebody is writing about their article. The Atom API may well include the ability to add comments to a website directly from a feed reader.

Re:God I hope so.

[Jerf]

If you get your news as an RSS feed, that's it - you just consume what others prepared, without an easy and effective possibility to reply, without the chance for a fair peer-to-peer discussion, and in particular without the chance to publish such stories yourself

Completely false. You are free to reply, you are free to publish that reply, and there are sites that will help people who care find your reply, even if the original source doesn't ever point to you.

Your problem is...

of course, you can technically do that, only that nobody will subscribe to your private RSS feed, so you are basically invisible)

You seem to think that you have some sort of right to be heard... that if ABC News publishes an article and you have some comment that you have some sort of right to make ABC News distribute your opinion on the same footing as their own. This is flatly false. They may acknowlege your opinion or not as they see fit.

The true benefit of the RSS-style of communication is that it provides you with a channel of communication that is yours. Your RSS file has no trolls. Your RSS file has no spam. Thus, if people care about your opinions (or whatever you are posting), they can subscribe with confidence to your feed. The technology exists then to bring your content to those who are interesting.

Odds are, you won't get thousands or millions of subscribers. That's because, odds are, you aren't one out of a million. I say this as someone who has had a feed since Jan. 2000 and have not exactly raked in the fame. However, this is the way it is.

It's not like the alternatives are any better. Do you actually read the feedback forums on ABC News? Sure, I do intermittently, but there's just no way around the fact that when you create that "right of reply", it's flooded and you can't help but be uninterested in it.

Fundamentally, you see this "one-way communication", but what you don't see is that (nearly) all communication is one way. You are not allowed to modify this message, but you can post a reply. You are not allowed to modify somebody else's RSS feed, but you can post a reply. The fact that I don't have to read every last schmoe's reply to some article, but only get the ones from the people I care about, is a feature, not a bug.

The ideal communication technology is a compromise between the readers and the writers. RSS feeds are one of the best we've created so far, with low binding on both the writer's and the reader's side. (Even posted an unpopular opinion and been deluged in hate mail? Unless you're a sociopath it gets old. RSS is one of the few ways for a writer to be able to deal with that, because they are not forced to read the flames in the same forum they themselves are posting in.) In the end, RSS-based communities are one of the best matches to the real principles of free speech: That you can say whatever you like, and people are free to read whatever they like, and there is no binding between the two: You do not have the right to be heard, and you do not have the right to censor anyone else, even by "shouting them down". In this way, RSS feeds surpass even real-world communication.

Practically speaking, it is undeniable that this plays out as I've described, and not as you've described. I've participated in many conversations via RSS, so I have empirical proof they exist, no matter how you might theorize that they don't. And plenty of people comment on all sort of things, many of whom I find interesting and many of whom I don't. You obviously don't use it, if you have so many misconceptions.

RSS is the exact opposite of TV on the web. Everybody gets to compete on a level playing ground for attention, and is rewarded according to their social merits. Some people don't like this and prefer forums where they (falsely) think this doesn't apply. Even the big networks and newspapers don't have much adv

Re:God I hope so.

[ChaosDiscord]

RSS is the TV of online communication.

So what?

I get lots of entertainment and useful information from my television. That we have two-way communication systems doesn't invalidate the use for one-way communication systems. For certain areas (news reporting, entertainment), on the whole I'd rather that the content creators spent more time creating better information (better news, better entertainment), than engaging in two way communication with their audience.

As a replacement for email and usenet, RSS is clearly inferior. But as a replacement for checking the dozen or so news, commentary, and comic sites I visit almost daily, RSS is clearly superior.

Re:God I hope so.

[Cecil]

You were probably querying it hundreds of times per hour, because twice per hour is fine with slashdot.

Bullshit. Try it. Slashdot's ridiculous RSS restrictions are not only excessively draconian, but also buggy, frequently tagging non-offenders.

All this, for a small RSS file on a website that gets millions of hits to its graphical front page per day. What crack are they smoking?

Perhaps anyone wanting to automate the listing of slashdot stories should write a parser for the Slashdot frontpage instead, since clearly that is not subject to pointless draconian restrictions. Have it download images to /dev/null too, just for kicks.

Re:God I hope so.

[Anonymous Coward]

Spot on. I too received the nastygram. I provided my crontab of 30 minute interval and suggested to them that parsing the front page on my own would be more costly to them. Magically I was unblocked, however they were incapable of responding with an explanation or apology. And their RSS feeds are frequently not updated in a timely manner.

Re:God I hope so.

[Ichimusai]

I myself happened to pull the feed about every ten minutes, and boy that god me on 72 hour ice. Now it is back - occasionally. I get headlines sometimes, but still sometimes they change into the message telling me I am abusing them still. Now I pull once an hour.

Re:God I hope so.

[Anonymous Coward]

I came here through an RSS feed. Does it look like I'm passively absorbing without discussing?
An RSS feed is simply a way to get to the stories that interest me, faster.

Re:God I hope so.

[iCat]

I started using NetNewsWire and my IP was banned almost immediately. Didn't get access back until 3 days later.

Haven't used it for /. since then.

Re:God I hope so.

[gisarah]

If you get your news as an RSS feed, that's it - you just consume what others prepared
that's why we created Jyte. Jyte is a new way to find, read and follow the news. It has all the benefits of RSS readers in that you don't have to surf the web to find your content, you can read the content in the Jyte window, and it takes up a very small amount of bandwidth. You're getting headlines, not whole articles, pushed to you. The real breakthrough, however, is that the articles you receive are based on search technology. Instead of subscribing to feeds that already exist, you create your own search with whatever keywords you want ("athens olympics -swimming", for example) and get only the news that relates. Since we're still in Beta mode, blogs and RSS feeds haven't yet been included, but in a few weeks' time we will be greatly expanding these capabilities.

Re:God I hope so.

[glinden]

• Formerly CRAYON was, IMHO a great site for quick-surfing only the news you wanted to read

You might also take a look at Findory News. It's a personalized news site pulling from hundreds of news sources. The site learns from the articles you read and helps you find the news you want.

Re:God I hope so.

[Richard_at_work]

Heh, yes. Slashdot even banned themselves once, all the slashdot specific (BSD, Developers etc) side boxes on the front page showed "Your RSS request has been blocked due to excessive usage.". I did have a screen shot which i sent off to slashdot support and it mysteriously got fixed. The next day. I have no idea if this happened to everyone or just a selection.

Re:God I hope so.

[t0ny]

Formerly CRAYON was, IMHO a great site for quick-surfing only the news you wanted to read,

Let me guess- they ran into trademark issues regarding their name.

Re:God I hope so.

[Chanc_Gorkon]

Got a question for you.....how many stories does slashdot post every 10 minutes?? Every 60? Every Day? Slashdot only posts a story like 8-10 times per day. Refreshing your feed every 10 minutes....even every 30 minutes is just too much. This is why they have the autoban set up this way. Also, when you hit this feed, you use part of the bandwidth they need for the regular web page. Again, thats why the autoban is setup. You have no idea what Slashdots net admins see. Even less then you did 3 years ago as GIS is pretty much all done and they used to say things like that in the show especially if alot of folks asked. I bet one month the RSS file was in the top percentage of files accessed and that had to be cut down. I know, it's not a large file, but if you grabe it 20 bazillion times a day, it ADDS UP! In closing, if you grab the feed more then once per two hours, that is way too much. Set it to refresh 4-5 times perday and you will be fair to Slashdot and NOT eat their bandwidth.

Re:God I hope so.

[Isofarro]

Are there any rough guidelines for "this is okay unless they say not to" for RSS? (I've got the RSS 2.0 specs, but I doubt there's anything in there.)

General etiquette is once an hour at the most.

Re:God I hope so.

[ubernostrum]

RSS, and indeed the whole WWW (including blog) style of communication is a lot worse than the mail/usenet style in that it is basically one-way. If you get your news as an RSS feed, that's it - you just consume what others prepared, without an easy and effective possibility to reply

RSS has modules supporting various comment APIs, allowing you to post a comment to someone's weblog entry from your aggregator.

Re:God I hope so.

[SandSpider]

Orrrr...You have about 30 feeds that you update each every half an hour or so, and it doesn't make that much sense (or the RSS reader doesn't support) configuring each site differently. Besides, the new RSS standards can find check to see if anything has changed, then only download if there's new content.

For myself, I don't use Slashdot's RSS feed because it can't match my preferences for which stories to show. I want to see the apple.slashdot.org feeds, I want to skip all the SCO stories. That sort of thing. All it seems to do is the base front page.

=Brian

Re:God I hope so.

[AndroidCat]

Aha, general etiquette, there's a solid standard! :^P Call me Mr. Thicky, but since RSS feeds are supplying all that formated data, why don't we all agree on a field that says what the recommended and absolute minimum refresh periods are for each feed? (With a default if it's not present.)

I was thinking adding RSS to some software I'm writing, but I know that info junkies and clueless will grab the refresh slider and yank it down to whatever minimum time I allow. (And that minimum will be short. Some RSS feeds might be special purpose private access ones that refresh often over LANs.)

Re:God I hope so.

[Anonymous Coward]

how many stories does slashdot post every 10 minutes?

It's about latency, not bandwidth. Checking more regularly doesn't increase the number of stories you get, but it does lower the time between Slashdot posting and you reading.

In the case of hot topics like SCO, it can mean the difference between posting a comment that starts an interesting thread, and posting a comment that gets lost in the noise of 200 other comments.

In the case of geek topics like a lego replica of the space shuttle, it can mean the difference between being able to read the story, and waiting until next month when their bandwidth quota hasn't been exceeded.

I know, it's not a large file, but if you grabe it 20 bazillion times a day, it ADDS UP!

Any decent reader supports "conditional get", so if the file hasn't been updated, then the only thing they download is a couple of headers. The bandwidth use isn't as bad as you think. Learn a little about HTTP.

Re:God I hope so.

[Quixadhal]

I think the point was, why do they autoban retrieval of a small XML file, while they do NOT autoban someone sitting in a graphical browser with no cache hitting refresh every 30 seconds?

If RSS is such a great thing, they should be encouraging people to use it and punishing people who abuse the (more costly) html interface.

Re:God I hope so.

[Isofarro]

but since RSS feeds are supplying all that formated data, why don't we all agree on a field that says what the recommended and absolute minimum refresh periods are for each feed? (With a default if it's not present.)

All agree to something - you're new to this RSS specification thing right? ;-)

Seriously, there are three elements specified in RSS2.0 which may be of use - skipHours, skipDays and ttl. ttl sounds in the right direction to your original requirements.

Re:God I hope so.

[AndroidCat]

Thanks, I would have eventually RTFMed, but now I know what look for. Actually, I think I noticed them before, but when the topic of too-quick Slashdot refreshes came up, I was wondering why this problem was happening. (I suppose I'll allow users to override ttl, but with a suitably worded warning that they're being a fugghead.)

I'm still at the metaphor description stage, so it'll be be a little while I have to worry about it. Describing a program as doing "lots of stuff" just doesn't work these days--gotta have a metaphor! After that, a little programming and I'll be straight into the ???? stage.

Re:God I hope so.

[Chanc_Gorkon]

You can also get banned by refreshing the front page obsessively too. The RSS file probably gets hit more because it's automated by many newsfeed readers. I think what SHOULD be done is a line in each feed that sets the refresh rate for that channel automagically for you and specifies if the user can change it. This would solve it as you could not set it. Like it or not, Slashdot has finte bandwidth too. It's up to them to decided policy and not us. If you don't like it, you can download slashcode and try to do the same.

forget speed feed...

[batmn42]

how about quick fix? fastpass? extremely expedient content delivery system?

That last one may not be quite as catchy...

Re:forget speed feed...

[Pxtl]

I'm curious about RSS - rather than breaking into a new technology, why not extend the existing platform? Why not set up a real-time form of html? Just have the user log-in to the webpage, and then the server sends diff information to the user whenever there's a change. Thus, there's no hitting the "refresh" button over and over again in your browser, and no wasting time downloading the full page over and over again, only the relevant diff info. People use webpages as chat systems all the time, why not make it work right and handle refreshing server-side?

Re:forget speed feed...

[A3thling]

It's an issue of scalability. A decent webserver can handle a million hits an hour without much difficulty, but if it has to maintain a million open socket connections (which it would if it was a site that people liked to keep open, like /.), then you would quickly run into resource problems.

Re:forget speed feed...

[Stuwee]

A real-time form of HTML would be a completely new concept altogether. Although conceptually a good idea, it means developing a new client/server architecture. The good thing about RSS is that it works over existing technology - the same way that people are excited about broadband over power lines - the technology is already in place.

Re:forget speed feed...

[kid-noodle]

At a guess, because that's outside the remit of HTML - which is purely there to say what the things one puts on a page are?

I suppose I might as well call it modularisation (and be instantly corrected, no doubt) - it makes more sense to have something else do what is, really an entirely unrelated task - the HTML is not responsible for delivering the content, only for saying what of it, is what.

Although come to think of it - isn't what you describe handled by SSI? Although one still has to download the entire page over - however given the increasing bandwidth, it possibly makes more sense to do that, than to fiddle...

But I'm only speculating there.

Re:forget speed feed...

[SoTuA]

what's the problem with RSS?

Say it aloud: R-R-S

Our ARSES! Cool ri- ummmm...

ok, ok, let's call it SpeedFeed.

Re:forget speed feed...

[vicviper]

I'm curious about RSS - rather than breaking into a new technology, why not extend the existing platform? Why not set up a real-time form of html? Just have the user log-in to the webpage, and then the server sends diff information to the user whenever there's a change. Thus, there's no hitting the "refresh" button over and over again in your browser, and no wasting time downloading the full page over and over again, only the relevant diff info. People use webpages as chat systems all the time, why not make it work right and handle refreshing server-side?

They (whoever they are) tried this a while back, and they called it "push" technology. For the push I received you had to use a specific client. The problem was they decided to push ads to you too, and I could find more timely/relevant news from other non-push sources.

Re:forget speed feed...

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a swedish product that makes this happen: http://www.trapets.com/

You need to understand swedish to read it, but in short, their product does more or less exactly as your proposal. To bad it isnt free, maybe someone should make a new?

Re:forget speed feed...

[Anonymous Coward]

Because RSS is a machine-readable format. If you want to know the title of a feed, it's right there in a known XML element. That way a single program can aggregate multiple RSS feeds.. they all have the same structure.

