Tag: RSS

I just published my first two Yahoo Pipes. I use them, so I know they’re at least a bit useful. Please let me know if you have any suggestions for making improvements to them.

I’ve been having a conversation with Andy Beard on a post of his entitled “Google are killing the future of RSS“. For some reason, my most recent comment has not appeared on the page. I can only assume that he did not appreciate its tone. So, I have decided to post the comment here:

The task list examples are bogus. It’s the user’s personal information, not the publisher’s. The user should be able to do what he wants with it, even accidentally share it with the world.

The financial information and marketing examples do have some merit. (Why someone would subscribe to a feed full of marketing speak is beyond me. But whatever.)

However, I don’t think any of these cases are strong enough to warrant adding a no-sharing restriction to feeds. (I’m taking back the “more power to you” statement in my last post. That was an incredibly stupid thing to say.) I’ve come to the realization that what we’re really talking about is a DRM scheme. We’ve already seen the kind of damage that can be done with DRM in the music, film, and ebook industries. Adding it to RSS for some short-term gain would be a disaster.

There’s another programmatic way you could solve this problem. Simply prevent applications that allow for sharing to access your feeds. Very easy to implement. It would also help you with your goal of having less readers.

In addition to the feeds I linked to the other day, I now have a feed of wine reviews generated from my Cork’d journal. I can’t guarantee that it will be updated very often, if ever. I’m really just doing this to try to force myself to stop buying the same wines over and over.

Today I managed to dig through the 500+ posts that piled up in my aggregator over the weekend. This is one of the side effects of going out of town when my data is tied to a desktop computer and a semi-broken, mostly-unusable notebook computer.

In December I fixed my e-mail portability problem by forwarding all my work and personal accounts to Gmail. Admittedly, I was hesitant to do so. What if Gmail went down for an extended amount of time? Would I be as productive using a web mail app as I am with a traditional one? What about those times I said that Google was becoming evil? None of those problems have really panned out. I couldn’t be happier with my decision.

The situation with my feed data isn’t quite so simple. At the time I started using Gmail, I also tried using Rojo as my full-time aggregator. Rojo would be an excellent choice for some, if not most, people. I was kind of unhappy with the idea of having to run a separate application for downloading podcasts. But the real deal-breaker was that Rojo is not able to handle private feeds, such as those generated by Basecamp and Instiki, both of which I use for my work. I immediately went back to using NetNewsWire, which meant that if I didn’t have access to my computer, I didn’t have access to my feeds.

Anyway, while I was digging through through all those posts today, I was happy to discover that NetNewsWire 2.1 had gone into public beta. The big new feature with this version is that it allows you to sync your feed data with NewsGator Online. Now I have one set of data that I can access through NetNewsWire on my computers and through NewsGator Online on anyone else’s.

This means that the giant pile of old posts is a thing of the past. You have no idea how happy I am about this. Does this make me a giant geek? You bet.

FeedBurner has an API for its FeedFlare service. I’m going to have to check that out this weekend. If you’re subscribed to my main or comments feeds, please update their URLs in your aggregator.

• Main: http://feeds.feedburner.com/MatthewGifford
• Comments: http://feeds.feedburner.com/MatthewGiffordComments

If you’ve actually been to my site in the last couple days, you’ve noticed that I replaced text-based links to my feeds with this: . You probably also noticed that my site’s template got a little uglier. I’m working on that.

Since both Mozilla and Microsoft have agreed to use the same icon, I think that it’s time to start replacing the countless variations of white-on-orange XML and RSS buttons with a single icon that doesn’t confront the user with jargon.

I urge my fellow bloggers to download the icon set (via Marusin) and start using it.

The other day I wrote a program that will produce an RSS feed from a list of URLs. I did this because a few of the pages that I like to read on a daily basis (such as Pitchfork) don’t have feeds. And these days, if a site doesn’t have a feed, I usually don’t remember to read it.

If this is something you’d like to try out, leave a comment and I’ll send you the instructions for setting it up. I’d post it on this site, but it’s way too rough for public use yet.

Also, if you know of a program or service that already does this, please let me know. I’d hate to waste my time replicating someone else’s work.

Yesterday Google announced Reader, a web-based feed aggregator. I haven’t had a chance to play around with it much yet. My first impressions:

• It allows you to import your subscriptions using OPML. This isn’t a very big deal. Every aggregator should have it.
• Some cool ajaxy stuff.
• Overall, pretty boring.

Today, Brent Simmons, creator of NetNewsWire, wrote:

It’s true! NewsGator has acquired NetNewsWire and hired me as a product architect! There’s a press release and a Q&A page that go into more detail.

One of the reasons that he sites for selling NetNewsWire to NewsGator is that his customers were requesting that he add the ability to sync data between apps. While I’m not one of those people, I was certainly starting to head in that direction. Recently, I’ve been considering switching to Rojo in an attempt to make my computing life a little more web-centric. Syncing between NetNewsWire and NewsGator will allow me to keep one of my top-five-favorite apps while still allowing me to read and manage my feeds when I’m away from my own machine.

Is the end of the white-on-orange XML icon near? According to a post from Dave Winer, we may be seeing more white-on-orange SUBSCRIBE buttons soon. This is a good thing. Using the XML button to point to both RSS and OPML files is confusing to non-technical users. It’s equally bad that on some sites users are presented with multiple icons (RSS and Atom) that have the exact same function. The SUBSCRIBE icon tells the user exactly what the it’s for and is format-neutral. I think that the new icon ought to point to feeds using the feed URI scheme. This will make subscribing even more user-friendly be eliminating the need to copy and paste URLs from one app to another.