Use of RSS

[Roedy Green]

Someone wrote me suggesting I should publish my what's new section at
http://mindprod.com/whatsnew.html as an RSS feed.

I have read several articles on RSS but I still don't get it. What
advantage accrues to anyone by converting the html that gives the only
relevant information: link and description to a great fat wad of XML
that says the same thing in 10 times as many characters?

I can see the benefit if I were publishing someone else's news where I
want to track non-Internet sources, but I can't see how it is of any
use to anyone tracking what's new on your own site.

Is the idea you are hoping others will suck that up and republish it
else where as news?

 

[Monique Y. Mudama]

Someone wrote me suggesting I should publish my what's new section
at http://mindprod.com/whatsnew.html as an RSS feed.

I have read several articles on RSS but I still don't get it. What
advantage accrues to anyone by converting the html that gives the
only relevant information: link and description to a great fat wad
of XML that says the same thing in 10 times as many characters?

I can see the benefit if I were publishing someone else's news where
I want to track non-Internet sources, but I can't see how it is of
any use to anyone tracking what's new on your own site.

Is the idea you are hoping others will suck that up and republish it
else where as news?

I use a program called rss2email to subscribe to sites that interest
me. The program polls the feeds every so often and emails me if
there's anything new. This way, I don't have to check the site for
new stuff; the new stuff is delivered right to my inbox. If I'm
interested, I follow the link included in the feed.

I use or have used this for:

a friend's blog
ThinkGeek new items
Slashdot articles
Washington Post articles
Debian Planet

I really wish every site of interest had an RSS feed, as it makes it a
lot easier for me to track the stuff I care about.

I eventually unsubscribed from /. and WP because the sheer volume of
articles threatened to drown me. Most of them were at least a little
bit interesting, so I tended to save them off but never get around to
reading them.

I would definitely find a "what's new" RSS feed for your java glossary
useful, and would probably subscribe to it.

 

[Alan Krueger]

Someone wrote me suggesting I should publish my what's new section at
http://mindprod.com/whatsnew.html as an RSS feed.

I have read several articles on RSS but I still don't get it. What
advantage accrues to anyone by converting the html that gives the only
relevant information: link and description to a great fat wad of XML
that says the same thing in 10 times as many characters?

HTML is text with meta-data in a mostly standard format. The meta-data
carries formatting information.

RSS is text with meta-data in a mostly standard format. The meta-data
carries publication information. This contains enough information to
generate HTML formatting information, but contains semantic information
that would require scraping software to extract from HTML.

I can see the benefit if I were publishing someone else's news where I
want to track non-Internet sources, but I can't see how it is of any
use to anyone tracking what's new on your own site.

Perhaps it's the ability for software to automatically determine what's
new in the RSS document by the publication date meta-data. In HTML,
this isn't represented in a standard, structured way and would have to
be scraped in a custom way for each site.

 

[Oliver Wong]

Someone wrote me suggesting I should publish my what's new section at
http://mindprod.com/whatsnew.html as an RSS feed.

I have read several articles on RSS but I still don't get it. What
advantage accrues to anyone by converting the html that gives the only
relevant information: link and description to a great fat wad of XML
that says the same thing in 10 times as many characters?

I can see the benefit if I were publishing someone else's news where I
want to track non-Internet sources, but I can't see how it is of any
use to anyone tracking what's new on your own site.

Is the idea you are hoping others will suck that up and republish it
else where as news?

With a typical RSS reader, adding an RSS feed to your site conceptually
makes additions to your site act like e-mail. That is, as long as a user is
subscribed to your site, and has their RSS reader open, they will be
notified when they've "received" new entries from your site, which they can
probably read straight from their RSS reader, or click on to be taken to
your site.

As such, RSS feeds work best for sites that periodically update
themselves with short to medium content, like e-mails. I'm not sure how well
it would work for a glossary, though I do subscribe to an RSS feed that
selects some random Japanese characters daily as a sort of "here's something
I should learn today" notification (I'm trying to learn Japanese).

The benefit is that you don't actually have to go visit the site to see
if there's anything new or not. I have some friends who use a pre-packaged
blogging software, and they don't have an RSS feed, so I have to actually
manually navigate to their site and read the top most entry to see if it's
something new or not. Very annoying, and it feels like I've wasted my time
when I go there and see nothing has been updated.

Some of my other friends DO have an RSS feed for their blog, so I never
have to actually go to their site to check. The RSS reader checks for me,
and it'll display unread items in bold, and read items in a lighter font, so
I can quickly see, for every blog I'm subscribed to, who has updated and who
hasn't.

- Oliver