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.
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!
SharpReader
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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?
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...
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!
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
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.
It's all pull.
.technomancer
Gator.... bad choice in names...
Makes my skin crawl.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
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.
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
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
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"?
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