Slashdot Mirror
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)
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.
Check out FeedReader
SharpReader
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It is built into Opera
Sure there is
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.
I just use the RSS Reader Panel for Firefox.
Xbox reviews.. We think they're funny.
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.
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!
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Use Bloglines.
It's online, free and includes a host of other features such as exportable subscriptions, disposable email addresses, etc.
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
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.
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.
This space unintentionally left unblank.
It's all pull.
.technomancer
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.
I made a PHP/MySQL library that prevents SQL injection & makes coding easier!
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.
the specs say
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.
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...
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.
"It was a summer's tale: Just a boy, his Linux, and a head full of dreams..."
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
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.
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.
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).
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.
And if you don't feel like reading that, just think of Emacs and XEmacs, but replace RMS with Dave Winer.
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.
Why can't I moderate something "Wrong" or at least "Grossly Misinformed"?
Actually, slashdot has a PDA link: http://slashdot.org/palm/
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!
/. story this way....
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
I have discovered a truly remarkable sig which this 120 chars is too small to contain.
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.
No guarantee that this will work for anybody else, but it DID just work for me.
Is it fascism yet?
I do the same thing. Some other low bandwidth sites I use:
n ?node=ad min/delivery/avantgo&language=palm
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-dy
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.