Tag: RSS

Going Pro with Feedly

I’ve been a heavy user of RSS for years now.  I’ve tried and used everything from custom built applications and scripts, to browser add-ons, to third-party services.  Even this very blog’s archives are full migration and review articles form one tool to another.  Here are a few links, if you are interested:

For the last 3 years, I’ve been using Feedly, which I like a lot.  I’ve been thinking about going Pro for about a year now.  Last week, I made the switch.  Here’s why:

  1. I do love the service and want to support it!  After all, I’m spending at least an hour every day going through my feeds.  Sometimes even more.
  2. The Pro version removes the limit on the number of feeds and items in each feed.  Not that I don’t have enough to read, but I don’t like the idea that I might be missing something.
  3. The Pro version provides integrations and easier sharing to a variety of third-party services.  The one that is most important for me is WordPress integration.
  4. Their blog post about the upcoming changes to feed organization was the last drop – I WANT THAT!

Feedly constantly improves the user experience and brings new features.  It works very stable – I think only remember one or two downtimes in the last three years.  Their web interface is very handy and the mobile app works well too.  They have plenty of browser add-ons to make things even easier.

All in all, it’s well worth $5 per month for me.

Announcing JSON Feed

Straight from the JSON Feed homepage:

We — Manton Reece and Brent Simmons — have noticed that JSON has become the developers’ choice for APIs, and that developers will often go out of their way to avoid XML. JSON is simpler to read and write, and it’s less prone to bugs.

So we developed JSON Feed, a format similar to RSS and Atom but in JSON. It reflects the lessons learned from our years of work reading and publishing feeds.

See the spec. It’s at version 1, which may be the only version ever needed. If future versions are needed, version 1 feeds will still be valid feeds.

Sounds interesting…

A year without Google Reader

Mashable reminds us that it’s been a year since Google Reader has been decommissioned.  They are also doing a survey to find out if people use more of RSS feeds now or less, what they’ve substituted it with and which tools people are using now to follow their favorite feeds.

I’ve completed the survey, but without any visible results just yet, I thought I’d talk about my situation here.  In the last year my use of RSS has decreased significantly.   Even though the actual number of the feeds I am subscribed to has increased, I read them less.  I share less.  I bookmark and blog about less.  And it’ nothing but the tool’s fault.  Even though Feedly is an excellent tool – fast, flexible, with mobile support, and aesthetically pleasing, it simply is not Google Reader, which I was practically embed into.  I’ve looked around for Google Reader alternatives, I tried a few.  Feedly is the best of the bunch for my taste, but it’s different.

So, with that in mind, what happened to all that free time that I used to spend in Google Reader?  Sadly, I have to admit that I’m much more on Facebook now.  Quality-wise, that’s a huge drop.  Instead of following my favorite writers, keeping in touch with all kinds of technology advances, and learning new things, I am now participating in flaming comment wars about nothing, and watching videos of cute kittens and bouncing boobs.  Cheap entertainment swallowed me and spat me out.  It’s exactly like never switching a television set was in the last century.  And it’s a pity.

And the saddest part is that I knew it would happen.  And if I knew, Google definitely knew that too.  And they killed Google Reader anyway.  And it’ll be a long time until I let it go…

Moving the RSS to Feedly

I’ve wrote a few posts on this blog in regards to RSS aggregators and a very unfortunate plug pull on Google Reader last year.  Since then, I’ve been a happy user of Bazqux.  But in the last couple of weeks, I’ve been trying (yes, once again) Feedly and I decided that I finally like it enough to use it as my main RSS aggregator.  The interface has been further polished, the mobile and tablet apps are nicer than those that support Bazqux, and overall it is very pleasant on the eye without being too much in the way.

feedly

Gladly, the migration of RSS feeds from one place to another has been sorted out years ago – by simply exporting the list into OPML file and them importing the list at another place.  The only annoyance being the unread items count for a while, but those are quickly updated.

Aggregating feeds isn’t all that simple

As I mentioned a few times, one of my first start-up ideas was an RSS aggregator.  It was back in 2005 or so, before Google Reader was even alive.  Bloglines was the coolest tool, if I remember correctly, and it sucked badly.  I got together with a few friends of mine and we started coding.  It was an interesting challenge both technically and aesthetically.  But we got it to the point where it actually worked and wasn’t all too bad.  It was a weird mixture of Python, Perl, and PHP though.

Eventually, it became too much work.  We couldn’t figure out how to monetize the thing.  And Google Reader was announced.  That sort of killed the project.

A few month back, when the announcement of Google Reader’s end of life came out, I looked at the alternatives and wasn’t pleased.  I thought with all the technical advances in the last few years, and with my own improved knowledge, I could attempt the task again.  Yes, I know, I am hopeless optimist in a lot of matters.

At least this time it took just a few days to convince me not to pursue the goal.  Alternatives are plentiful.  Each and every one of them is light years ahead.  I still don’t enjoy front-end development.  And I still have no clue as to how to monetize it.  So, the Subs Reader got frozen.  At least I got it all in frameworks, and left it in the Open Source state.  If I ever will have another try, I can pick up from here.

One of the biggest mistakes I’ve done the last time, was not documenting the project’s process at all.  I vaguely remember that I didn’t sleep for a few nights, trying to figure out all kinds of problems.  But what were they, I don’t remember.

Today, I came across a blog post which lists similar problems that I had to solve, but in greater number and variety.  Even if you aren’t thinking about writing your own RSS reader any time soon (or ever), you should still read through the Brian’s stupid feed tricks.  First of all, they clearly illustrate how much complexity is hiding in the details.  Secondly, they show non-standard is the web in general and RSS in particular.  If you do any kind of web crawling, you’d probably see half of the same issues in your application.  Thirdly, even if you aren’t crawling the web at all, but just code a web application or an API to one, you’ll many places where you can go wrong without noticing it.  All in all, it’s a great list of problems that everybody involved in web development can learn from.