Though, you do have a bit of a point with the "push"/"pull" model. It might be interesting to embed RSS in Jabber messages, for instance.

Re:forget speed feed...

[digital bath]

forget outside the remit of HTML.. it's outside of HTTP. It would need a completely new protocol.

Re:forget speed feed...

[Anonymous Coward]

what's the problem with RSS?

Say it aloud: R-R-S

are you retarded?

Re:forget speed feed...

[multipartmixed]

Yeah, the client was called "Netscape 1.2"

I wonder why the hell they dropped server push?

Re:forget speed feed...

[NanoGator]

"Our ARSES! Cool ri- ummmm... "

Troll? That was mildly amusing.

Re:forget speed feed...

[STrinity]

I'm curious about RSS - rather than breaking into a new technology, why not extend the existing platform? Why not set up a real-time form of html? Just have the user log-in to the webpage, and then the server sends diff information to the user whenever there's a change. Thus, there's no hitting the "refresh" button over and over again in your browser, and no wasting time downloading the full page over and over again, only the relevant diff info.

Um, that's pretty much how RSS works, except you set your aggregator to recheck the page at regular intervals instead of putting the strain on the server. The aggregator then displays the text of the new material (many sites only bother with the first few lines, so you have to visit the page to see the whole thing, though most non Blogger blogs give each article a separate page so you don't have to download the whole front page).

Re:forget speed feed...

[Ichimusai]

Speaking of which... are there any companies today that have had good success with distributing bandwidth over power-lines? Over here in Sweden one of the biggest actors did some trials about five years ago but put it all on hold because they ran into all kinds of problems with it.

Re:forget speed feed...

[iCat]

I seem to remember one of the side-effects of broadband over power lines is interference to shortwave radio reception. May not impact you, but a lot of radio hams are dead set against it.

Re:forget speed feed...

[edsarkiss]

Problem Solved

Re:forget speed feed...

[stonecypher]

Why not set up a real-time form of html?

There is push HTML. It sucks. The reason RSS can't get spam is that you request things; they're not sent to you. You don't want to introduce a way for a server to reach a specific user.

why not make it work right and handle refreshing server-side?

Because, er, you hold open a few sockets that way. Sockets have overhead. You seem not to realize the kind of resources IRC and Telnet take up per user compared to HTTP.

Re:forget speed feed...

[stonecypher]

A real-time form of HTML would be a completely new concept altogether.

Oh, sure. If it's 1997. Try checking. Section 8.1.1, page 43.

Moderators: don't moderate something insightful that claims X Topic would be revolutionary unless you know about X Topic, please. Push HTTP has been there since day one. It started push, not pull.

Re:forget speed feed...

[stonecypher]

I don't know who this "they" is, but RSS is just an XML dialect over HTTP. HTTP has push. That probably just means someone wrote a server that sould keep streams open and a client which could, too. RSS shouldn't be at all difficult to adapt for something like that; write an RFC, throw it on usenet, wait two weeks, and implement it in Mozilla. The rest will follow under the weight of whether people actually want it.

RSS Readers

[necrogram]

Any recomendations for a good RSS reader for Win32

Re:RSS Readers

[Organized Konfusion]

Opera 7.5 supports RSS nicely.

Re:RSS Readers

[Pxtl]

There's a plug-in for Miranda. Nice to have all your IM, IRC, and RSS on one platform.

Re:RSS Readers

[ptolemu]

Check out FeedReader

Re:RSS Readers

[x3ro]

SharpReader

Re:RSS Readers

[Anonymous Coward]

Check out the Downloads section at Trolltalk XP.

Re:RSS Readers

[Karamchand]

There is no Opera 7.5 yet. Current release is 7.23

Re:RSS Readers

[Anonymous Coward]

NewzSpider is good. Simple 3 pane interface. Import/Export of subscribtions in OPML. FREE trial.

Re:RSS Readers

[Organized Konfusion]

Sure there is

Re:RSS Readers

[Anonymous Coward]

That preview 2 - not really 7.5 or 7.50

Re:RSS Readers

[stubear]

I just discovered a great RSS news reader that integrates seamlessly with Outlook 2000 and newer called NewsGator. You can add feeds from NNTP as well but the nicest feature is the ability to right-click on an RSS link and select subscribe to. You can set NewsGator to check feeds at a set interval and if anything new is found it will notify you with an icon and balloon tooltip in the tray area. It's $29 but it's a nicely polished, well designed RSS news reader. The only problem I found, and this is an Outlook problem I believe, is I couldn't set the NewsGator folder home page to be the first thing I see when I open Outlook.

Re:RSS Readers

[rholliday]

I just use the RSS Reader Panel for Firefox.

Re:RSS Readers

[Apreche]

If you use Firefox (firebird, phoenix, browzilla, etc.) the RSS reader panel extension is the highest quality. It's great for my morning routine. I go down the list of bookmark folders opening each one in tabs and reading all my non-RSS sites. Then when I'm all done I press Alt+R and I check all the news feeds with the quickness. I just wish slashdot's newsfeed didn't suck. I read penny arcade now only with RSS.

I wish all webcomics used it. Even better, consolidate all my webcomics into a single news feed. Then consolidate all the geek news into another, blogs in another, software updates in another and real news in the last one. Then have a program that makes noise when something new comes up.

Life would be sweet.

If you don't have an RSS feed, get one!

Re:RSS Readers

[pgrote]

Use Bloglines.

It's online, free and includes a host of other features such as exportable subscriptions, disposable email addresses, etc.

Re:RSS Readers

[patelbhavesh]

Amphetadesk is pretty popular.
If you want to embed RSS in your own home page(or any HTML page) like I have done on http://bhavesh.freeshell.org/news.html then you can use http://zvonnews.sourceforge.net/zfeeder.php

Re:RSS Readers

[Xii]

I'd use this if it weren't for the fact that it opens articles in IE. If there's an option to change the browser please point me to it because I've searched hard and don't think it's there. There's no reason I shouldn't be allowed to choose Mozilla, Opera, etc to open a site. Sadly this is a problem for many of the news readers I've tried and if it isn't that it's another "feature" that prevents me from using the program.

Re:RSS Readers

[ticklemeozmo]

Quoth the Poster: Check out FeedReader

Quoth the Article: Cheesy rhyming will help the non techno elite remember it..

Re:RSS Readers

[Anonymous Coward]

This is definitely one to watch. It still has few glitches but looks great for a beta version.
3gp

Re:RSS Readers

[Anonymous Coward]

This one is good if you watch up to 50-60 feeds. Thumbs up!

Re:RSS Readers

[FsG]

FeedDemon is probably the most powerful Win32 RSS reader available. It supports tons of unique features like merging of feeds into a single "newspaper" of today's events.

Re:RSS Readers

[Shinglor]

FeedDemon is one of the best but unfortunately the final release is only a trial version. It's made by the same guy who made the awesome TopStyle CSS editor.

Re:RSS Readers

[Anonymous Coward]

Any recomendations for a link to "WTF IS F**ING RSS THING????"

Sorry. I hear it all the time but I have been UNABLE to locate a document which describes WHAT IS IT. And I sure as hell don't wanna download "Joe's RSS fr33 f33der" from "hax0r-my-Computer.net"

Timothy didn't even bother to add a link for it.

Re:RSS Readers

[Cylix]

Gator.... bad choice in names...

Makes my skin crawl.

Re:RSS Readers

[avalys]

Opera 7.5 is the current beta release.

Re:RSS Readers

[notque]

Trying to download it, I get a 404, file not found.

Re:RSS Readers

[zdanev]

next version will support ATOM and will have improved user interface.

Re:RSS Readers

[Lord Crc]

So let's call RSS for ReaderFeeder instead then :)

Re:RSS Readers

[termos]

Emacs with Gnus! :)

Re:RSS Readers

[Anonymous Coward]

If you read slashdot's feed to often they will ban you for 3 days!

Re:RSS Readers

[Anonymous Coward]

It's sad that all you have to do is ask one dumb fucking question and you get modded +4 for it. WTF?

"What's a good RSS reader for Win32?" That's not goddamn interesting in the least bit and is fucking stupid. Fucking use google, slashbot.

Re:RSS Readers

[omicronish]

Try RSS Bandit. It's based on an MSDN article, Building a Desktop News Aggregator, that discusses how to build an RSS aggregator with C# and .NET.

Re:RSS Readers

[notque]

I just downloaded the Firefox one, and I can't get Fark's to load, Slashdot's is lame, Espn's isn't formatted very well...

This definately seems like something that would be awesome, if only a few additions were added.

Re:RSS Readers

[pointyhairedmba]

I like Pluck, http://www.pluck.com , it seems to work well, isn't huge, and has a good set of functionality without being bloated.

Re:RSS Readers

[mek2600]

There's also one for Trillian as well. Oddly enough, that's how I got to this article.

Re:RSS Readers

[DoraLives]

I went to the RSS Home Page and the Firefox 0.8 RSS installer worked like a champ. This, after confirming that the original link was indeed 404'ing.

No guarantee that this will work for anybody else, but it DID just work for me.

Re:RSS Readers

[notque]

I went to the RSS Home Page and the Firefox 0.8 RSS installer worked like a champ. This, after confirming that the original link was indeed 404'ing.

No guarantee that this will work for anybody else, but it DID just work for me.

Thank you, it worked for me as well.

Re:RSS Readers

[nzkoz]

FeedDemon. It's a fantastic piece of software, everything *just works*.

It's commercial but worth the price!

Re:RSS Readers

[rholliday]

Sorry about that guys. I got it from the Mozilla site originally, but it's been a week or so.

Re:RSS Readers

[AndroidCat]

The spyware formally known as Gator has changed their name to the venerial disease Claria or some-such.

Re:RSS Readers

[Cylix]

I know...

It's a joke...

Gator's name being tainted and all...

Re:RSS Readers

[shokk]

Anything web based. Set up Feed On Feeds on any Apache/PHP/mySQL system to get Usenet-like access and marking to the same feeds. Most others (including Yahoo's RSS service) do not do this marking which means you see the same topics over and over in the same feed. Sure, you can ignore the old stories, but realize that some feeds post dozens of items per day and that's a lot to remember.

RSS is a natural evolution of using the Web. Why constantly scour web sites for updates when you can subscribe to a feed from EWeek or Sourceforge or Penny Arcade and see the update shortly after it appears? I always keep Feed On Feeds open in a mozilla tab.

Re:RSS Readers

[Anonymous Coward]

Your link http://fls.moo.jp/moz/rssreader.html works... The original link is a direct link to an older version of the panel... so it's a good thing that it 404 errors out.

Re:RSS Readers

[shokk]

So how do you sync this between similar installs at home and work? Instead, I use a web-based reader like Feed On Feeds so that I can pick up at home where I left off at work and vice versa.

Re:RSS Readers

[Chatmag]

They did the name change to Claria so they could fool the public into thinking they were not connected with the scum/spyware company Gator. It's only a matter of time until they start up their lawsuits against anyone that calls them scum/spyware.

From an article regarding Gator/Claria:

In October, Gator threatened legal action against a site that dared to call its software spyware. They claim that it's only spyware if it's downloaded without the person knowing about it. Having just spent some of my Thanksgiving vacation removing Gator from my father's computer, I beg to differ. Most people who end up with Gator on their system have no idea how it got there - which appears to fit even Gator's own definition of spyware. Now, despite changing their name to Claria, it appears that Gator won't be able to shake the critics they threatened to sue. While PC Pitstop agreed to remove pages calling Gator spyware, they're coming back with a new site that is just as critical of Claria/Gator. Apparently, they've carefully worded the site to abide by the terms of the settlement. They don't call Gator spyware, but give the definition of spyware and then explain how Gator matches that definition. Should be interesting to see how Gator responds. Of course, the angrier they get, the more attention will get drawn to the way they get their application onto computers.

Re:RSS Readers

[Kent Recal]

I'm not sure whether it runs on win32 but be sure to check out rawdog, the one news aggregator.

Re:RSS Readers

[NanoGator]

"Gator.... bad choice in names...

Makes my skin crawl."

That's right. I chose my nick to instill fear in people. BUAHAHA!

Re:RSS Readers

[STrinity]

I second the RSS Reader Panel -- I don't see any point in getting a separate aggregator application when so many RSS feeds force you to visit the site for the full article.

As for Slashdot, I use Slashzilla -- it only shows the headlines and topic icons, but that's usually enough to decide whether an article will be interesting.

Re:RSS Readers

[ptolemu]

The browser used to open articles depends on the browser set as default. As far as I know each version of Windows has the ability to set a default browser so you should have the option to do this as well. Opening articles on my computer opens a new or existing instance of Mozilla.

Re:RSS Readers

[Chatmag]

Dark Helmet: "Prepare to be scared" SpaceBall 1: "Prepare to be scared" SpaceBall 2: "Prepare to be scared" Dark Helmet: "Why are you always preparing, just be scared"

Re:RSS Readers

[tchansen]

I've used several different newsreaders and the best one I've found is NewsDesk, a free download from http://www.wildgrape.net/. It is easy to use and it runs well. It doesn't crash and it doesn't corrupt your system.

I've used it for over a year now. I've tried other readers but they either require a paid for service, or purchased software that doesn't work or work very well.

It is free - give it a try. And, no, I'm not the developer.

Re:RSS Readers

[magores]

Sharpreader is my Win32 RSS reader of choice.

In fact, I'm reading this story, and sending this post from within Sharpreader.

Re:RSS Readers

[magores]

Sorry for replying to myself, but I thought I should point out Daily Rotation as well.

It's not a program, but rather a website. It pulls headlines from 250+ tech-related sites, not all of which have RSS feeds.

Re:RSS Readers

[Anonymous Coward]

amphetadesk is bloated

Re:RSS Readers

[jwinter1]

Bloglines is worth using just because your subscriptions are automatically synchronized across all your computers (since it's web-based). It has all the features that the good win32 applications have, but through an actually well thought-out frames interface. It also is nicer bandwidth-wise on the sites who are publishing.

Not an employee, just a satisified convert from Sharpreader.

Re:RSS Readers

[Anonymous Coward]

Opera incorporates RSS into its M5 news/mail/everything reader. Whenever you view an rss feed, Opera autodetects it and treats it like a news folder and remembers it.
It can also read RSS feed it into your sidebar.

Very slick stuff.

