Hey all… this site still has an RSS feed, and I’m not sure who’s using it or why, but it’s there. Do let me know.
Shameful admission: rss.asp is actually an ASP page, which hits the database every time it’s requested, which is silly as hell. The ideal solution would be to write a text file whenever I update or add an entry, since the file should be static until I do that again. No database hit, no overhead. (A close second would be an ASP page that used proper caching… but since I don’t run the server this page uses, I don’t know if they’ve got caching on, severely minimized to reduce impact to the shared environment, or what. Anyway.)
I have three or four tools for parsing RSS and working with it.
First is SharpReader, which is great, but slow, and I’m sure there’s a good reason for that. That treats changes to a feed like a new email: it can notify you each time, it sets each headline to bold, until you read it, then it’s not… so subscribing to a feed that feeds more than you can handle is not recommended.
My Yahoo offers you the top N links in any feed, but does nothing with the description. That’s got its place, but if I were to use it to stay on top of blogs, I’d still be asking myself "did I already read this? Should I click?"
You might not know that Firefox will check an RSS feed and insert it into your bookmarks (although they foolishly call it a Live Bookmark, when it’s really a collection of links, and a bookmark is just one link). This is awesome for feeds like the del.icio.us/popular page (one click access to fifty-or-so timewasters! perfect!), but also awesome for feeds like del.icio.us/dnordquist/bands, which can be bookmarked just the same. Any time I add something to my bands list, it just shows up in any Firefox that has that set as a Live Bookmark. Boss. A lot of feeds are links-and-not-content. FARK has a feed like that. So does blogdex.
The fourth way is most similar to the My Yahoo thing: it’s what you see over to the right of this page on my Netflix, flickr, and Audioscrobbler panels. I’ve got a little bit of code that actually syndicates the content of other sites: if I wanted to put the most recent posts of Cratchit, Meister, and MC Chris together on this page, I could do that.
But I still feel like I’m missing out on something important about RSS. I’d like to see more of my vital intarweb data in RSS form, so I could really keep track of things I don’t really need in email form, or more things from the real world (my dentist reminders, oil changes, etc.) as a reminder.
I might be making it too complicated. Anyway. The topic’s open for discussion.
