alan little's weblog
i don't get rss
3rd August 2003 permanent link
I don't get RSS.
This may mean I'm terminally technically un-hip, but I've tried out NetNewsWire Lite a couple of times and I just don't see what it does for me that a set of bookmarked tabs in Mozilla or Safari doesn't. Let's see: a set of bookmarked tabs:
- can also include websites that don't have RSS feeds (*)
- shows me the full text of all the items I want to read in one window, whereas lots of RSS feeds only have summaries, and then NNW opens everything I click on in new browser windows and eats up my precious desktop space - the only scarce commodity on most computers these days.
A set of bookmarked tabs can't:
- update itself automatically when one of the sites I'm interested in reading posts new material
... but that's a feature not a bug. I already spend far too much time catching up on news in the morning before I start doing any actual work, I don't want that spilling over into the rest of my day too.
There are a couple of important things that neither a browser nor an RSS reader can do for me at the moment:
- neither a browser nor an RSS reader can deal with synchronising my subscriptions, bookmarks or whatever across multiple machines. I regularly work on my desktop, my laptop - both Macs - and a variety of Windows machines at client sites. I want all the machines I use on a regular basis to know what I'm currently interested in. Dave Winer has a project to deal with this for RSS feeds, which I remember reading about a while ago but can't find the link for just now - but what about all the websites I want to read that don't have RSS feeds? I have a several semi-private blogger pages that I use as notebooks for various subjects, but I don't actually use them as much as I would like because writing a post in blogger is significantly more work than saving a bookmark in a browser. I want a two-or-three-click solution that maintains a master links page on a server and can synch bookmarks with Safari, Mozilla or Internet Explorer. (So I guess I'd better get on with writing one then).
- neither a browser nor an RSS reader can show me discussions that are happening across a number of sites as a coherent thread. Movable Type's trackback seems like an idea that could have some potential for dealing with this, but has some major limitations. Technorati looks interesing in this realm too - although again only for sites with RSS feeds. What I'm thinking of is some sort of linking syntax that says Post B "comments on" or "replies to" Post A and a viewer that can show me Post A and Post B in the same windows regardless of what website they originally come from. Which of course starts to drift dangerously close to real hypertext as conceived by the likes of Vannevar Bush, Ted Nelson and even Tim Berners-Lee.
(*) Examples of indispensable tech news and commentary sites that don't have RSS feeds - Clay Shirky, David Isenberg, Jerry Pournelle. Plus of course Lileks and the What's New page on Luminous Landscape, my favourite photography site.
This doesn't mean I won't be providing an RSS feed at some point when my weblog generating tool becomes more sophisticated than just me and BBEdit - I don't get it but clearly lots of people do.
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