I like the direction this concept is going. It is a really good way to get websites without all the images and styles and unneeded frills.
With some extensions to remedy things such as the previously mentioned lack of ability to post messages, RSS could be the medium that facilitates a good alternative to graphical web browsers while also being a nice alternative to usenet and other such services.

Re:RSS Readers

[Anonymous Coward]

You can get quite a collection of web comics via RSS on tapestry.com-Dilbert among them. They even carried Calvin and Hobbes till recently, when the copyright owners forced them to remove it.

Re:RSS Readers

[julesh]

It's from 'navigator'. The earliest example I know of a program named in this fashion (other, of course, than programs actually called 'navigator', e.g. Netscape's web browser) is 'napigator', which was a program that allowed you to find & use alternate servers with the official napster client.

Re:RSS Readers

[Anonymous Coward]

... reading RSS:

http://www.methodize.org/nntprss/img/screenshot-gn us.png

(using nntp//rss)

Re:RSS Readers

[ambrosine10]

SharpReader requires the .NET Framework. I would recommend FeedReader.

Re:RSS Readers

[necrogram]

Thanks, i ended up using this one since i live out of my exchange mailbox here at work. to set out look to open your news folder just go to tools, options, others, and the advanced button under email

Re:RSS Readers

[Xii]

My browser is set to mozilla by default and I have the option for allowing access to IE unticked under "Set Program Access and Defaults".

Speed Read?

[levell]

It /must/ be the name that is harming adoption, that HTML thing never really caught on either did it?. Actually speed-read sounds kind of catchy and gives the uninitiated a good idea of what it does so ignore me...

Re:Speed Read?

[Rakshasa Taisab]

World Wide Web, sounds alot better than RSS. Hell, most people just call it the Internet.

Re:Speed Read?

[Anonymous Coward]

Speed feed... for when you need to download some speed

Oh, maybe not then

They're missing the point

[NSash]

If I were able to read the news ten times more quickly, I'd just have to get back to work ten times faster!

Browser integration

[x3ro]

Perhaps more of the Great Unwashed would use RSS feeds if support was built into the most commonly used browsers.

Re:Browser integration

[Organized Konfusion]

It is built into Opera

Re:Browser integration

[Anonymous Coward]

I dont believe Opera fits the definition of "commonly used browsers"

Re:Browser integration

[x3ro]

Cool. I also found this extension for Firefox.

one thing

[Anonymous Coward]

in soviet russia, you feed rss

Re:one thing

[Anonymous Coward]

No, comrade. In Soviet Russia, RSS reads YOU. And then it reports back to the Kremlin.

Commercialisation is next :-(

[Space cowboy]

It's a shame that my first thoughts on this are: as soon as it becomes popular, it'll be used commercially, and start to lose its appeal. It's easy to see the commercialism of the web in the same light as the agents viewed humanity, in the Matrix - a plague.

Consider what you use the internet for, and how it's changed:

• email was once a useful tool, now it's a spamfest. Still useful to me, but going downhill rapidly.
  
• Webpages used to be information sources - can you believe there was an argument once over whether markup tags should be for pixel-perfect layout or for meta-information like TeX ? How naive is that ? As for the intrusive adverts that take over your screen, the less said the better. I will never buy anything from anyone who does this - I will seek out a more expensive competitor if necessary...
  

The more-successful protocols - those that actually deliver information are those left commercially-free. FTP is pretty basic, but you get what you want and nothing else. Usenet news has flamewars galore, but the limitations on what can be posted in non-binary groups actually seem to work well.

When I first started using the web, I set up a website for my image-processing postgrad group. We emailed CERN to let them know there was another website on the net :-) Imagine that today [grin]. The point is that I've seen the degeneration of the net into what it's become, and it's a sad story. Let's just hope that with this medium (the content being provided by lots of people rather than a concentrated few) we can buck the trend...

Simon

Re:Commercialisation is next :-(

[MegaFur]

Yeah, but look on the brightside. Now there's a near-infinite supply of cheap, easy access porn.

RSSSSS Feed

[elid]

We've been exporting our headlines practically since the beginning. (note that RSSS link in the footer).

Yess...
we wantssss it...
RSSSS feed...our precioussss....

Re:RSSSSS Feed

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow. This gets modded up, while an identical post one minute earlier is at zero. Apparently, slashbotters all think alike, so that several people post identical posts at the same time.

Re:RSSSSS Feed

[Anonymous Coward]

It's because moderators don't read at -1 as they're supposed to.

Not much point me posting this, because the moderators who should see it, won't.

Re:RSSSSS Feed

[notque]

Not much point me posting this, because the moderators who should see it, won't.

Because the only reason to post it to be modded up?

Re:RSSSSS Feed

[Anonymous Coward]

No the reason to make that post was to reach the idiot moderators who don't browse below "1". You could have at least quoted all of it, so a few more might have seen it.

Re:RSSSSS Feed

[notque]

No the reason to make that post was to reach the idiot moderators who don't browse below "1". You could have at least quoted all of it, so a few more might have seen it.

My fault.. what you said wasn't trolling, and the way I quoted it, it may have seemed that way.

Regardless, I moderate at 0, spending the majority of my points on people whom have something interesting to say who have relatively new accounts, but that's me.

Spam and others

[RoadkillBunny]

RSS is good now, but I don't think it will be long before someone figures out how to add spam and adds to it...

RSS acronym

[stonebeat.org]

1) RDF Site Syndication; or
2) Really Simple Syndication????
Which one is correct?

Re:RSS acronym

[stonebeat.org]

actually I meant:
1) RDF Site Summary

Re:RSS acronym

[CaptainBaz]

Actually, it's not an acronym :-)

Re:RSS acronym

[Shinglor]

Well I'm pretty sure it does stand for "RDF Site Summary" except that it doesn't make a whole lot of sense when you consider that not all versions of RSS use RDF (eg. RSS 2.0).

Re:RSS acronym

[spydir31]

Google is your friend,
the specs say

Its name is an acronym for Really Simple Syndication.

Re:RSS acronym

[Anonymous Coward]

It depends which version you are talking about. RSS 1.0 is RDF, RSS 2.0 is Simple.

Basically, the format was developed by Netscape, simplified for a quick release, abandoned by Netscape, UserLand/Dave Winer released their own version (Simple), and everyone else released another version (RDF).

RSS 2.0 is not a successor to RSS 1.0; Dave Winer merely leapfrogged them in versioning to try and co-opt the format. Tricks like that caused a massive chunk of the RSS developers to abandon the format and create something much more technically sound, Atom.

RSS 1.0 is much more closely aligned with the original aims of RSS, RSS 2.0 more closely resembles the simplified format the was released in a hurry to get to market.

My advice is to publish RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0 feeds, and as soon as Atom gets to 1.0 and the majority of readers support that, switch to that and drop RSS. RSS is too prone to game-playing by Dave Winer and bitchiness by the whole community. Switching to Atom won't rid you of this entirely, Dave has recently been stating that as far as he is concerned, Atom is a "type of" RSS.

Re:RSS acronym

[Anonymous Coward]

The specs also state that it stands for RDF Site Summary.

What you need to remember is that RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0 are two different formats, with a shared heritage (RSS 2.0 isn't the successor to RSS 1.0), it's more like how Netscape and Internet Explorer were both based upon Mosaic).

Re:RSS acronym

[ubernostrum]

As the AC mentioned, it really depends on which version you're using. RSS 0.9x versions and RSS 2.0 are "Really Simple Syndication" and RSS 1.0 is "RDF Site Syndication." Sometimes you'll see it referred to as "RSS/RDF" in that incarnation. Mark Pilgrim's "History of the RSS Fork" is a good, quick summary of how that came to be.

And if you don't feel like reading that, just think of Emacs and XEmacs, but replace RMS with Dave Winer.

Re:RSS acronym

[notque]

I thought it was Rich Site Summary

Re:RSS acronym

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh-oh, I smell some propaganda and Winer-hating.

I don't like Winer either, but Atom is a dead-end. It may have some technical merit (but it also has flaws, it uses HTTP methods besides simple GET/POST, which means it is a huge PITA to implement), but mostly it lives in it's own little world.

Stepping back, it's a shame that there are 7+ flavors of RSS and now Atom which is basically the same concept. Neither Winer nor any Atom developer has the power to solve this problem.

It means Microsoft gets to define the standard when they start pushing "MS-RSS", which we will all have to implement anyway. All the infighting between RSS and Atom will look pretty pointless at that point.

Re:RSS acronym

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't like Winer either, but Atom is a dead-end. It may have some technical merit (but it also has flaws, it uses HTTP methods besides simple GET/POST, which means it is a huge PITA to implement), but mostly it lives in it's own little world.

I've implemented a REST server. Vague accusations of being "a dead end", and "living in its own little world" don't match up with the reality. The only specific criticism you have made is that it uses HTTP PUT to put stuff on the server, and HTTP DELETE to delete stuff from the server. This is an established concept, with very few issues when implementing in real life (somebody's even implemented the Atom API in Javascript).

Stepping back, it's a shame that there are 7+ flavors of RSS and now Atom which is basically the same concept.

Microsoft Word file format, and OpenOffice file format are the same concept too. Do you automatically reject the one that came second because of this?

It means Microsoft gets to define the standard when they start pushing "MS-RSS"

Bzzt. You've just demonstrated that you buy into Winer's "BigCo" FUD. When Winer is so entrenched into the RSS format, unless he has a major change of attitude, nobody is going to be able to work together.

As sad as it sounds, the RSS format is essentially dead. Winer threw away developer mindshare by the bucketload by acting like an idiot. The fact that there's a much better format on the horizon that people are rallying around is a lifesaver as far as protection from "BigCo" goes.

Re:RSS acronym

[KjetilK]

I looked at RSS around the time 2.0 was released, and soon realized I didn't like the goals of 2.0 and decided to stay with 1.0, but I haven't actually written any code for it yet.

So, it is good to hear some news!

But I'm curious about Atom, any idea when it'll reach 1.0?

Re:RSS acronym

[Anonymous Coward]

But I'm curious about Atom, any idea when it'll reach 1.0?

My guess is probably by the end of the year. The best place to read about its development, besides the relevent mailing lists, are Mark Pilgrim's and Sam Ruby's weblogs.

Atom has recently been submitted to the IETF for standardization.

Re:RSS acronym

[julesh]

I don't think Netsacpe was based on Mosaic. My understanding, in fact, was that Netscape was written with the specific intention of being a clean-room reimplementation that would forever rid the world of Mosaic. And then IE went and saved it...

Re:RSS acronym

[Isofarro]

(but it also has flaws, it uses HTTP methods besides simple GET/POST, which means it is a huge PITA to implement

Hardly. Its trivial to implement a script that supports PUT and DELETE, not to mention HEAD, OPTIONS and TRACE. Trying to implement XML-RPC - now _that's_ pain.

Re:RSS acronym

[stonecypher]

All true such comparisons must be made between NetHack and Angband. Thank you for playing; you may apply for the Nerd Badge rank six again next month.

That's great, Taco.

[James A. G. Joyce]

Slashdot's RSS feed is really useful. Apart from the fact that:

• The feed is only updated once every hour.
• Viewing the feed any more frequently, even by mistake or for just a day or two, bans your RSS reader permanently.
• It misses out much of the information from the story (and only around 0.2% of Slashdot's readers are subscribers, so your proposal doesn't help).
• It requires your RSS reader to use the Slash RSS module.

All in all, this makes it pretty damn useless. Way to go, dipshit.

Re:That's great, Taco.

[Anonymous Coward]

Cmdr. Taco fucks up and misses the goddamn point.

News at 11, right after the story about Taco still being afraid of caching stories or linking to the Google cache for low-bandwidth sites without ad banners.

Re:That's great, Taco.

[rsmith-mac]

Ya, the ban thing really is anoying, especially when you considering the website itself has no equivilent. I ended up banning myself once when I updated the refresh time on Slashdot to 30 minutes; it took me forever to figure out what the heck was wrong with it. Frankly, I'd just like to see the ban go unless there's some reason why it should stay.

Re:That's great, Taco.

[znu]

I've been reading a lot of RSS feeds through my Nokia 3650 lately, using Bloggo. This is really nice, but it's only practical for feeds which provide full text, because trying to view real web sites on a cell phone is a major exercise in frustration.

I've noticed that over the last few months, full-text feeds have become more common. Slashdot should really join the fun.

Re:That's great, Taco.

[costas]

Check out memigo Now! (plug). Memigo can provide you with a customized light-HTML page that links to recommended articles in light formats only (i.e. PDA- or printer-friendly). Much nicer for PDAs or cell phones than a plain RSS feed.

Re:That's great, Taco.

[Anonymous Coward]

No one ever accused CmdrTaco of knowing what he was doing. Or being a programmer. Or being smart. Here's a transcript of the dev process for slashdot RSS implementation:

Not Taco: "If too many people use this it could cost us a lot in bandwidth"
Taco: <drools>

15 minutes later

Taco thinks to self: "Something said...not good..."
Taco: <drools>

Re:That's great, Taco.

[Anonymous Coward]

The FAQs answer this. You've got half a point.

Re:That's great, Taco.

[kekoap]

Viewing the feed any more frequently, even by mistake or for just a day or two, bans your RSS reader permanently.

Huh. But you get instantaneous feedback that you are reading too quickly in the form of a link to a page explaining the situation. In my experience, banning is temporary, at least if you heed the warning page. I agree that this is inconvenient (Slashdot is the only site I know that does this kind of thing) but I can see the other side of things also. RSS is a privilege, and it's up to Slashdot to decide how to deploy the technology on its site. If you get the warning, back the fuck off! It's about that simple.

It misses out much of the information from the story.

I dunno, I just click the links I'm interested in, and that gets me straight to the full story. And, at no extra cost, that same page lets me read comments from people like you, and respond to them!!! Woo!

It requires your RSS reader to use the Slash RSS module.

Huh? I read the feed just fine, and I've never heard of "the Slash RSS module." I just use a Perl script that wraps LWP::UserAgent and XML::RSS. What am I missing?

Re:That's great, Taco.

[myov]

Many other sites simply return a HTTP header (I forget which one) which basically says "nothing has changed since the last time you were here", rather than sending the entire RSS down each time.

I got myself banned a little while ago when I discovered that each section of /. has RSS feeds. What's the point if you get banned reading them all?

Re:That's great, Taco.

