Tag: Syndication

Radio Userland Is Broken

Dave Winer complains today that a story about RSS left out any mention of Radio Userland. According to Winer,

There are two schools of thought about aggregators. One says that they should work like a mail reader, the other that it should work like a weblog. The former shows you each feed as a separate thing, the latter shows all articles in reverse-chronologic order, grouping them by time. Imho we already have enough mail readers, wire up RSS to email and you’re done. Who needs another piece of software to do what an already-existing category does so well. But the latter, which is the approach I used in Radio’s aggregator, works incredibly well. People who are just using mail-reader style aggregators are really missing something. Articles that only write about mail reader aggregators are also missing something.

No, actually Radio’s aggregation features suck for precisely this reason. I know this because I’m using Radio as an aggregator.

Well, technically I’m ignoring it at the moment because it’s impossible to actually use Radio Useralnd if you want to subscribe to a lot of feeds.

This is something I’ve written about before. Net News Wire has a very nice system that lets you organize and aggregate feeds by categories the user defines (see this nice screenshot). But Dave doesn’t work that way, so the odds of seeing this in Radio is non-existent (please port Net News Wire to Windows!)

Dave says all you need are your feeds in reverse chronological order like a weblog. Earth to Dave — relying on reverse chronological listing as the main organizing principle for news is stupid. Ever visited Google News? Notice how they divided the stories into categories? Same thing with the New York Times.

But the world according to Dave is that all anybody ever needs is a reverse chronological listing and so that’s that. As a result I see RSS feeds arranged like this:

Wi-Fi Networking News (2 items)

AllAfrica News: Zimbabwe (2 items)

AllConsuming ( 9 items)

BoingBoing! (6 items)

CNET News.Com (5 items)

Moreover Animal News (3 items)

Moreover Asia (6 items)

NYT Business (1 item)

NYT Homepage (5 items)

Tomalak’s Realm (1 item)

BBC News Home Page (7 items)

Animal Concerns News Service (5 items)

Moreover SE Asia (14 items)

Moreover Asia Pacific (15 items)

Samizdata.Net (2 items)

Register (1 item)

FARK (5 items)

Yahoo! Oddly Enough (5 items)

Yahoo! Strange News (2 items)

Reuters Science (2 items)

Scientific American (1 items)

New Scientist (2 items)

EurekAlert (1 item)

Economist:Books (1 item)

Dave would never have the animal-related feeds and tech-related feeds grouped together, so why would I ever want this? It’s the Henry Ford principle — any color you like as long as it’s black (or reverse chronological).

The upshot is that I rarely bother to even check Radio’s aggregated feed anymore. It’s much more efficient to visit these sites in groups using Mozilla’s tab features than it is to wade through the chaotic output of Radio Userland.

Customizable RSS Feeds? It’s In Here

John Robb mentions a feature at Adrian Holovaty’s weblog — customizable RSS feeds (unfortunately, as I write this, Adrian’s site is unreachable).

This is a feature which my weblog has had for several months. All you need to do is use this URL:

http://brian.carnell.com/index/rss/?body=

and add the text you want to look for after the “body=”

For example,

http://brian.carnell.com/index/rss/?body=John+Robb

. . . will return all of the weblog posts featuring Robb.

Personally, though, text-based searching like that quickly runs into some problems and limitations which is why I’ve got almost 250 topical RSS feeds (and growing) that can be subscribed to here.

A complete list of all the RSS feeds for this site can be found here.

Caching RSS Feeds and Macros in Conversant

The right-hand sidebar on the front page of this site features recent headlines from other sites I manage. This is accomplished using a macro in Conversant that reads the RSS feeds from those sites and then displays the two most recent posts on the weblogs there.

Which is cool, except it used to cause the page to load slowly when it was time to update the RSS feeds (which the macro did every hour).

So when the discussion on the Conversant support board veered to talking about RSS, I mentioned that it would be nice to be able to change the length of the feed cache.

Well, it didn’t take long until not only was that possible, but a feature was added so that the results of the entire macro itself could be cached. The upshot is that now the text of the headlines here only changes every six hours which means the front page now loads much faster than it used to.

Good stuff. And it may load even faster once we do a server upgrade currently schedule for May.

Radio News Aggregator Update

I’ve been using Radio Userland as an RSS aggregator, but the user interface is decidedly unfriendly once you are checking a lot of RSS feeds (the interface desperately needs a “Check All” option to select all RSS items on a page for deletion).

Userland solved all of my problems, however, by adding a feature to distribute aggregated news via e-mail. Now I receive an e-mail message every hour with all the news I’m trying to keep up with.

Since I do about 80 percent of my computer-related work in my e-mail client, this is an enormous improvement — it’s like receiving a personalized e-mail news digest every hour. Very cool.

Redirection (RSS and Otherwise)

Dave Winer issues a call for an RSS redirection module,

Also, I realize there’s a need for a RSS module for redirection. . . . Not everyone can control their server enough to program an HTTP-level redirect.

Okay, it may not be a particularly sexy feature, but Conversant has an excellent redirection page type.

Recently, for example, I moved the location of several of my RSS feeds. Then I simply created a new redirection page with the same name as the old feeds, and filled out a form telling the system the URL to redirect to.

The redirect is seamless to RSS aggregators. I am still using the old URL in my Radio subscriptions, and the feed keeps being updated regularly with no problems.

Redirection may be a relatively small feature, but it certainly has saved me from myself numerous times.