Category Archives: RSS

RSS, feeds, syndication, and the plumbing of the open web.

Switching to Google Reader

Essays, Google, RSS, Tech, ,

I held out on using a RSS reader for more than two years. I had a little thingy built so Ping-O-Matic would use its own results and Weblogs.com to store the last updated time of every blog it saw, and then I reordered my blogroll based on that. (The original version in WordPress parsed the whole changes.xml from Weblogs.com a few times an hour. Remember when that was feasible?) Then I would go from the top of the list to the last one I remember reading, opening each in tabs, and closing as I finished. Incidentally, this kept my blogroll from withering as many do.

At some point I started begrudgingly using Bloglines in 2004, and fell in love shortly thereafter. Where I used to follow a few dozen blogs, now I could consume hundreds and its UI just made sense to me, and just got better over time. I sang its praises often in interviews, mentioning it as one of the handful of websites I used daily. Any outages or performance problems it had seemed minor to me, only reminding me of how much I appreciated the service when it was up. Bloglines search was and continues to be the cleanest in the space.

I don’t recall exactly when many of my friends started switching to Google Reader. I had tried it at its first release and was pretty unimpressed. I saw the hubabub around Gears and how Reader was the first to embrace that. I watched with envy as friends used their trends feature to see nifty data about how and when they read feeds, and use it to cull out the non-essentials, much like I used to with my blogroll.

A week ago, frustrated to no end by a bug in Bloglines telling me to reread things I already had, I decided to make the switch cold turkey. I packed my OPML file and went along to Google Reader full-time. It hasn’t been painless — the keyboard shortcuts are a little funky on dvorak — but it feels better to be on a platform that whether real or perceived feels like it has momentum. That self-fufilling X-factor in apps is one of the magic elements for me. Also as I’m adapting to the UI I feel a lot more efficient than I used to in going through things.

Finally I’ve started reducing my subscriptions, down to 346 now, and I hope to be under 200 within a month or so. I’m thinking of adopted a fixed-number, say 150, and if I want to add one I need to remove another one first so the total is always the same. (I’ve considered this for social networking sites, too.) However it’s probably focusing on the wrong metrics, unread items is more important than total feeds.

New Blog Design

Design, Meta, RSS

It is now official get out of your RSS reader day. Take a few minutes to check out the new photomatt.net and browse around a bit. This is, I believe, the fifth major iteration of the design here but it’s the first one since 2003. When I last freshened the paint around here it got a link from Zeldman saying “lucky in redesign” and I figured I would never be able to top that, so I left the design the same for years. The only major change was the introduction of Asides in 2004.

Well I couldn’t top the last design, but Nicolò Volpato had no trouble creating something beautiful I started coding up earlier this weekend. Nicolò is still working on mocking up a few of the pages, and in the meantime I’ve been working on a little additional functionality around the site, particularly with photos.

Here are a few things you might notice so far: related posts on entry pages, recent entries shown in the sidebar on entries older than 2 weeks, when a blog is from the same day as a photo album random photos from that day are shown at the bottom, and likewise a photo will show when there’s a post that day.

The main goals of the photo integration were to enable a little more serendipity. There are a lot of other little Easter eggs, but those will remain an exercise for the reader.

Bloglines Update

RSS, Tech

I’m a few days late on this, but I think the new Bloglines updates are really slick, they’re subtle but they really improve the usability of the product. Bloglines is my favority aggregator, online or offline, and I admire the restraint they have. It would be easy for them to add every possible feature, instead they keep things simple and, since January, fast. Simplicity is far harder than complexity. Especially in a big organization.

TagJag Thoughts

RSS, Spam, ,

I had a very brief comment during Chris' session "Should TagJag get funded?" On the stage with Chris and Rick Segal were two of my favorite members of the venture community, Brad Feld and Jeff Clavier. My feedback may have been phrased more negatively than I meant it to be, but what I was trying to constructively criticise is that TagJag would be a lot more unique and valuable to me if beyond merely listing the results pages of the different services it aggregates, it presented the results interesting and timesaving ways. For example: better categorization of time-based vs. authority-based sources; combining different results into a single list; de-duping and filtering results; filtering the spam that the different providers seem to be unable to catch; providing different notification thresholds and mediums beyond RSS and HTML, like email, SMS, IM. All of these would provide value to me beyond what the individual services provide, save me time, and provide something greater than the sum of its parts. tagjag freedbacking

The Feed Validator is Dead to Me

Politics, RSS

Is anyone else sick and tired of the so-called feed validator changing its mind on fundamental issues every other week? I’m sure Sam Ruby and whoever else is still working on the Validator mean well, but the constant ivory tower decisions to change the way it interpets “valid RSS 2.0” is making it seem more like a political advocacy tool than anything else. Perhaps I should give the benefit of the doubt and “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

I’m not even talking about deciding they can change the world by decree. (Which has already been addressed.) The latest in their line of enlightened changes is that the author of the Well-formed Web spec has changed the capitializition of the wfw:commentRSS element at some unknown point to lowercase Rss. This arbitrary decision has been codified by the validator, which now reports the millions and millions of feeds that use the previously correct capitialization as invalid. Confusion ensues.

If the previous paragraph makes your eyes glaze over, congratulations, you’re normal.

Here is a post on their mailing list which also explains the issue and includes a link to the archive.org version of the page with the capitialization everyone uses, which was there for at least two years. One line can cause so much trouble.

