Aug 22, 2007

RSS Feeds - I Hate that I love you (+ favor asking)

When you only get time to check the internet twice a week, on mondays and wednesdays, because you have to spend your summer at an internet-free house, it becomes a challenge to stay up-to-date with everything going on in the symbian and tech world. Even the 2 days you have access to a connection are barely enough to check your mail, visit some of your favorite blogs and read what you missed.

And there comes RSS feeds. If I knew the man/company behind this amazing idea, I would run right now and hug him/them.

[ Edit: from Wikipedia,
RDF Site Summary, the first version of RSS, was created by Ramanathan V. Guha of Netscape in March 1999 for use on the My Netscape portal. This version became known as RSS 0.9. In July 1999, responding to comments and suggestions, Dan Libby produced a prototype tentatively named RSS 0.91 (RSS standing for Rich Site Summary), that simplified the format and incorporated parts of Dave Winer's Scripting News format.
Can anyone get me those Guha and Libby guys addresses now? ]

I just love the concept :) What I do right now is check my favorite blogs quickly when I'm online, then connect my Qtek with Active Sync, run SPB Insight which uses my laptop ADSL connection to update all my news. I then have all the time in the world, when I'm swinging in Kleiat and enjoying the nice breeze, to get updated on what I missed during the days I wasn't connected. I then mark as unread the news I have to comment on or continue reading and the news that contain a link I need to follow... so I can perform these operations when I'm at Beirut again. Sweet!

To tell you the truth, it's not until a couple of months ago that I started using RSS (that's why I'm still excited and impressed). For a year or so, I had been seeing that orange icon on websites, never bothering to check the real story behind it. And when I finally discovered what it was, I thought that it wasn't such a big deal because I didn't have an internet connection on my mobile device and using RSS on the laptop would be ridiculous (if I'm online, why not check the whole site?). It's not until I tried the RSS feature in MobiReader that later connects to my 3250, that I knew how precious and time-saving it was. I even wonder how I've managed to live without it.

One big let down I face, not correlated with the technology itself, but with bloggers, is the fact that some feeds only contain headers, or a header with a couple of lines. It's ridiculous. Almost like showing a kid a lollipop then telling him he won't have it. Please fellow bloggers, we want FULL FEEDS, I know you'll be losing some site traffic, but it's only for the good cause of readers like me who can't access your sites everyday.

P.S : "I Hate that I love you" is a nice RnB song by Rihanna and Ne-Yo.

2 comments:

  1. well...rss was intended as a site summary....just like the snippets on the front page of a newspaper...and u have to turn to some other page to read the full article... only if it interests you !! :D

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  2. well yeah I agree about rss being a site summary at first, but now it's more of a news delivery system, and it's kinda frustrating to have half your news available :(

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