[darkpurpleblob]

Many other sites simply return a HTTP header (I forget which one) which basically says "nothing has changed since the last time you were here", rather than sending the entire RSS down each time.

But you are forgetting newsreaders typically do a refresh every hour or so. In an hour the Slashdot feed would always almost certainly have a new story and need to fully redownloaded, by and large negating the use of If-Modified-Since and ETag headers.

Thats not to say they shouldn't be used if they don't already - it would at least help with those who refreshed it chronically...

Re:That's great, Taco.

[darkpurpleblob]

...and there is no single one feed that you can subscribe to that contains all of the sections stories.

Re:That's great, Taco.

[jpkunst]

Viewing the feed any more frequently, even by mistake or for just a day or two, bans your RSS reader permanently.

Yes, that is very annoying. This article inspired me to download the latest version of the excellent Mac OS X RSS reader SlashDock. I had to quit and restart the app to clear up some problem with its preferences window not appearing. Which meant that it reloaded the headlines. There we go again: banned from Slashdot RSS feed for 72 hours. Forget it, I'll just go back to reloading the web page. Which costs Slashdot a lot more bandwith than the RSS feed, I suppose. Oh well.

JP

Re:That's great, Taco.

[chickenwing]

What happens when you have an office full of Slashdot readers behind a NAT? I thought for a minute that I might be less distracted at work if I was not constantly checking the Slashdot page, but after seeing the limitation on use, I realized that RSS just wouldn't be practical.

I wonder what it means in the FAQ about "pounding our servers". I don't understand how serving RSS is more stressful than serving the main page. The actual content of that page is generated periodically and then the static version is sent out?

Slashdot Poll, obviously!

[Anonymous Coward]

"What should RSS be called?" should be the next /. poll!

From Yahoo!:
Programmers who've developed rival versions of RSS since its 1999 invention -- primarily by Winer and folks at Netscape -- can't agree on what RSS is supposed to stand for. Winer's preference is Really Simple Syndication (RDF Site Summary and Rich Site Summary are the other options).

Re:Slashdot Poll, obviously!

[Snork Asaurus]

"What should RSS be called?" should be the next /. poll!

I'm not sure what it should be called, but if it ever catches on, about 3 years later it will suck and be called "Microsoft News".

Re:Slashdot Poll, obviously!

[ubernostrum]

I'm not sure what it should be called, but if it ever catches on, about 3 years later it will suck and be called "Microsoft News".

Funny you should mention that, since MS was doing it a loooong time ago... look up "CDF" sometime (that's "Channel Description Format") for a history lesson.

Is this not just "push"?

[IamGarageGuy 2]

This seems like the "push" technology that was the next big thing a few years ago. Is it coming around again for real or is this just the hype that made it popular years ago coming around again?

Re:Is this not just "push"?

[Punchinello]

You think you are being insightful, but really you just didn't RTFA:

"At least it's nothing like the fiasco of 1997 known as "push technology" and incarnate in PointCast, which wrote its death warrant by clogging hard drives and crashing operating systems as it delivered updated information to subscribers.

RSS is more pull than push. Your aggregator retrieves the updated material from the feed-offering Web site at set time intervals."

Re:Is this not just "push"?

[technomancerX]

RSS is not a push technology. It's basically a standardized markup format to summarize news stories. Readers then download the RSS file from the provider using an aggregator program.

It's all pull.

Re:Is this not just "push"?

[topham]

Actually it is exactly like PointCast.

But shhhh, don't tell anyone.

PointCast was a horrible implementation of the idea, but functionally 'identical'. ('push' never was 'push', and PointCast happened to be the agregator. The basic feed and premise was RSS based.

Re:Is this not just "push"?

[Anonymous Coward]

You are mixing between the implementation and the overall result.
For a regular user it is a pure "push" experience. The difference is that rss channels are much more diverse and distributed than the old push channels.
The question to be asked is whether push technology had failed because it's a bad concept or due to poor implementation.

Re:Is this not just "push"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Pointcast wasn't based on RSS because RSS wasn't around then. Maybe some of the concepts were similar, but it wasn't RSS.

Re:speed feed?

[Anonymous Coward]

boring.

Great name!

[Anonymous Coward]

Speedfeed...though it does bring to mind when my brother was in basic training...they only get a few minutes for meals, and work up a heckuva appetite...He got a weekend off and I went to visit. We went to lunch, he ordered a big meal and, just out of habit, polished it off in five minutes flat. Just inhaled the sucker. Midway through, he said "hey just so you know, I'm choking right now. Only way to eat this fast is to swallow bites whole."

rss 2...

[Anonymous Coward]

i wish Trillian could get a RSS 2.x plugin..

Speed Feed

[i_am_syco]

The only people that will catch on to Speed Feed are ephedra addicts.

Bloglines - the perfect web service for RSS reader

[pgrote]

If you're looking for a stable, well performing reader that is host based, meaning you don't have to move your config files and pointers, check out Bloglines.

Developed by the same person who started Egroups, Bloglines offers the ability to manage your feeds through a simple interface available anywhere.

The power also includes:

1) Disposable email addresses.
2) Sharing of your feeds.
3) Exporting of feeds.
4) Routing email to your account.

A great, free service.

Why does everyone hate capitalism?

[AIX-Hood]

I know this is communism central, but what's wrong with someone making a buck? If everyone only uses the RSS feeds for articles, and all sites are stripped down to their meat, no one will make any money and we'll all be shut down. The only answer is that every site has to become subscription based only. Is that what you people really want? Having to shell out an additional 40-50 a month just so you don't have to see an ad every now and then?

Re:Why does everyone hate capitalism?

[Anonymous Coward]

We don't hate capitalism. We hate what happens when capitalism expands unchecked and becomes an all-controlling, unstoppable power, like the very totalitarian socialist governments that capitalists say they hate so much. That's what we hate.

Re:Why does everyone hate capitalism?

[sabat]

This is Libertarian Central, my friend. No communists here.

Once again, technological evolution will force good capitalists to improve their business models. Poor capitalists. Unfortunately, that is exactly the way it's supposed to work. Go back and read your Adam Smith, pal.

Re:Why does everyone hate capitalism?

[stefanlasiewski]

How is subscriber funded content less capitalistic then ad-funded content? If anything, subscriber funded content gives me more control over the ads that I see.

Having to shell out an additional 40-50 a month just so you don't have to see an ad every now and then?

But it's not about seeing an ad now and then, it's about seeing thousands of additional ads per month, on top of all the billboards, tv ads, radio ads, branded T-shirts, etc. I want less of that in my life, and I'm willing to pay some money to get less ads-- not $40-50 a month, but I do pay $40-50 a year to get good content from sites that I like.

Re:Why does everyone hate capitalism?

[znu]

There's no reason you can't display ads, particularly text ads, within the bodies of articles delivered via RSS. You could even have ads as independent RSS headlines, although that would probably piss people off.

Re:Why does everyone hate capitalism?

[gnu-generation-one]

The only answer is to stop providing information, in case somebody reads it? The answer is to encourage ways of delivering advertising?

If people want to stop providing information, let them. Then their opinions will become irrelevant, outvoiced by the people who do want to provide information for the sake of it, rather than advertising dollars.

Subscription sites are the wet-dreams of advertising execs, not something that works in the real world, and certainly not something to use as a threat against people who read news but not advertising.

Re:Why does everyone hate capitalism?

[ZB Mowrey]

Thousands of additional ads, huh? M-o-z-i-l-l-a. Adblock is your friend.

Re:Why does everyone hate capitalism?

[AIX-Hood]

Good to know that 6 mods got together to mod this so far down it'll never see the light of day, even though lots of people replied to this with constructive feedback. It just shows that what I said was true, but that the mods here don't want to hear it.

Re:Why does everyone hate capitalism?

[stefanlasiewski]

I do use Mozilla, and I block ads that I find offensive or obnoxious (popups, ads that take advantage of gullible computer users, etc).

But that goes right back to the parent post:

If everyone only uses ad blockers, and all sites are stripped down to their meat, no one will make any money and we'll all be shut down.

Speaking of RSS...

[RoadkillBunny]

...does anyone know of a docklet for GNOME2 that shows the current headlines from a site (slashdot.org)? I remember something like that in GNOME1..

Re:Speaking of RSS...

[botzi]

Please don't be shocked, but I actually found something with Google!!!!! here

Those search engins are a remarkable invention, don't you think???

I think he's got it right

[Anonymous Coward]

For once, Taco manages to post something grammatically correct -- AND with a good idea! SpeedFeed is exactly the kind of name that would catch on. It does need to be catchier. We all laughed at the name Firewire when it first got coined by some marketing wank -- I remember ./ discussion about how much more appropriate the IEEE moniker was. And now all we call it is Firewire; it's easier for us to say, too.

SpeedFeed it is. RSS is dead! Long live SpeedFeed!

Re:I think he's got it right

[Anonymous Coward]

You would think so... but he managed to misspell RSS.

(note that RSSS link in the footer)

How in the fuck do you misspell a three-letter acronym?

Re:I think he's got it right

[DrEasy]

Firewire, Firebird, Firefox... just pleeeaaase don't call it FireFeed. Stop playing with Fire!

Re:I think he's got it right

[notque]

Firewire, Firebird, Firefox... just pleeeaaase don't call it FireFeed. Stop playing with Fire!

Next is Firewirx. Ho Ho Ho

Re:I think he's got it right

[Anonymous Coward]

FUEGO!

Re:I think he's got it right

[STrinity]

What you need is Firesomething.

(This post brought to you by Yog-Sothoth Earthvulture.)

yes, certainly "Alas"...NOT

[botzi]

Alas, you'll not find the tools for handling RSS in your Microsoft Windows operating system. Not yet, anyway.

How bad is it to have become accostumed to the monopole of a single software??? What's wrong with having to surfe & choose the application you prefer???

MOD PARENT UP +1 FUNNY

[Anonymous Coward]

I lolled my head back due to it's raw hilarity

Mmmh?

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought that portals were the next big thing.

Man

[Anonymous Coward]

If RSS was more prevelent I'd use my phone to take more pix of my moblog and bluetooth them to my airport ipod while I'm garage band jamming with my fellow orkuteers at coachella.

Where?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's twice you've said that. Where can I find it? I'm using 7.23 and nothing shows up in the help info. Is it new to 7.5 (still beta)? A search of their site yields: No matches on search for "rss".

Re:Where?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, it's a new feature in the 7.5 previews.

The future of the web?

[costas]

I run an "intelligent" newsbot, memigo. Memigo is a kinda hard to explain; sort of like Google News with TiVo functionality. One of memigo's most popular features are customized XML feeds for pretty much everything: recommended articles, reading and recommending history etc. The site serves thousands and thousands of custom XML feeds a day.

XML syndication is great but there are several drawbacks:

The standards wars: RSS 0.9 vs RSS 1.0 vs RSS 2.0 vs Atom. As a provider if I want to reach as many people as possible I will have to provide 4 different formats! (RSS 2.0 should be readable by RSS 0.9 readers but you never know).

The bad client implementations: repeat after me: 304 Modified. If you consume XML/RSS, make sure your client supports 304 Modified responses, and provides Last Modified and ETags. Otherwise, you're wasting my bandwidth, and I'll have to ban your customers (which I don't want to do!).

RSS is less two-way than HTML: a lot (not all definitely) of the RSS clients make it hard to interact with the authoring site, much more so than plain HTML and a browser. Fortunately, this is changing.

IMHO, RSS is a good first attempt at a truly automated, interactive Web experience. But the killer apps will have to wait for better technology and infrastructure...

So when will Slash fix their RSS feed?

[Mr. Darl McBride]

Slashdot offers an RSS feed, but there's still no feed containing all the stories. Anything that's not front-paged isn't available through the RSS feed. That means about 1/4 of Slashdot's content is unavailable without visiting the site and either browsing sections or turning on all stories in user preferences.

Re:So when will Slash fix their RSS feed?

[/dev/trash]

That's what Taco means when says "wait for the subscriber feed"

Nice story...

[jdifool]

It's also worth noting that Slashdot's RSS feed will have more article contents for subscribers in a few weeks

Or how to make a little bit of advertising with an innocent story.

Very professional : kudos to /. editors.

Regards,
jdif

What's so great about RSS?

[cmacb]

I actually don't get what's so revolutionary about RSS. I continually see references to it as an example of "PUSH" technology. To me that means the server initiates the transfer of data to the client. I've never seen an example of RSS working this way. At best, I hit a web page, which has some RSS scripting which then goes and hits dozens of other pages with RSS feeds. This could all be done on the client, and in fact, I may not only be grabbing Slashdot headlines by visiting another server, but I may also be grabbing them at the same time by opening up Evolution, or any of dozens of other programs. I can't remember the last time I looked at Slashdot headlines using Evolution, but its right there on my summary page just the same.

It basically serves up headlines. It's pretty useless without conventional HTML/CSS behind it.

My concern is that once it REALLY takes off there are going to be millions of people running RSS harvesting programs 24 hours a day. That means servers having to respond to all these behind the scenes inquiries for data that is almost NEVER going to be looked at.

This sounds like something that could be done a lot more efficiently by the likes of Google. They scan everything anyway, no reason they can't summarize much of it too (and they are starting to do this).

And I still don't see how RSS will end Spam. Most legitimate advertisers have stopped using Spam already. The con artists who still Spam know that there are an endless supply of suckers. The only thing that will end e-mail Spam will be to either end e-mail, or create laws that will make e-mail useless.

Re:What's so great about RSS?

[costas]

The site in my sig provides tons of XML. Technically, I agree with you that RSS is way to simple:

The original standard was so lenient (on purpose) that the quality of feeds is inconsistent at best.

RSS also piggy-backs on HTTP for authentication, modifications (304s), etc. This is great in theory, but in practice it has meant that every RSS client author has thrown together their homebrewed RSS client from an HTTP library without doing authentication, modification-checking, gzip compression, charset encodings, etc, etc, etc. It literally would have been preferrable for an HTSP (HyperText Syndication Protocol) to come out, just to force developers to use well-thought-out and well-behaved syndication libraries.

RSS is not NNTP (unfortunately): there is no interactivity, unless you provide additional controls to the subscribers somehow (memigo uses a frame-over) which is not consistent from site to site. Hacks like TrackBack are only half-way measures...