But wait, there’s more. “In addition, this feed has an issue that may cause problems for some users.” They’ve also started marking all uses of content:encoded as potentially causing problems, which is funny because it actually avoids a ton of problems and (again) people have been using it in RSS 2.0 feeds for 3+ years now, and I even asked Dave Winer about it in the past and he said that was fine. Their documentation on the topic seems more geared toward instilling fear, uncertainty, and doubt in RSS 2.0 than addressing the reason they’ve decided to start warning about this element. Where a validator normally provides stability, the feed validator has become the Homeland Security of the RSS world, keeping us all in a constant state of dulled fear, insensitive to whatever warnings they’re giving us today because we just want it to stop.

I’m sure the content:encoded change can be rationalized with a perfectly convincing argument. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone as smart as Sam could do the same for the arbitrary wft:CommentRSS change. I know that the code is open source and we could fork it and create another version of the validator that doesn’t invalidate half the blogosphere on a Tuesday afternoon. But then we would have more than one validator, and that defeats the point.

Invalid Atom

Press, RSS, Web Standards, WordPress, WordPress.com

“Next time someone tells you Atom 0.3 is invalid because the validator says so, point them to this page. The validator is full of it, because it doesn’t reflect reality.” If Robert had comments, I would say “I never suggested Bloglines was “best-effort software development” (though I do love it and use it myself) but merely that it has an overwhelming market share. We’ve been tracking feed stats on WordPress.com and Bloglines and Newsgator online both dominate. The Web Standards project never casts stones from an ivory tower, they’ve always advocated practical standards for pratical benefits. Ben’s comment was akin to someone saying that the site sucked because it used XHTML 1.0 instead of 1.1, or if the validator decided to instantly “deprecate” all sites using HTML 3.2, 4.0, and XHTML 1.0 when 1.1 came out.”

Spam Blogs

RSS

You should read spam and fake blogs, another problem I’ve been seeing a lot lately is entire blogs being scraped and their content being re-published with ads on it. Structured formats like RSS make this easier than before. The dark side to the numbers all the blog search engines have been toting is that a LARGE percentage of these are fake blogs, so much so that I currently block over 80% of all incoming pings to Ping-O-Matic as obvious spam. This has been a huge resource burden as well. We have around 2 million legit pings per day, do the math.

Yahoo RSS Search

RSS, Yahoo

Niall scoops Yahoo RSS Search, which I played around with a bit this morning thanks to a ping from him. I got very good results with it. They seemed to spider permalink page HTML, so I would get results from people mentioning me in comments to an entry, but I didn’t get blogroll noise like I do from Technorati. Should be interesting to see where it goes. Should also be interesting to see the spin from Technorati, Feedster, Icerocket, Pubsub, etc in response to one of the giants knocking on their door.

Corante Not Trustworthy?

Humor, RSS

Okay, it was very funny that a blogger by the name of Dana Blankenhorn (who we’ve seen before) attributed Why Google Is Faltering on RSS and that “Google needs to bring in someone with a Clue.” He had no “Clue” himself that the person he was trying to roast left the company half a year ago and he’s now doing cool things with Odeo. Now it’s not worth mentioning or even surprising that someone made a false assumption and came to a silly conclusion because of it. What is interesting is how Corante’s response to the entry, or lack thereof.

As it stands the entry is inarguably factually inaccurate, yet only the comments point to that. Dana has not responded to the comments or updated the entry, even though he had time to write 8 more entries that day. It may seem obvious to you and I that the entry is wrong, but not everyone and the entry is still gathering links. What’s more interesting is that entry has disappeared from the front page. (Screenshot of where it should be here.)

Corante claims to be “a trusted, unbiased source on technology, science and business that’s authored by highly respected thinkers, commentators and journalists; read by many of the sector’s top entrepreneurs, executives, funders and followers; and is helping to lead the emergence of blogging as an influential and important form of reportage, analysis and commentary.” They’re not helping blogging or their trust by leaving that entry up un-corrected and covering it up by taking it off the front page.

Update: Jason notes that the entry was deleted in MT, just not removed from the filesystem.

Panels Finished

Events, Personal, RSS

My last panel was yesterday at 5 PM so now I’m taking as much time as I can to catch the panels that are left and learn a few things. Speaking was more stressful than I expected but most of the feedback was good. I still need to check out the web feedback though, as people are probably more candid online than when they’re shaking your hand.

Tool Marketshare?

Google, RSS, WordPress

Elise’s look at weblog tool marketshare is interesting if not the most accurate. I’d much rather see numbers from someone who could programatically actually determine what blogs use, like Technorati or Feedster. Anyway I tried to follow along in the audience and typed “wordpress.org” into Google, which gave me a helpful page with “link to” and “contains term” links, which I assume is Elise’s methodology. Link to returned 288,000, as is in her chart, but contains term gave 674,000, which is radically different than the 5,000 she attributed to WordPress. I sent a note suggesting she look at this number, to which she replied to Google for www.wordpress.org, which I did. The “contain this term” link returned the even more modest “Results 1 – 10 of about 981,” so obviously the chart should be updated to 1 instead of 5 immediately.

Cosmos Plugin

RSS

Jonas has a Technorati Cosmos plugin which is kinda neat. I think it may have the wrong approach though, here’s how a really nice Technorati plugin would work: watch the site cosmos feed for incoming links, if the link isn’t to the root use the same code we use for Pingbacks to determine what post it’s linking to, if one at all, then check if the incoming link already exists as a Trackback or Pingback, and if not insert it into the comment table chronologically in line with the rest of the comments. (And send a notification email.) Cosmos should work transparant of other forms of commenting. Bonus points if it works with referrer data too, call it “remote-comments.”