BBC RSS feeds
June 25th, 2003
The BBC have released official RSS feeds for all 68 of their news indexes. Matt Jones put the word out, and Dave Winer has published a full list.
Six months ago this wouldn't have mattered to me one bit, but my move to OS X has opened my eyes to how handy RSS feeds can be. On my PC I used Feedreader, which was a decent enough program except that once I went offline it would stop checking for refreshed feeds completely until I manually closed down and restarted the program. Since the whole point of a desktop RSS aggregator is that it does all the work and just brings stories to my attention as they appear, this was less than satisfactory. NetNewsWire running under OS X has shown me just how useful RSS feeds can really be. It's not perfect – most notably, it doesn't allow me to set refresh intervals for individual subscriptions – but it's pretty damn usable and very stable.
Which, getting back to the point I started out with, is why I'm so happy to see the BBC expend on their initial limited release of feeds last year. An RSS aggregator with a good selection of newsfeeds comes about as close as anything I've seen so far to the ideal of the personalised newspaper we were all promised as part of the communications revolution, so the ability to read BBC News Online (and The Guardian) as RSS feeds is highly gratifying.
Oddly enough, I find reading weblogs via RSS feeds deeply unsatisfying. There are a couple of factors at work here. First, I find it much more comfortable to read weblog entries in context. I like seeing an individual's entries for a day or week in sequence, rubbing up against one another the way the writer intended them. Second, it seems a shame to miss out on some of the spiffy site designs people with some actual design talent come up with. (And yes, I do realise that nobody reading this site's RSS feed would be missing much design-wise.) The third factor is that RSS feeds, while common, are by no means universal: I'd be somewhat more attracted to using an RSS reader for weblog reading if it would completely cut out my daily journey through the Weblogs section of my bookmarks. If I'm going to go through that folder anyway, I might as well see my favourite sites in all their glory.
[Pointer to Matt Jones' announcement via Something ~ better than nothing]
June 25th, 2003 at 23:57
Wouldn't it be a nice idea if you explained exactly what RSS feeds were rather than just say how good they are? I'm sure most people who visit don't know either
June 26th, 2003 at 00:26
Fair enough. RSS is a technology for taking content from a web site – such as individual news articles or weblog posts – and packaging it one entry at a time. The owner of a web site can set up their RSS feed to show just a headline, a headline and a brief summary, or the entire content of an article.
Using an 'RSS aggregator' like Feedreader or NetNewsWire you can gather information from RSS feeds at the sites of your choice and display the content of each site as a series of headlines, then choose whether to read the headline or article in your aggregator or else launch the related web site article in your web browser.
The trick is that once you've set up your RSS aggregator with a list of sites to watch it'll automagically check the sites for updates at regular intervals and alert you as the sites are updated. It's much more efficient than loading up full web pages every thirty minutes and reading them to see if they've been updated.
You can get a taste of RSS feeds by using a web site like NewsIsFree which allows you to set up an account, tell the site to watch a set of RSS feeds for you and display the results online. (In one respect this is better than using an RSS aggregator program on your own PC, since it's available to you anywhere you have access to the web.)
June 27th, 2003 at 02:10
Thanks.
So basically it's just a more convinent way of checking if a site has updated with anything interesting without having to go there? I take it it's only useful if you do this with several sites otherwise you may as well go to the site and check yourself. Then again it does tell you when to check I guess but it must put some load on the server
June 27th, 2003 at 07:25
Yes, it's best used to monitor lots of sites.
An RSS feed normally contains only a small portion of the content on the average weblog/news site page – in my case, it's just the content of my last few posts, without all the stuff in my sidebar which is essentially static or useless out of the context of the page – so the load on the server is rather less than it would be if someone had to download my site's entire page every time I made a single post. Some sites only set up their RSS feed to show the titles of posts, or just a brief excerpt of each post, thereby reducing the size of the RSS feed and the load on their server even more.