Related to the above: RSS provides meta-data only from the publisher side, NOT the reader side. Well, the vast majority of people are readers, not writers, and their meta-data vanish into clickthrus... sites like memigo try to fix that (by using implict ratings, page-read trackers, etc) but those are still kludges around the underlying technology...

In short, RSS is a good 1.0 technology, gopher waiting for HTTP...

Re:What's so great about RSS?

[jnthnjng]

Many RSS readers are intelligent enough to simply request the http header first. If the feed hasn't been updated since it was last retrieved, then they don't bother to retrieve it. So it's not as extreme as you make it sound. Also, if you compare the front page of slashdot to the RSS feed, the main page is currently 28572 bytes (including images) while the RSS feed is 2599 bytes. So I could download the RSS feed 11 times before I use as much bandwidth as you do by viewing the front page of slashdot. And I only use bandwidth if the page has been updated since last time I checked it, whereas you download the full page every time you check slashdot.

Re:What's so great about RSS?

[Anonymous Coward]

I actually don't get what's so revolutionary about RSS.

It's nothing about the technology, and everything about the human side of things.

RSS lets me keep track of ten times as many news sites as I would be able to by visiting each of them individually.

From a website's perspective, it makes it much more likely that your visitors won't drop you due to lack of time.

It basically serves up headlines. It's pretty useless without conventional HTML/CSS behind it.

It can contain the whole article, not just the headline. The fact that it requires HTML/CSS is irrelevent; you wouldn't state that HTML is not useful because it requires HTTP, or that CSS is useless because it requires markup.

My concern is that once it REALLY takes off there are going to be millions of people running RSS harvesting programs 24 hours a day. That means servers having to respond to all these behind the scenes inquiries for data that is almost NEVER going to be looked at.

How is that different to HTML?

This sounds like something that could be done a lot more efficiently by the likes of Google.

Then you've missed the point.

Re:What's so great about RSS?

[GeorgeH]

You must be reading the wrong stories about RSS. It doesn't basically serve up headlines, it basically serves up a diff of the web since you last looked at it. That's probably the best way of describing just how powerful it really is.

Take my Bloglines feeds for example. There's no way I could keep track of 100+ sites continuously without RSS. It gives me full text of updates for most sites (Slashdot, of course, is broken) that I read when I want to know what's new.

And most RSS readers support HTML/CSS. Images too. Just so you know, so the next time you bash RSS you can do it with a little information behind you.

Also, the bandwidth concerns are minimal for RSS aggregators that support 304 Modified headers, ETags, and If-Modified-Since headers. And I predict that by the end of the year the community will make a common practice of banning those aggregators that don't support them.

As for the Spam angle, I think you mis-read the article. RSS won't end Spam, it will provide people who use email for legitimate broadcast reasons (email newsletters, etc) to get around Spam blockers. And people will prefer this method because they know they can unsubscribe at any time.

Seriously though, RSS is like TiVo for the web. You hear a lot of zealots talk about how cool it is, when it's obvious from their description that it's nothing special. Then, when you try it (like with Bloglines, the free aggregator I use) you realize just how powerful and revolutionary it is.

Re:What's so great about RSS?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yahoo now has an RSS capability built into both My.yahoo.com and the search system. It only reads the feed once for all users subscribing to the feed.

Re:What's so great about RSS?

[aldoman]

Thanks to NAT, push will never be used. It's too much trouble for most users to set up NAT and most of the time they are not allowed (ie: at work). This means the internet will continue to develop as a pull medium, but sadly push is a long way off...

Does Opera support Slashdot yet?

[Cardbox]

Opera (4.0 to 6.0 inclusive) randomly forgets that I'm logged in, so I become AC halfway through doing a post or comment. Also, it needs to be told to refresh the Slashdot home page every time I run it, despite all the settings (according to the Opera people) being OK.

When I queried this with the /. gurus they said, basically, "Opera is broken so we don't support it". Given /.'s claimed desire to support things other than IE, I'd have thought that *someone* might have wanted to talk to the Opera people and tell them how to correct their program? Or even tell *us* what the incompatibility is???

Re:Does Opera support Slashdot yet?

[Oopsz]

Been using opera from version 3.62, and I've never had login problems with slashdot...

Oh, for God's sake.

[James A. G. Joyce]

For one thing, goatse.cx has ceased to be. And for another, the whole point of an RSS feed is to keep you up to date on recent changes. Goatse.cx virtually never changed its content, so an RSS feed would be completely fucking pointless. Your idea sucks.

Portable Spam?

[Anonymous Coward]

now why didn't I think of that!

Great example of personal RSS use

[opec]

This is my homepage. It's hosted off a local apache server with php. It has all my bookmarks organized neatly right there too. Browser developers should look into this 100% personalized home page stuff. I love it.

Re:Great example of personal RSS use

[rockmanac]

You must have gotten overloaded 'cause I couldn't get to the site.. Anyway, I do a very similar thing where I have important news feeds and bookmarks on a page on my server

.
-A

Don't bloat it to death

[OmegaGeek]

No - for the love of Kibo, people, lets not worry about naming. Let's start building infrastructure that will make use of it. If it proves useful, people will use it. And yes, most people talk about web pages (or internet pages, or the interweb or whatever), but the important point is that an infrastructure was built to the point where it became useful to people outside the technology field. SNMP, FTP, and DNS may not be the most pithily named standards, but they allow developers to build the infrastructure we need. If end users want to call it biff, let them go ahead.

(My apologies to Alan Levine if his site gets /.ed)

And (donning asbestos underwear) let's stop multiplying standards for no apparent reason other than personality conflicts with the originator of a standard.

Re:Don't bloat it to death

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, I've read your first paragraph five times, and I still can't work out what point it is that you are trying to make. Please clarify.

Don't like the name ?

[androse]

Fine !

Call it Atom.

NewsMonster or AmphetaDesk

[giveuptheghost]

Here are my recommendations for RSS/news readers for Windows (and other platforms):

If you use the Mozilla browser, NewsMonster is a great RSS add-on. It is cross-platform, and the basic version is free and open source. (There is a Pro version with a bunch more features for a fee.) It installs as a second sidebar in the Mozilla browser, and you can read feeds like you read email in most email clients. It also installs with about twenty popular feeds to get you started. It has a few bugs, but it is my favorite one overall.

Another one is AmphetaDesk. It is also free, open source, and cross-platform. It displays all your feeds in a web page in your browser. It runs in the Windows taskbar, checking ever so often for updates. It's not as powerful as other RSS readers--it's not easy to tell which feeds and articles are new/updated, for instance--but it is rock-solid with no bugs that I've ever found.

I don't come here for the stories

[heironymouscoward]

But for the discussion. If I want stories I go to El Reg. And then I end up reading every single story anyhow.

Re:I don't come here for the stories

[GeorgeH]

Right, but RSS is a good way of knowing when there's a new discussion to read. Like this one, which I spotted in my RSS aggregator.

RSS Readers and Aggregators for Linux

[wehe]

Setting up the TuxMobil News RSS feed , which features daily news for mobile geeks using laptops, PDAs and mobile cell phones with Linux, I have also made a survey of RSS news readers, tickers and aggregators for Linux (available at the link above). The survey contains tools for Gnome , KDE, text console, HTML and your favorite X11 window manager.

RSS Could Cure Spam

[philipkd]

The only problem with penny e-mail postage stamps is when you need to send a newsletter to 100,000 subscribers.

RSS solves that by creating a new medium for opt-in mass e-mailings, allowing e-mail to diverge into pay-per-play e-mails.

Plus RSS and regular e-mail can appear in the same inbox, thus making the transition seamless.

Re:RSS Could Cure Spam

[julesh]

The only problem with penny e-mail postage stamps is when you need to send a newsletter to 100,000 subscribers.

RSS solves that...

No it doesn't. In this situation, you'd have 100,000 users checking your RSS feeds every hour, so you'd be burning up 2,400,000 connections to your web server every day, each one using something like 0.5K of your data transfer allowance, so 1.2Gb per day = about 35Gb per month, which on most ISP packages would probably cost you about $50-$100 per month in excess "bandwidth" charges. Doesn't work for me; the e-mail is still the most effective method of pushing content to readers because it does actually push to them, rather than relying on them periodically pulling...

It's happening already

[gregwbrooks]

In public relations circles, using RSS is a hot topic.

Me on the subject.

Tom Murphy has written extensively on this as well, although his site lacks a search engine so you have to rummage around for relevant articles.

Re:It's happening already

[pipingguy]

although his site lacks a search engine so you have to rummage around for relevant articles.

Just do relevant articles site:www.natterjackpr.com from Google.

RSS has bandwith problems.

[Otis_INF]

Don't get me wrong, I like feeds in RSS formats, use them a lot, however RSS has a problem: bandwith.

If a site exposes an RSS feed, and 50,000 people subscribe to that feed and refresh that feed every 10 minutes, you get 3mil requests for that feed per hour, you can do the math yourself how much bandwith that consumes if the feed is larger than a couple of bytes.

If you crank out an email with the headlines each day to these 50,000 subscribers, you save bandwith in most cases.

What should be done is that the RSS client first asks the rss feed server if the feed has changed past a given date/time. If not, no fetch is done. Correct me if this is already the case, but I fear it isn't (most rss feeds are dynamically produced, (perhaps with cached contents) so a simple HTTP poll won't do.)

Re:RSS has bandwith problems.

[GeorgeH]

This is already the case. Consider yourself corrected. Well-behaved clients support 304 Modified headers, ETags and other caching mechanisms. Also, as for the dynamically produced feeds (how do you know most are?) they can impliment 304 headers et all, if they don't they can't really complain, can they?

Re:RSS has bandwith problems.

[kekoap]

What should be done is that the RSS client first asks the rss feed server if the feed has changed past a given date/time. If not, no fetch is done. Correct me if this is already the case, but I fear it isn't (most rss feeds are dynamically produced, (perhaps with cached contents) so a simple HTTP poll won't do.)

There are facilities for doing this, e.g. conditional HTTP gets, although as far as I know, they might not be very wide implemented yet, especially on the client side. See, for example, some dude's blog entry on conditional HTTP gets for RSS.

The point is, solutions are out there. Hopefully, as RSS becomes more widely-deployed, people will implement this sort of thing to keep things working smoothly.

Re:RSS has bandwith problems.

[ubernostrum]

There are problems with aggregators that check every 10 minutes or so, but that's far less of an issue than it used to be; most of the "big-name" aggregators finally started doing sensible things like looking to see if the feed has been modified, and prominent sites like Slashdot started banning aggregators that poll too often (try getting Slashdot's feed more than once an hour if you want an example...).

Plus, quite a few aggregators coming out these days are based on Mark Pilgrim's Universal Feed Parser, which is one of the most well-behaved aggregator backends out there.

And finally, for aggregators which understand certain of the namespaced extensions developed for RSS 1.0, there are the <sy:updatePeriod> and <sy:updateFrequency> elements from the syndication module, which allow you to tell the aggregator how often it should poll your feed.

Re:RSS has bandwith problems.

[Ice_Balrog]

Or even simpler: ignore/reject more then say, 1 request from an ip address every 30 minutes.

Re:RSS has bandwith problems.

[Idarubicin]

f a site exposes an RSS feed, and 50,000 people subscribe to that feed and refresh that feed every 10 minutes, you get 3mil requests for that feed per hour, you can do the math yourself how much bandwith that consumes if the feed is larger than a couple of bytes.

When--as instructed--I do the math myself, that comes out to 300,000 feeds. Cheers. :D

Not that I disagree with the parent's basic point, though some of the bandwidth concerns are lightened by (use of and readers that recognize) 304 Modified headers, ETags, and If-Modified-Since headers.

Speed Feed

[spazoid12]

It's also worth noting that Slashdot's RSS feed will have more article contents for subscribers in a few weeks

Then call it Greed Feed.

THE BEST WEB EVER: Pretend you have a PDA

[Eric_Cartman_South_P]

I browse EVERYTHING, including Slashdot, via the PDA links, on my PC. I beg of you to do the same.

Even though I have a 3.2 GHz box with 2 gigs of RAM and a ATI 9800 TX with 256 mb RAM... yes, Battlefield is awesome at 6xAA, 1200x1000, at ~110 FPS :) back on topic... I will always browse the web using the PDA links if available.

IT'S NOTHING SHORT OF AWESOME. All my sites load instantly, no adverts or maybe just one, and everything is plain text with links underlined, and only a picture or two of whats really relevant. And when I do browse the web on my Treo 600, I see the exact same thing. Lean and mean and consistent.

Here are some links... enjoy!

Slashdot: no special link, just change your settings!

Wired: www.wired.com/news_drop/palmpilot

C|Net (for the M$ fanboyz): cnet.vitalstream.com

MSNBC: www.msnbc.com/avantgo/mmc.asp

BBC: news.bbc.co.uk/text_only.stm

New York Post: www.nypost.com/avantgo/index.htm

Google (yes, even leaner!!!): www.google.com/palm

TIPS

[Anonymous Coward]

Use multiple smapfilters in series. Or don't give your your email address except to a select few. Works for me. I get 0 spam/day in my inbox. The only spam I see is the stuff that gets posted to mailing lists or on Usenet.
Use Lynx (or Links) to browse the web. No popups. No graphics, except those you want to click on. Justs pure content (and it makes it easy to tell which sites have zero content...) You can even bind Lynx keys to spawn a graphical browser if you want to view a page in its full gaudy glory... Since I"m mainly a console user, I have the . and , keys bound to launch the framebuffer version of Links (http://links.twibright.com/) on current page or selected link. Oh yeah, and Lynx on a 1024x768 75 Hz refresh framebuffer console is nice and easy on the eyes. Unlike those crazy graphics...

Network Licensing

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, the glory days of the net...when the unwashed masses were locked out, and the net was used only for .edu and .mil sites. When only the people with the right political connections in the university could log in and access pages. The problem happened they let in the rabble.

When only well paid professors had access to the net, then you could be assured that all the writing on the net was either for ego massage, and or political gain...none of this horrible, horrible, HORRIBLE economic gain that the common press expects.

The same thing happened with reading and writing. When only a few people could read...why, it was a glorious technology. Then with that fraggin' printing press, and all of the lower class starting to read, it was horrible. Horrible I tell you. Look at the garbage and tripe that got written to please the unkept masses.

