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.
Any recomendations for a good RSS reader for Win32
If I were able to read the news ten times more quickly, I'd just have to get back to work ten times faster!
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!
Yess...
we wantssss it...
RSSSS feed...our precioussss....
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?
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.
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.
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
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".
Sigs are bad for your health.
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
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
"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.
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.
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..."
Firewire, Firebird, Firefox... just pleeeaaase don't call it FireFeed. Stop playing with Fire!
"In our tactical decisions, we are operating contrary to our strategic interest."
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.)
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
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
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?
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.
"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
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!
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/
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
If you think Slashdot is a "speed feed", try setting your RSS utility to update from /. every five minutes and see what happens.
Fred
"A fool and his freedom are soon parted"
-RMS
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.
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.
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
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.)
No Laughing Allowed!