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)
Any recomendations for a good RSS reader for Win32
Consider what you use the internet for, and how it's changed:
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
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
1) RDF Site Syndication; or
2) Really Simple Syndication????
Which one is correct?
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
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?
World Wide Web, sounds alot better than RSS. Hell, most people just call it the Internet.
- These characters were randomly selected.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Even heroes have the right to dream
But for the discussion. If I want stories I go to El Reg. And then I end up reading every single story anyhow.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
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.
Josh
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.
Philosophistry
"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.
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.
fortune -o
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?
I used to use /.'s RSS, but once I queried twice in one hour, so my IP got banned.
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
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.
"Anything that's not front-paged isn't available through the RSS feed."
.rss feed. Just click on the science section, and click "rss" link at the bottom of the Science page.
/.!
I don't think this is correct. I just loaded 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
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.
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.
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
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:
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.
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.
/. has RSS feeds. What's the point if you get banned reading them all?
I got myself banned a little while ago when I discovered that each section of
I use Macs to up my productivity, so up yours Microsoft!
as the possible new name, thanks to a piece at LinuxWorld that's linking back to this thread.
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.
I have discovered a truly remarkable sig which this 120 chars is too small to contain.
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!
Sam
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.
(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.)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
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.
Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
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!
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.
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.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
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.
Search 2010 Gen Con events
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?
You were probably querying it hundreds of times per hour, because twice per hour is fine with slashdot.
/dev/null too, just for kicks.
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
Random and weird software I've written.
In spite of the suggestions and all the tests that I have made, I have not cavato a spider from the hole.
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? :>
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.