I can remember the glory days of the net. Well, actually, I didn't actually get on the net at the time. There was a troll at the university that guarded access to the net and would only let groups he thought politically fit to get connections. But I can remember reading about the net, and but bursting with a desire to gain access... but a Stalin wanna be was guarding the door and deemed the group I was with at the time unfit. BTW, was that you?

PS...don't worry, the revolution will come, and middle class will be the first group slaughtered.

Re:Network Licensing

[Anonymous Coward]

I seem to recall posting about the content of the net, not the users of the net... I've never yet come across someone who's told me "I surf the web just to see those huge adverts that, like, take over your screen. For ages, all I do is sit and watch the canned advert. It's great!". Perhaps you have ?

Where I was at college, there was free and open access to all students, even undergrads had 24-hour access to the 'net (it was called JANET over here in the UK, before this internet thing took off). Hell, the cleaners probably had access.

So, no, I was not that troll. Since I was in charge of the groups machines, I probably would have given you an account if you'd asked - I did it for lots of others. Of course they didn't accuse me of being a troll first, so maybe (just for you) and purely for bad manners, I would have directed you to the public machines...

Simon.

For Outlook users, try IntraVnews...

[cmeans]

If you don't mind reading your news inside Outlook, I'd suggest looking at IntraVnews. It's quite good, and provides a number of options.

you can get rss feeds for the sections

[johnjay]

"Anything that's not front-paged isn't available through the RSS feed."

I don't think this is correct. I just loaded the Science page .rss feed. Just click on the science section, and click "rss" link at the bottom of the Science page.

I don't know if viewing the "slashdot" rss feed and then the "slashdot - science" rss feed counts as 2 refreshes for the "banned from RSS" rule. At this point, I've only had an RSS reader for about 10 minutes. Still not banned from /.!

Re:you can get rss feeds for the sections

[kekoap]

At one point a few months ago, I think the site admins cranked up the strictness of the banning algorithm, and that certainly made it seem like the main page and section feeds were all being tracked together, with "one per hour" applying to the whole set of feeds. Since then, I changed my reader to read the main feed some number of minutes after the hour every even hour, and to read science and games the same number of minutes after the hour every odd hour, alternating science and games every other odd hour. What a pain. Not wanting to get banned again, I haven't checked to see if this has been changed to something more sensible, i.e. once per hour for any given feed, instead of once per hour for the entire set of feeds.

Re:you can get rss feeds for the sections

[tswann01]

Unless a Dem. candidate promises to continue and improve on current foreign policy, I'll vote for Bush. Defense first.

Until people can construct grammatically correct sigs, I'll vote for Democrats. Education first. "Meerkat. It's what's for dinner." -- Uncle Max

Or

[bogie]

You could just use Freshnews or Dailyrotation. Personally I find those much more useful and they don't require me installing anything else. Plus that whole "ad-free" thing for RSS is just temporary.

Re:Or

[GeorgeH]

Uhhh, don't those sites just use RSS? How are they an alternative to RSS, aside from limiting which feeds you read? If you like them because they're web based, there are plenty of web based RSS readers like Bloglines. As for the whole "ad-free" thing, you're right people will find a way to make money on RSS. But at the same time, there will always be ad-free sites out there, and I suspect a lot of the sites using RSS right now without ads will continue to do so.

Does it Push?

[RAMMS EIN]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe RSS is distributed through the clients polling the server periodically. IMO, this is the wrong way aroud. It wastes CPU time and bandwidth each time a poll is performed, but no news is available. Also news doesn't travel to clients when it's there, but only when they poll. This could lead them to set low poll intervals, which further increases wastage.

Instead, a push model should be used, where news is distributed when it arrives (kind of like it works with IHAVE feeds for NNTP). Latencies can be reduced to a minimum with no wasted bandwidth.

On a similar note, I sometimes wish that HTML pages could be made to work that way, too. Rather than have a webpage periodically check for new messages, the server would notify the client of new messages arriving. This could be done with multipart documents for Netscape, but other browsers (I think even Netscape > 4) don't support it.

Re:Does it Push?

[Findus Krispy]

Yes, great idea. When do we begin the move to IPv6?

And, although RSS is a technically a pull technology, it feels as though it's a push technology because the computer does the polling automatically -- so, as far as normal people are concerned, it is a push technology, and that's really the same thing ;-).

As for efficiency, if RSS readers respect the HTTP protocol than it should be at least as efficient, if not more, then some basic push mechanism since HTTP is a distributed protocol. The client knows how long to wait before retrying (Cache-Control: max-age), the feed is only downloaded if it has changed (304 -- Not Modified) and it is likely you need ask no futher than your ISPs/Companies/Universities transparent cache (Cache-Control: public).

Re:Does it Push?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, you could always do XMPP pub/sub, as suggested here.

Re:Does it Push?

[quonsar]

Instead, a push model should be used, where news is distributed when it arrives ...thus bringing that unruly web thing one giant step closer to television. yawn.

I've been doing the same type of thing

[Fo0eY]

http://fooey.net/newsfeeds.cfm is my little personal newsfeeds and bookmarks site
the next thing I want to add is to store all of the newsfeeds in a DB along with fark
then i'll have a nice big searchable databse of news, and will be able to make it customizable for the few of us that use it regularly

Scraping tools?

[kekoap]

I agree that RSS is going to be inundated with ads sometime in the next year or two. That's going to suck.

I have my own headline grabber going, and for many many sites I just scrape links rather than depend on some kind of feed. How do I know which links are to stories? In most cases, it's sufficent to just extract links and check hrefs against regexps. For example, here's a regexp that works for NYT:

\d{4}/\d{2}/\d{2}/.*/\w+.html(\?pagewanted=\S+)?$

I run that on index pages for different paper sections, e.g. http://nytimes.com/pages/world/text/index.html.

In some cases, you want something a little more sophisticated, like the ability to recognize certain tags to enable link grabbing only in certain sections of pages, or the ability to programatically skip a set of tags, like a table or a table row. In any event, the solution I ended up allows me to use a text file to describe the sites I want to scrape, with a section for each site that says how to grab links from that site.

Just Headlines? What's the use of that?

[httpamphibio.us]

Ok... so I decided to try out RSS and downloaded SharpReader (for Windows, at sharpreader.ner). Wired is already set up as a subscribed feed (so is Slashdot!)...

So I let it download the feeds, then click on one... and... it's just a one sentence summary. What's the use of this? If I still have to click the link to read the article how is this any better/faster than just going to wired.com and quickly looking over the recent headlines?

Now if it actually downloaded the text of the article that would be useful.

Is this just my RSS aggregator? Is this just wired.com?

I'm not impressed.

Re:THE BEST WEB EVER: Pretend you have a PDA

[kirkjobsluder]

I'm personally loving alterslash http://alterslash.org/

*ggl*

[toroko_nomura]

This page was generated by a flock of uber-robots for tomoko_nomura

Re:Just Headlines? What's the use of that?

[GeorgeH]

It could be your RSS aggregator and I know wired.com doesn't put the full text of their stories in the feeds. A lot of sites do, however. If you want an idea of the kind of sites that are using RSS check out my Bloglines subscriptions or this list of the top 100 feeds.

My SharpReader fetches it every 15 minutes...

[Otis_INF]

and no exclusion whatsoever, nor do I need a Slash module in my reader.

The feed is also updated more than once per hour, so I think your info is a little out of touch with reality.

Cool, Google News is picking up on "Speed Feed"

[jg21]

as the possible new name, thanks to a piece at LinuxWorld that's linking back to this thread.

Top 100 Feeds

[GeorgeH]

If you're interested in the types of content that are available in RSS check out scripting.com's Top 100 RSS Feeds. They generate their statistics from the users who upload their RSS feed list (called an OPML file) to the site.

Re:Top 100 Feeds

[Anonymous Coward]

Another very useful resource is Feedster's Top 100 compiled daily from users of our myFeedster aggregator (yes I work for Feedster).

Re:Top 100 Feeds

[Anonymous Coward]

for some reason /. is listed 3 times in that list

hmmm.... new http-option?

[NumbThumb]

why not introduce a new option into http, like modifications-since (similar to if-modified-since)? The server would return a "not modified" state if nothing was changed, and a diff (content-type=text/diff-script?) if there have been changes. For xhtml, this could even be done on a tag-by-tag basis, rather than line-by-line. Servers not supporting this option would just return the full page, or one could use if-modified-since as a fallback. Using the "Refresh" meta-tag, automatic updating every 60 secounds or such would be easy.

yea, i think i would like that.

Re:hmmm.... new http-option?

[Kent Recal]

The server would return a "not modified" state if nothing was changed, and a diff (content-type=text/diff-script?)

This works for static content but it would be a difficult task to implement for anything served up dynamically.

Re:hmmm.... new http-option?

[Anonymous Coward]

why not introduce a new option into http, like modifications-since (similar to if-modified-since)? The server would return a "not modified" state if nothing was changed, and a diff (content-type=text/diff-script?) if there have been changes.

Because it would require servers to:

• Keep track of a number of previous versions, and
• Compute a diff for each request

Neither of these are feasible for a website with moderate to high traffic.

Using the "Refresh" meta-tag, automatic updating every 60 secounds or such would be easy.

Please don't use the refresh "meta tag". It's an abomination.

Re:hmmm.... new http-option?

[NumbThumb]

point taken. But i belive further thinking in that area could turn up a workable solution... i'll ponder that a little more... maybe working on a DOM and keeping track of changes as a history of operations would make this feasable. Then, the browser would receive a list of DOM-Operations (as JavaScript?) and would apply them dHTML-style. But that would require a major redesign on the server side. And it does not easily allow for personalized content. oh, well.

(man, i'm replying to an AC... get an account, seems like you've got something to say!)

Re:THE BEST WEB EVER: Pretend you have a PDA

[timothv]

Actually, slashdot has a PDA link: http://slashdot.org/palm/

Think bigger and check out the spec.

[basking2]

RSS is a simple simple thing, much like XML is a simple simple thing.

If you check out the spec for it, you'll notice that there is room for lots of handy info. This in it self may not convice you, as you said, how does this beat going to the site and looking for yourself?

There are two primary benefits: 1. Your site can be syndicated or you can sydicate other sites easily! I can put Slashdot headlines in a box on my site for my users to click on! Neat stuff!! Making machines able to homogeneously deal with this data is a big plus.

That brings me to RSS agregators. Unlike a PHP script which will simply snag and update a display on your home page (as suggested above) you can have a window on your desktop with a list of sites in it. Click on the site and you get the headlines without the overhead of graphics, silly scripts, and graphics. It is a matter of taste, but I absolutly love this technology! I have a bunch of blogs and news sites that I try to stay on top of and it's very annoying to open up 20 tabs in FireFox when I can use the FireFox RSS plug in to brows them in a side bar as a list. I ussually have 20 tabs open anyway and this is a great way for me to get my news.

Also, as the article mentions, how can you spam me via this unless the company directly injects the advertisement as one of their headlines? Email is push method while this is a pull method. Pull methods mean that the client can stop pulling, so if spam shows up in my slashdot.rdf, I 'll stop using it.

Hope this is helpful!

eventwatcher

[srussell]

My big recent find (WRT RSS) was eventwatcher.

The problem I've had with most of the RSS browsers is that they don't distinguish between what you've read, and what you haven't. They either create a web page (which is sort of tedious to browse), or they ticker-tape the N most recent events. If you're off-line for a while, and N+1 events come through, you miss that first one, and in any case, you have to constantly scan the ticker for new events.

eventwatcher queues messages, and alerts you when any of your feeds has a new event. When you read events, you can trash them, or save them. If you save them, they go into a different queue which you can browse later; if you trash them, they're marked as "read", and don't show up in your queue.

eventwatcher is a KDE app, and it sits in the system tray, alerting you via a tooltip when a new event comes in (and telling you how many events you have in the queue). For an early release of the app, it is amazingly useful; I only have a couple of feature requests, and I highly recommend it.

I'm not affiliated with the project and have had no contact with the author yet.

What about back link polluters?

[Second_Derivative]

Is this suggesting that RSS won't be bogged down in commercialised distraction? I dunno if it's just me or not but every time I think of a spammer I imagine a red faced overweight gent screaming "Who the fuck are you to tell me what I can't fill your screen with!?" whilst spittle is flying out of his mouth.

These people believe that it is their god given right to fill the Internet with their... content, and they get incredibly angry and retaliative when someone dares to challenge this.

They will find a way.

Speed Feed LOL!

[ThisIsFred]

If you think Slashdot is a "speed feed", try setting your RSS utility to update from /. every five minutes and see what happens.

RSS + Perl + Karamba = news on your desktop.

[NumbThumb]

When installing Karamba (KDE tool for putting dynamic content on the desktop), i noticed a perl script on the karamba homepage that would read a rss feed and display it on the desktop. I hacked it a little, to do nicer formating, read multiple feeds and handle different versions of rss, and now i have the headlines from /., kuro5hin, wired, the register and a few more on my desktop. Nice!

The i missed a way to klick on those headlines and open a browser -- karamba does not support stuff like that. So i hacked the script some more to write html to a file that i have open in my browser, updating automatically. In fact, i found this /. story this way....

Re:RSS + Perl + Karamba = news on your desktop.

[Findus Krispy]

I have this exact same functionality with KDE News Ticker which I have dedicated to it's own bar at the top which I can hide when I don't want to be distracted. It's all colour coded to match the rest of the desktop and looks awesome.

Re:RSS + Perl + Karamba = news on your desktop.

[ravydavygravy]

The i missed a way to klick on those headlines and open a browser -- karamba does not support stuff like that.

<shameless-plug>
Then you should be using gdesklets, and the rss-grab aggregator - get it here
</shameless-plug>

~Dave

Re:RSS + Perl + Karamba = news on your desktop.

[mcubed]

I hacked it a little, to do nicer formating, read multiple feeds and handle different versions of rss, and now i have the headlines from /., kuro5hin, wired, the register and a few more on my desktop. Nice!

Less technically adept Windows users like myself can get the same effect with the help of programs like Coolmon or Samurize. The nice thing about both is that the appearance and layout are infinitely customizable.

But I'm still waiting for the software program that will let me write my own headlines and make them come to pass, kinda like Burgess Meredith's typeset machine in the "Printer's Devil" episode of "Twilight Zone." Of course, he was the devil, and I would only use it for good ... heh heh.

Michael

RSS the new thing? Uhhh...

