D'Arcy links to an aggregator list. I've spent most of the day trying to find a NNW replacement. (I'm selling my laptop to by a desktop dual 1GHz G4.)
Looking for an RSS reader?
Well, you're probably not, but if you know someone who is, they might be thankful for this page, containing what appears to be a pretty comprehensive list of RSS readers for a whole lotta platforms…. [D'Arcy Norman's Learning Commons Weblog]
Bill French points to this post in a comment about my post about leaving RSS to the business of information delivery. Here a snip of his comment:
…the trouble that the [RSS] industry is expriencing is the rush by marketing folks into the RSS fray without a complete understanding of what RSS syncation (sic) is good for or its historical roots.
Bill is making a great point here. The market is ready for content syndication, but they don't know what the underlying technology is called and don't care. See my two posts on the right sidebar for extra details.
The average customer cares about RSS vs. Nechoatom in the same way they care about Intel vs. Mac. They want the most compatible best deal for the money. Most average consumers don't care what chip drives an X-Box or Sony Playstation, just that the games are cool and easy to afford.
So is RSS the Playstation and Nechoatom the X-Box? Discuss!
I've subscribed to his site now. Thanks Bill!
Joe is at it again. I had a blast with Phase 5 and am looking forward to all of the fun with ShareBlogs. It's really made me take a different approach to BlogShares in general. I've made a couple of new blog friends and learned that you really do get more out of an endevour when your focus is giving rather than receiving.
I've received share gifts over the weekend from blog owners, increasing my BlogShare worth. Now it's time to give some back. Watch your emails. If you are a subscriber to the RSS feed of this site, you'll get a gift (send me some inventive proof, too :> ) and if you've given me a gift before, you'll find something in your stocking…
I've been evaluating two ways of reading aggregated syndication feeds: Radio Userland's built-in aggregator and NetNewsWire. To skip the suspense, NNW won. I used Radio extensively for the last three days, posting and reading content. With Radio running on my downstairs server (see this), response time was fast and reading news was a little easier, since I use the traditional view in NNW and Radio's layout puts all of the news on one page.
This brings me to the reason I shut of Radio's aggregator this morning. I read news by scanning the content, then reviewing interesting stories, then posting the content afterwards. With Radio's aggregator, that just wasn't possible. I subscribe to 92 sources and that makes managing headlines in Radio unwieldy.
I'm hoping that when I learn a bit more about Radio/Frontier/Manila, I can create a read-only aggregator page that's tailored to my needs.
Update: Brent Simmons (creator of NNW writes):
[snip]
The thing to remember is that the distinction between aggregator types isn[base ']t between mail-reader style and weblog-style, it[base ']s between GUI apps and browser-based apps. Dave writes: [base “]People who are just using mail-reader style aggregators are really missing something.[per thou]
Actually, no, they[base ']re not. [inessential.com]
Here's a list of questions Dave is asking his candidates. I like that they aren't condusive to sound bites. I don't think many of them will answer the mary-jane question.
Dave writes about his impending trip to follow candidates for President through New Hampshire. Maybe he needs a link for contributions to his trip: Send Dave to New Hampshire!
I read this and agree with Don. I feel *exactly* the same way.
Death of E-Mail? When I send an e-mail now, I no longer feel sure of it being read by the receipient.
Joe inspired me to take a different approach to Blogshares. through gifts and no sales, plus playing Joe's game, I was able to increase my Blogshare worth and take my blog private. It was fun. I've subscribed.
I've created ShareBlogs as the new home for Joe's-slightly-less-crazy-but-fun-nevertheless game and should be moving forward with it soon. Hope to see some of you players there… ;~)
I have done it!
[Insert trumpet flourish]
After reading this post about how Technorati works, it was suggested that you ping the Technorati RPC server so it knew that you were around. I wanted to this with every post and asked some questions on my weblog in this post.
Well, I spent some time inside Radio and have figured out a solution. I wanted the correct Technorati URL to automatically populate the “URLs to Ping:” box on the desktop website. Here's a short description of how it's done.
[this is all at your own risk. I'm a Radio novice and you probably shouldn't take my advice. Ask Jake first.]
Open the Radio application. Go to the Tools menu and choose Developers…>Jump… Type radio.macros in the dialog box and click OK. You are now looking at a list of Radio's built in macros. Scroll down to near the bottom of the list to find “weblogPostForm”. This macro generates the weblog post form (duh!) found on the desktop website home page. Open the macro and look for some text that says “bundle //trackback URLs to Ping box” This is the “bundle” of code that takes the generates the “URLs to Ping:” text box and assigns the contents to a variable when the form is invoked.
Now that we are in the right place, here's where we make a change. Remember, if you screw this up and destroy your copy of Radio without a backup, it's your own fault.
Open the bundle (on a Mac double click the triangle). Open the subheading of the bundle. You should see the first line of code start with “add(“. Look for the HTML tag “text area”. It's inside this text area of the form box that we will add some text. This will allow it to autopopulate the form each time. Now, inside this tag, look for a formating part that looks like this:
wrap=\”soft\”>
Add the Technorati URL (http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping) to the right of the “>” symbol.
Close all of the Radio app windows. Restart Radio, if you like.
Reopen the desktop website home page. Now, when you post articles using the desktop website, the Technorati site will get a ping, along with the trackback URLs.
Questions? Comments?
This post makes me think.
Something came up on the syndication syntax list that bothers me. Syndication (RSS for now, Atom next) depends on separating formatting from content. A lump of html is thrown into an xml wrapper and passed along.
What happens to the original style sheets and the styled treatment of the post?
I want my news reader to give me the basics of the content, mainly the text. If I want the rich experience of the site in it's graphical glory, I'd go to the page. A problem is that I'm a geek and my needs are different than most of America and the world. :>
I think what we need to be careful about here is confining RSS/Nechoatom to one type of experience vs. another. RSS is a content syndication format, not an alternative to the visual experience the WWW has become. Let RSS transport syndicated content. Let RSS aggregators read it and display the feed. Instead of combining the web browser with the aggregator and perpetuating the current conventional thinking, let's try to take this in a different direction
Create a different kind of aggregator, one that's a browser first and a RSS reader second. The browser has a preference page where you subscribe to feeds of interest. Second, add a list of keywords to find in the feeds. Third, add technology to monitor your site view habits (think Tivo without the privacy issues).
When you launch this program, it displays a “customized home page” using the prefs from the paragraph above. Click a button on the page and the app opens news/info/entertainment of interest where each category is a window, each web page a tab. Info you wanted to know is highlighted (cues from CSS embedded in the feed or web page). Keywords are highlighted differently.
Wow…where did this post come from. Too much caffeine too early….
Anyway, all of the technology exists for this today. Apple's WebKit and Microsoft's integration of IE allow an app to be written that displays valid HTML correctly, but not be limited to a web browser app.
Whew. Comments? Brent Simmons, are you out there? You are the person that could do this. If Watson and NNW slept together, this idea would be their child.
Update: John Robb is thinking along the same lines with this. By the way, John, fix Radio so your post links in your RSS feed are the permalinks back to your web site. This one was to Macromedia.
Steve Kirks 