June 11, 2004

• I love RSS. There are very few regular news sites/weblogs that I keep up with that don't have a decent RSS feed. Okay, one, and that one is Slashdot. It has RSS, but it's perhaps the suckiest of RSS feeds. For me, a decent RSS feed will make or break a site. That being said, I don't require the entire content of a post to be sent via RSS. I'm perfectly happy getting a decent amount of summary (more than just a title, preferably), and going to the website to get the rest.
• Same here. As a user, I love RSS, esp. since I started using firefox with the RSS reader extension. Too many sites to keep track of. I have no idea if it brings more readers to a site, although I'm quite confident it does if I take my own RSS consumption as a reference.
• Confused by third link?
• I've tried it out a couple time for a few minutes and didn't really see the point. I'm not sure what the advantage of it really is. I have a bunch of tabs bookmarked and I just click, click, click them closed in firefox. If someone could explain teh advantage to me, I'll try it again.
• For the other side, as an infrequent weblog poster, I love RSS, because I know that anyone who has interest in my site can get updates without have to constantly check and become disappointed at the lack of content. Sure, it'd be even better if I posted daily, but I'm not all that interesting, so this works out better for me. Captain, the third link is to a relatively popular webcomic who doesn't appreciate people reading his comic through RSS feeds, where he gets no ad revenue from it. Apparently he found such a feed and made sure they received that comic rather than the daily one. jccalhoun, on of the advantages is that the checks happen without your intervention, so you can work on whatever it is you work on, but still keep up with events that come in with minimal fuss. Even more useful is if you really like a weblog poster, such as Neil Gaiman, Wil Wheaton, or Andy Ihnatko, who post somewhat regualarly to infrequently, depending on what's going on in their lives. You will find out within 15 minutes (give or take, depending on refresh rate) of a new post, whereas it might be months between posts, so that would be quite a bit of extra clicking for little reward. And if the topic of the post is timely, such as "I'll be in your town for a signing tour tomorrow at 3 PM", it's really handy to get the information when it comes out, rather than a couple of weeks later when you happen to check. Finally, it minimizes the amount of time you spend looking at things you aren't interested. Because it's optimized for speed of looking through summaries, you can click-click-click past the uninteresting stories with minimal difficulty. It's all in one program, and all easy to get to, so it saves much time and effort. And if you have the RSS reader for one reason, it's really easy to add on the extra sites to cover any of the other reasons.
• I'm a big fan of it because it shows everything in the same context. It also allows me to receive content that I normally wouldn't otherwise. For example, I love reading Atrios, but I probably wouldn't think to go to his site everyday. Times that by thirty or fourty, and you have my RSS list.
• At first, I hated RSS, but, lately, I have changed my mind. I'm not sure why I changed my mind. Maybe since it feels like it takes less time; however, I probably now read more blogs than I did before I started using RSS. For PC/MAC, I really like the web based Bloglines and for my PocketPC, I like Egress.
• Thanks Koant, I just added the extension. It is really handy. I don't know how I feel about RSS yet. There's something about actually visiting a site that is more appealing to me...I like pretty colors.
• There aren't many tech topics I have more mixed emotions about. On the one hand, RSS is a great tool for keeping track of a couple of high volume sites I need to keep an eye on. On the other hand, when you use the tool you've been given, the owners whine that you're skipping their click-throughs or that you're refreshing too often. On the third hand, for little sites like my own, it's silly to bother with the maintenance and overhead that setting up an RSS feed needs. If you care about what's growing in my garden or the latest (hah!) developments in M programming, put it in your bookmarks and click it once a week. Oh, and despite what "they" say, RSS is still effectively controlled by Dave "Weiner" Winer, which is enough to put me off it permanently.
• Well, now, I've been meaning for some time now to switch to RSS, to get away from my daily round of clicking the entire contents of my bookmark folder over and over again. I'm going to need to have it soon anyway for my job, to use as a kind of AP wire for the interweb. Anyway, you can imagine my surprise when the whole thing turns out to be an elaborate joke played by a cliquey circle of internet A-listers on unsuspecting suckers like me! There's no such thing as RSS feeds! And all RSS Readers do is bugger you about something rotten on installation, then just sit there giving you 403 codes for every single feed! Oh, how I laughed. Even Koant's link to the firefox extension was amusingly useless, because my (presumably unique) version of firefox seems reluctant to acknowledge that there's such a thing as extensions! Ha! Ahahahahaha! Oh, it's been a fun night. *goes to bed in a baffled daze*
• Informative link, thanks, shawnj, now I have a better grasp of how it works for a user.
• I set up my My Yahoo page with rss feeds for MoFi, Mefi, and /. just to see what they were like. I don't really see the point for those three because all they provide is the headlines, and I tend to read everything (at least on the 'filters) regardless of content. But if anyone has suggestions for the MoFi feed, let me know. I know nothing about them but I'll work on it at some point if necessary.
• I think I figured out why RSS doesn't work for me. I'm a grad student and I use at least 4 different computers a day hopping around from home and various computer labas and my office. I think if I had a job where I was infront of one computer all day then RSS would make more sense for me.
• Jccalhoun - me too. Try bloglines.
• That was me, but the cookie was my little brother's. Now you know.
• Part of the fun of the internet, for me, is surfing it. Typing in the URLs (I only bookmark sites I visit infrequently enough to forget the domains) and scanning the pages for delicious pieces of web content. I find nothing offensive about RSS, though. I've made use of it from time to time, and it certainly has its uses. To each their own, says I. I don't know if it kills traffic to websites, though. I'd assume people reading feeds of a specific site would be more likely to visit said site.
• tracicle, my only request for the MoFi feed is to add the URL and URL Description in front of the Link Description. People have a tendancy to use it as part of the first sentence, and at the moment it gets left out. So you would make me a very happy monkey if that were added in.