[softwarezman]

Interesting how they think RSS feeds are new. I'm in the military and we are actually implementing that for quite a few unclass and class websites! But I always thought we were 10 years behind everybody else... something MUST BE WRONG! ACK!

RSS? You mean XML?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't get why people call it RSS. It's an XML feed. Call it XML News Feed. XNF.

News Aggregators for Windows users - unnecessary,

[bob_calder]

totally unnecessary. They only need MSNBC and believe every word of it.

Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, et cetera, ad infinitum, ad nauseum.

You gotta love it.

Re:Commercialisation is next :-( -

[Anonymous Coward]

Industry Brains has figured out how to deliver sponsorship ads as headlines. This seems very much like the beginning of RSS spam.

http://www.clickz.com/news/article.php/3318161

In Yahoo News too, BUT /. BANNED THEM ALL.

[Ars-Fartsica]

Yahoo News also carries RSS feeds, but /. has banned all of the users from updating the feed.

ALL Yahoo RSS users BANNED from /. updates

[Ars-Fartsica]

Taco, the whole banning thing is blunt and ridiculous. Buy more servers or built some traffic shaping code that works.

When they do...

[temojen]

Remove that feed from your list. End of problem.

nomenclature

[TheUser0x58]

I still think the problem with RSS is the name. It sounds stupid. Let's all call it 'Speed Feed'. Cheesy rhyming will help the non techno elite remember it, and this is a technology that needs to be more widely deployed.

Oh yeah, because MP3 and XML are such unmemorable technical names for useful technologies, they could never become overused technology buzzwords.

that is so funny

[Anonymous Coward]

because it is like smeagul

Re:Commercialisation is next :-( -

[darkpurpleblob]

This seems very much like the beginning of RSS spam.

How can you have RSS spam? RSS is opt-in (i.e. you choose what you want to subscribe to), so the advertising in not unsolicited. If you want to opt out, you simply unsubscribe from the feed.

Your .Sig

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought it read

Girls Suck The curiously strong website.

mmm... milky milky...

er..

[jimmyCarter]

I still think the problem with RSS is the name. It sounds stupid. Let's all call it 'Speed Feed'. Cheesy rhyming will help the non techno elite remember it, and this is a technology that needs to be more widely deployed.

Taco, you're right.. millions have been struggling with the acronym of HTML for years now b/c it's just not "catchy" enough..

Re:THE BEST WEB EVER: Pretend you have a PDA

[ripflash]

I do the same thing. Some other low bandwidth sites I use:

MapQuest: mapquest.com/pda/
ITN (ITV News): avantgo.itn.co.uk/
PC World: pcworld.com/avantgo/
The Onion: mobile.theonion.com/
Wired: wired.com/news/avantgo/
Washington Post (not easy to find):
http://media.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn ?node=ad min/delivery/avantgo&language=palm

Re:THE BEST WEB EVER: Pretend you have a PDA

[pacman on prozac]

Using lynx, links or dillo will give you a similar browsing experience on your main PC.

Using mozilla with images blocked from images.slashdot.org will probably have the same effect aswell.

Ubernode: Another free, web-based news reader.

[astropuppy]

Try out this one: Ubernode.com. It's a free, web based news reader that adds new some cool features:

Automatically creating feeds out of web sites that currently don't export RSS feeds by tracking for new links on the page
Display sorting by time or feed
Display multiple feeds at once in a multi-column display
Filters and e-mail alerts

50 sites on average??

[baxissimo]

If you RTFM it explains what RSS is pretty well. I wasn't too up on it either.

The thing that made me curious in the article is this quote:

"For an average Internet user who regularly
visits about 50 Web sites, rather than have to go
visit those 50 sites wouldn't it be cool if those
sites could somehow visit you? "

Does the average internet user really visit 50 sites regularly? If so I'm way below average.
I regularly visit maybe 2 or 3 sites, so I really don't see any reason to invest time in getting RSS set up. I find it hard to believe that an average user really visits so many sites. It seems to me RSS is really more of a niche thing that's really great for people who like to overload themselves with information, rather than a super-hot technology that's about to explode into widespread popularity.

Re:50 sites on average??

[Anonymous Coward]

Right. After RTFM it seems RSS is something like the http thing "Has the content of the page changed?" but with very small "pages" which only have keywords. It's orange and doesn't look like a frige.

The point is that there are many people who have never set up RSS and for that they don't know what is it. There are some fanatic fans though. What will happen if I set up RSS? Can I do it with a perl script?

Is there an RFC for it somewhere???
Am I getting too old???

Re:50 sites on average??

[mcubed]

I regularly visit maybe 2 or 3 sites, so I really don't see any reason to invest time in getting RSS set up. I find it hard to believe that an average user really visits so many sites. It seems to me RSS is really more of a niche thing that's really great for people who like to overload themselves with information, rather than a super-hot technology that's about to explode into widespread popularity.

You're probably right that RSS won't "explode" in popularity. A great many people (like you, for example!) don't really think it's for them, don't really think they'll have enough of a use for it to bother trying it out for themselves. But this is one of those things that will spread more slowly, by word-of-mouth, especially across interlapping niche interest circles. A good friend of mine works in the classical music field; eventually, I had sent her enough posts and items from various blogs that deal with classical music that she asked me how I had time to find all these things. I told her about RSS and news aggregators, and she was hooked. She is also a lesbian, and has found numerous g&l blogs she likes to follow, spreading the word about RSS not only to some of her music collegues, but also to some of her lesbian friends. In that way, eventually, a lot of people who aren't necessarily infojunkies (and I fully admit to being one) get in on the game.

The thing about RSS is that even if you only subscribe to a half-dozen feeds, it still saves you time. It isn't only for people who visit 50 sites regularly. (ATM, I'm subbed to 20; I regularly add and delete, but I can't imagine my list growing much larger than that.) And the fact that you subscribe to a half-dozen sites doesn't mean you have to visit those sites everyday -- it just makes it easy to keep tabs on what's happening at sites you have an interest in.

No offense, but if you can't find six feeds out of the 10s of thousands out there that pique your interest enough that you would like an easy way to keep up with them, then you must not have many interests. You already read /. -- only five more to go. :-)

Michael

Microsoft Active RSS...

[IGnatius T Foobar]

Yahoo and Google recently embraced Web feeds, and Microsoft is expected to incorporate tools for managing them in its next-generation operating system, code-named Longhorn.

Funny how Microsoft tried this in 1998 (remember the original Active Desktop?) and everyone hated it. Now that RSS is here, Microsoft has to get on the bandwagon, because the open world did it right.

So much for Microsoft's assertions that our side does not innovate.

On the Mac side of things . . .

[Amiasian]

There's the Omniweb 5 Beta preview that has built in RSS streams.
Or if you prefer not to switch browsers, I strongly recommend Slashdock (do a search on Versiontracker for it) to stream in a tonne of RSS feeds.

nice, but...

[NumbThumb]

...i use karamba also to show me a top, /var/log/messages, my inbox and a fortune... using the "program" sensor, you can get it to show almost anything on the desktop. Also, hacking that rss script gave me a reason to learn a little perl;)

BTW: I would really like a "ticker"-style text display in karamba. I tried to code it myself, but having never worked with qt and automake before, i'm having a dificult time to get that to compile...

Re:nice, but...

[Findus Krispy]

I did a tiny bit of KDE programming, and got really good help on the kde-devel mailing list, and the IRC channels. Maybe you should there for help.

You ever met Mark Pilgrim?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah Atom is soooo much better off.

For all his faults, at least Winer is rational most of the time.

Re:You ever met Mark Pilgrim?

[Anonymous Coward]

For all his faults, at least Winer is rational most of the time.

Given the choice between* Mark Pilgrim and Dave Winer, I'd choose Mark any day.

Dave has done various hideous things, such as the RSS 2.0 versioning debacle, calling people he disagrees with alcoholics and teenagers, fudding competing versions of RSS with vague accusations that he only clarifies months later, and generally behaving like a complete arsehole every time an RSS conversation comes up. It's impossible to have a decent conversation about RSS, because he always pops his head up, makes some vague accusation, and when people ask him to clarify, he says things like "I don't want to get into that right now", or just vanishes from the conversation, leaving a trail of flames in his wake.

Mark sometimes acts like an arsehole when Dave enters the conversation, but is otherwise fairly decent.

* Of course, Mark Pilgrim doesn't tie himself to Atom every chance he gets, so it's really a choice between Atom and RSS/Winer, which is much more palatable.

Re:You ever met Mark Pilgrim?

[Anonymous Coward]

Given only the choice between Mark Pilgrim and Dave Winer, I'd choose a massive upheaval resulting in an agrarian society. :-)

Actually, from my ousiders perspective Mark is inextrably linked to Atom. He appears to be the main driver of the spec. Atom nice in many ways, but I think it will go the way of BetaMax. RSS has too much momentum and it is now out of the hands of the geeks.

Re:You ever met Mark Pilgrim?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, from my ousiders perspective Mark is inextrably linked to Atom.

I agree with that, what I am saying is that Atom isn't inextricably linked with Mark. The fact that it's going the IETF route only underlines this. Yes, he'll probably be on the board, but so will a lot of other people.

If anybody is the "name" behind Atom, I would have said that it was Sam Ruby, not Mark Pilgrim. He hosted the initial wiki, he wrote the proposal and took it to the IETF, and he works on it full-time (I think). Sam has show himself to be a decent arbiter when Mark and Dave start flaming each other as well.

Atom nice in many ways, but I think it will go the way of BetaMax. RSS has too much momentum and it is now out of the hands of the geeks.

Subscribe to Mark's b-links feed sometime. He posts links whenever another feed reader supports Atom. A lot of readers support Atom, and it's only reached 0.3 so far.

There is incredible momentum behind Atom, I agree it's not as much as when it first started (that was to be expected), but I think by the time 1.0 rolls around, the only people who won't be implementing Atom are the people who explicitly wait for 1.0, and Dave Winer.

F.E.E.D.

[BlackShirt]

*looking for good name? What about feed. Geeky - "May the feed be with you". Sexy - "feed me" or "eat me". Acronymic - "F.E.E.D." And it is a 4 letter word.
*I don't use it as there is no good reader. I don't like some, too big a monster (newsmonster). Could not log in. Link they send via email somehow does'nt work. Tried four times (Bloglines)
*Too many blends. Rss vs Atom
*Cuts stories. Shrinks. I just want to see the whole story in front of me.
*htps is fine idea

And what about comments (like here in slash)

First. Could the comments be syndicayted? Blog comments, forum comments, usenet groups, trackback, slash comments. D
amn, they are all incompatible. What you get is my ideas scattered all over net.
Second. Add a little filter. Mod up your friends, opinion leaders, journalists (some are bad, some are good.) Publish mod list and you get spam stopping filter. What you get at the moment is headlines. But additionally you want to get opions about news. At the moment you dont know who has written this or that webpage. Yes, by eye scanning.

wbr,

i.e.

[BlackShirt]

HTSP (HyperText Syndication Protocol) :)

This is so amusing....

[DerekLyons]

Yahoo! carries an Associated Press editorial about RSS-based news feeds, and how they are pushing the spam-ridden e-mail and advertising-ridden web-pages aside and consolidate information from multiple sites.

The problem is... RSS doesn't really do that. You *still* have to visit the original web page in order to acess the actual content/information. Headlines and summaries are neither content, nor information.

Livejournal does this

[samael]

Not only are all users automatically RSS producers:
http://www.livejournal.com/users/andrewducker/data /rss/
but you can take any RSS feed and produce a 'user' from it.

I get all my news on:
http://andrewducker.livejournal.com/friends/news/
which aggregates various news sources into one place.

Re:Just Headlines? What's the use of that?

[Anonymous Coward]

What's happening here is full content feeds versus summary / excerpt feeds. There's no standard in the RSS world for what you get but generally you get full content from blogs and non commercial sources while you get summary content from commercial sources that want to actually drive you to their site.

Sign up for a few blogs with full content and you'll be much more impressed.

Scott Johnson of www.Feedster.com

Re:Cool, Google News is picking up on "Speed Feed"

[Anonymous Coward]

someone over at LinuxWorld.com now says they've snagged the domain name SpeedFeed.org - adding "To see how to use it, see the the domain I grabbed for the Atom Wiki at AtomWiki.Org"

Re:Just Headlines? What's the use of that?

[edsarkiss]

The power of RSS is that headlines are aggregated (hence the name) into one interface. If the full articles were available through the feeds, commercial sites would have no incentive to publish RSS, since their existence depends on eyeballs looking at their site (and ads). Aggregating many different sites into a single interface allows you to more quickly decide what your path of consumption will be.

Re:Bloglines - the perfect web service for RSS rea

[Anonymous Coward]

A similar web based service is myFeedster.

Anti-Slash Jihad

[Anonymous Coward]

The parent post has been featured on the front page of the Anti-Slash Jihad web site.

Not that amusing

[SnakeStu]

You *still* have to visit the original web page in order to acess the actual content/information. Headlines and summaries are neither content, nor information.

Headlines and summaries are information. Yes, you have to go to the site if you want detailed information but this is not always necessary. It's like skimming through a newspaper by reading headlines and first paragraphs (the latter of which should give you the core details, if the journalist is writing appropriately). You don't have to read the entire newspaper front to back; you skim through and can get the gist of what's going on, without delving into details. And if something does strike your eye, you take the time to [read the article|view the Web site].

A perfect example is how I "read" eWeek via the Zinio digital reader. I look through the table of contents, which includes very short snippets (less than what many RSS feeds offer) that describe the article. Sometimes that's all I do -- if nothing catches my interest, or I don't have time, then at least I have a bare minimum knowledge of things going on in the industry. If I have more time, or if something very interesting is listed, then I click over and read the article.

An RSS feed works the same way. It provides minimal information, from which you can make the decision about whether or not you want to obtain detailed information.

Or, using the example of the RSS feeds provided by the Open Music Registry, the feed lets you know when new music is listed, but there's no need to listen to every new title -- just those that catch your interest. Even if you don't listen to them, you still are aware -- i.e., you've gained the information -- that new music is available. (There's also a site news RSS feed, and each news item is often small enough to fit into the RSS summary, in which case you get all of the content via that feed.)

Sometimes useful

[no1here]

I know feedster has been doing a good job of compiling feeds from all over the web and allowing people to search quickly and easily for information. Of course, with any RSS search engine you get a lot of people's opinions, but sometimes there is actually valuable information hidden in there.

PointCast

[nbvb]

Does anyone remember PointCast?

Here we go, "push" technology all over again.

Except this time, it isn't the stock feeds, but purported "geek news" sites.

Yeah, that's gonna fly. :-)

Gdesklets

[bonch]

http://gdesklets.gnomedesktop.org/

Taint RSS at your own peril

[mabu]

Sure, you can infect RSS feeds with advertisements. Feel free. RSS is a whitelisted service where sites choose which sources they want to feature. You put ads in your feed, you get blacklisted. Feel free. It will help us separate the sleazebags from the honorable sources of information.

RSS grabber for Mac, Faust's Friend

[Anonymous Coward]

Faust's Friend

...and /.'s feed is bunk!

[rneches]

What the hell is the point of an RSS feed with naught but a few sentences of the story? And no images? The above story looks like this on Slashdot's RSS feed:

RSS Web-Feeds, The Next Big Thing?
Sun, 29 Feb 17:36:00

mi writes "Yahoo! carries an Associated Press
editorial about RSS-based news feeds, and how
they are pushing the spam-ridden e-mail and
advertising-ridden ...

Creator: CmdrTaco

Why bother with that? Boooooo Slashdot! Include the whole article! If the web sucks because of popups (I haven't seen one in years, thanks to Mozilla), ads (haven't seen one of those in years, thanks to AdZapper and squid), and spyware (haven't seen any of that, thanks to running an OS that actually has a security model) then RSS sucks because of crummy crippled feeds like the one from Slashdot.

here are some feeds to get you started

[Anonymous Coward]

http://agonist.org/index.rdf
http://alterslash.or g/rss.xml
http://hackerintel.com/backend/hackerin tel.xml
http://internetnews.com/icom_includes/fee ds/inews/ xml_front-10.xml
http://moreover.com/cgi-local/pa ge?index_topstorie s+xml
http://mozillazine.org/contents.rdf
http:/ /nanodot.org/nanodot.rdf
http://rss.spywareinfo.c om/15.rdf
http://slashdot.org/slashdot.xml

So when do you fix your WAP feed?

[rwa2]

slashdot.wml hasn't been updating since 10/03 ... does no one really use it?

T-Mobile apparently started allowing all their subscribers unlimited WAP usage a few months ago, which is the only reason I've played with WAP enough to notice this. How about fixing up your RSS -> WML export? :>

forget speed feed...Wincast.

[Anonymous Coward]

"They (whoever they are) tried this a while back, and they called it "push" technology. For the push I received you had to use a specific client. The problem was they decided to push ads to you too, and I could find more timely/relevant news from other non-push sources."

Wincast was a form of "push" and most everyone can recieve TV signals.

NewsMonster or AmphetaDesk-Bugs.

[Anonymous Coward]

"If you use the Mozilla browser, NewsMonster is a great RSS add-on. It is cross-platform, and the basic version is free and open source. (There is a Pro version with a bunch more features for a fee.) It installs as a second sidebar in the Mozilla browser, and you can read feeds like you read email in most email clients. It also installs with about twenty popular feeds to get you started. It has a few bugs, but it is my favorite one overall."

Understatement. I had it working ONCE, then here after it had Java problems. I even tried to reinstall, didn't fix.

"Another one is AmphetaDesk. It is also free, open source, and cross-platform. It displays all your feeds in a web page in your browser. It runs in the Windows taskbar, checking ever so often for updates. It's not as powerful as other RSS readers--it's not easy to tell which feeds and articles are new/updated, for instance--but it is rock-solid with no bugs that I've ever found."

I tried putting this onto our internal Apache server for use with all our clients. First you have to manually run another program to get it to update. Second there's no real way to customize it so each client has it's own "webpage".

I've look up and down for a good server side RSS "proxy" reader. I've even thought of using cocoon to pull everything together for all the devices that will access it i.e. desktop to PDA. But that's a lot of work.

RDF retrieval

[venkats]

Do any of the site-readers use a WebDAV( Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning) based approach to retrieve this document (the document stored in RDF)?
oh, btw, is a WebDAV based approach possible at all?

rss feeds and IRC

[kenners]

I've been spending a few hours rigging up a deadly.org tcl rss feed script to work with my own important rss feed, and I've noticed that some sites nest and , while still others have all 3 in one line, making it difficult to parse.

I wonder if that's due to the rss-feeding server, or the owner of such server? A standard would be nice, so I don't have to spend my sleeping hours mutating my code to check for both styles.

Needless to say, I like having the newest fansub anime releases announced in a place I find myself in constantly anyway.

readership

[headonfire]

great, just what i need... a way to have a non-dedicated readership. i -want- people to visit my site. more than that, i want people to want to visit my site, in its entirety.

i've used amphetadesk before, myself, and it's not bad, if a bit clunky. and i like the idea of being able to have other site headlines on mine... it's sort of a catch-22. cool tech, can help spread the word of my site and bring new content without much effort - at the expense of someone else being able to do the same with -my- content.

for it to work, maybe it'll require rethinking the way we do things on the web. maybe it'll go the way of entirely custom pages on the user side, and they pull -everything- via RSS or something similar in the future. of course.

allow me to ring your buzzword bell: subscription-based modality for just such a thing. or, via micropayment - if you click a headline and pull the full story, a penny or two is sent to the originating site. though i'm not sure i like either of those options, particularly - it'd be far to easy to fritter away a good chunk of money per month just browsing. then again, by only paying for the stories i want to read entirely, it may not amount to too terribly much.

Re:THE BEST WEB EVER: Pretend you have a PDA

[Mr_Silver]

Actually, slashdot has a PDA link: http://slashdot.org/palm/

Which, last time I looked, sucks for a multitude of reasons.

Try AvantSlash as see how it should be done properly.

feed?

[Quixadhal]

Can someone explain when the use of the word "feed" changed from being a pushed-on-arrival kind of thing to a pull-on-view kind of thing?

Back in the days of yore, when dragons ate virgins for dinner, and there were still virgins about, a thing called usenet used to be referred to. Typically, knights of the Realm would mention a newsfeed, and it was known that if you were a "real" usenet site, your parent would *push* new data to your news server as it became available.

Now, those poor folk who had tiny disk drives, or who were on a slow connection had the option to *pull* data from their server instead of accepting a feed... but we laughed at them and called them names.

Nowadays, it seems that lots of people talk about RSS feeds, or XML feeds, when they're really talking about pulling data from a source, not being fed data.

So, when did a feed become a slurp?

Don't make an effort to popularize it

[Anonymous Coward]

Why the heck do you want to give it an additional name so that the non techno elite can remember it and catch on to it?

• So that spammers start targetting it and reading a blog becomes impossible because of the interspersed junk ads?
• so that crackers start figuring out social engineering techniques for phishing through rss links?
• so that script kiddies start exploiting bugs in popular rss clients?
  

Are you being evil on purpose?

whoa, major screwup indeed :D

[Otis_INF]

hehe, maaaaaaaan I did 50,000 * 10 * 6...

(what's to blame, beer, not enough sleep, headache.. ;))..

I stand corrected.

The name isn't the problem, the poor usability is!

[mbauser2]

The name RSS isn't a problem: The terms HTTP, HTML, and World Wide Web don't make any sense to newbies, either. The Web didn't suceed because it had a better name than its predecessors (FTP, gopher, etc.), it suceeded because it was easier to user than other ways of using the Internet.

Before the WWW (protocols and software) pulled it all together, using the Internet required separate tools for separate protocols, and/or separate viewers for different file formats. (Not a problem for the average Slashdotter, but a barrier for newbies.) With a web browser, on the other hand, all the newbies needed to know what that one program showed them everything, and if they clicked on the blue text, something useful happened. "Using the Internet" was simplified to 2 programs: a web browser and an e-mail program, which usually came bundled together. It couldn't get much simpler than that. (10 years later, and most users are getting by with just browser, e-mail, and instant messaging. As far as most users are concerned, the Internet is three programs.)

And even when proprietary formats showed up that weren't integrated into browsers (like PDF and Flash) showed up, the software companies involved had the sense to use plugin-based solutions, which used the new formats' MIME types to launch helper applications inside the browser. Furthermore, webmasters using those formats had the sense to include warnings like "Viewing this file requires Acrobat Reader. Click here to download". The warnings are annoying after a while, but they work: People download the plugin once, and get back to their point-and-click lifestyle. All in all, it's fairly easy to use.

Compared to that, the inventors and implementors of RSS haven't done anything right.

Most links to RSS files are hidden behind obscure, uniformative links, like that stupid "XML" icon. That tells users nothing about what the link is for.

Should users actually click the link, they'll either get an XML file they don't understand, or an error message because their browser doesn't understand the MIME type. (Here's one of the unwritten rules of web design: If clicking on a hyperlink can't produce a useful result, it shouldn't be a user-visible hyperlink.)

If users actually figure out what the file is for, they still have to find, install, and use a program that doesn't integrate well with their browser experience. Most aggregators require users to cut-and-paste links from the browser to the feed reader. That's just awkward.

If technical people want RSS to catch on with non-technical users, they need to improve RSS's usability.

What webmasters need to do: Lose the stupid "XML" icons, and start telling people what that RSS link actually does. While you're at it, recommend some software so that users are fumbling in the dark. If you can, give your RSS file a MIME type besides application/xml, so that software authors can start making MIME-aware aggregators.

What software authors need to do: Integrate the subscription/aggregation software into the browser better. Making users launch a fourth program is not a usable as making their browser, e-mail programs, or instant messengers notify them of news. Also, write programs that are MIME-aware, so that when users click on an application/rss+xml file, the aggregator does something productive (popping up a box asking if the user wants to subscribe to a site.) Making software that works in a pipe (and/or reads RSS files declared on a command line) wouldn't hurt, either, because it would allow the distribution of RSS by non-HTTP methods.

A new name isn't going to help RSS (it's been tried before). Better usabilty will.

(Yes, I know this lecture was long, but trust me, it was even longer the first time I ranted about syndication.)

Anybody think of using... USENET?

[mbauser2]

No, really. I'm serious:

Instead, a push model should be used, where news is distributed when it arrives (kind of like it works with IHAVE feeds for NNTP). Latencies can be reduced to a minimum with no wasted bandwidth.

NNTP could be used now, if RSS aggregators were designed to play well with other programs. Feed providers could slap an application/rss+xml MIME header on their RSS file, post them to Usenet (maybe to dedicated RSS feed newsgroups, or maybe to regular topic newsgroups; we can figure that out later), and let netnews distribute the files. (With proper use of "Supersedes" headers, we wouldn't even have to worry about duplicate feeds; an RSS group would be like an *.answers group -- too scary for browsing, but easy to automate.)

End-users could subscribe to an RSS-feed newsgroup on their local news servers and filter the newsgroup so that RSS files go straight into an aggegator. Voila! RSS over Usenet, and the bandwidth pressure is taken off the feed originator.

(Hell, RSS could be distributed by e-mail, too, if everybody involved grokked MIME and plugins.)

The problem, of course, is that there aren't any aggregators that work in a pipe, because RSS development has been driven by people who learned to program in a Windows-based universe instead of the UNIX-based universe that produced netnews and the Web. It's all cut-and-paste or drag-and-drop. (Most RSS apps aren't even MIME-aware.)

You know, if feed reader authors made more flexible software, there might actually be some innovation in this field.

And yet...

[susano_otter]

So, um, congratulations, I guess, for popularizing yet another good idea that will marginally improve Windows without measurably advancing the cause of OSS. Kudos for all the hard work!

Better sig.

[johnjay]

Some what apropos of your censure: The recent thinning of the field in presidential politics has caused me to change my sig. Because of your criticism, you're the first person who get's to see the change. The last one was too wordy, and lead to some misunderstandings. This one is (I hope) a better summary of my position.

Now, for some reason, I fear you won't agree with the sentiments prescribed therein. Ignoring that for a moment, I hope I was able to clean up the grammar a bit. The 120 character limit is a bit constricting.

Re:Better sig.

[tswann01]

I'll vote for the better strategy against terror. Bush has done well so far. Kerry has to prove he has a better policy.

I actually agree w/ the first part, but not the second. Not sure how you're measuring Bush's strategy. I don't consider curtailment of domestic freedoms to be doing well against terror. It's late.

Re:Better sig.

[johnjay]

You're better than I thought. I was cringing, thinking that you might say something snooty about the typo "get's" in the last post. Proofreading isn't my strong point.

I'm not pleased about the curtailment of domestic freedoms either. And if Bush is re-elected, I'm not very happy with Ashcroft getting another four years of power (on the other hand, I might not like his replacement either. I don't remember the last time Americans actually liked an attorney general. They only make news when they do something bad). I think Bush is doing well in foreign policy. Not perfect by a long stretch, but a damn site better than I thought he would do when I didn't vote for him last time.

The reasoning is sort of like this: A long period of time under Ashcroft's idea of good society would be stifiling. However, Bush has done so much against foreign states that use terrorists as a proxy army, that I think it might be possible to end the war on terror with another 4 years of his paranoid, hawkish team in control. At that point, the threat having passed, the war crowd, like Churchill after WWII, will be voted out. "Thank you for being the pit-bull when we needed one. Don't let the door hit you on the way out."

Kerry has to convince me that he will be as aggressive as Bush. He had to act anti-war to gut Dean's campaign, which (as you might guess from what I wrote above) didn't impress me very much. He's going to need to be very convincing. If he does convince me of that, then my vote will be based on things like domestic policy, which hasn't been Bush's strong suit. I'll probably also change the .sig again--make it non-political.

People post on this website all the time that they're afraid the current War on Terror will turn the U.S. into "1984". In a way, I can't argue that, because I don't have the time or ability to successfully refute that notion. If someone is paranoid enough to think there's a growing conspiracy to enslave the U.S. citizenry, I don't think I have the perspective to understand their position enough to refute that theory. On the other hand, if you're not paranoid, but you are just thinking that the War on Terror will be as bad on American rights as the War on Drugs, I can understand that and share your concern. I think it's a serious risk, but it's also a reversable condition, and I want to live to see the Patriot Act not get renewed.

Re:Better sig.

[tswann01]

Now that we've determined I'm not some snooty grammar nazi, "Some what" should have been one word, and "lead" should have been "led". Anyway. It will be interesting to see how Kerry and Bush measure up against each other in debates, etc. Hopefully, it will give us all a chance to compare them on a more apples-to-apples basis.