4 ms·

A proper standard for syncing rss? So that, like email, you just have to point your various clients at the address of the sync server you are using. That can be

A proper standard for syncing rss? So that, like email, you just have to point your various clients at the address of the sync server you are using. That can be one you run yourself or one from some third party provider. If your provider closes you can just point your clients at the new service, without each client needing to implement a new custom API. You are also free to use whatever client(s) you want. It seems to me like this should have been part of RSS since the beginning. The web community seems disinterested in developing standards other than presentational ones (HTML/CSS), I guess largely for commercial reasons: the creators of services want to lock you into their specific (magic hip RESTful JSON) API. Five years ago, if you wanted to show content from one site or app on your own site or app, you could use a simple, documented format to do so, without requiring a business-development deal or contractual agreement between the sites. Thus, user experiences weren’t subject to the vagaries of the political battles between different companies, but instead were consistently based on the extensible architecture of the web itself. -- Anil Dash [1] [1] http://adactio.com/journal/6291/ http://adactio.com/journal/6291/

veidr 13y ago
Yep, you are exactly right, that is the only proper solution. Like you say, though, the proverbial "community" doesn't seem any closer to building that then they were when Google Reader was created in 2005. I had hoped that the demise of the proprietary Google Reader would finally inspire the creation of such an open standard, but so far all it seems to have inspired is more crap like Google Reader... (But, lacking the good solution, I would still pay for another crappy proprietary solution in the meantime.)
zeckalpha 13y ago
What about something as simple as reusing IMAP for RSS?
- veidr 13y ago
  I actually hacked up a feed-horfer that populated an IMAP account some years ago. IMAP gets you like 90% of the way there. There's no facility for updating items, that was about the only thing really wrong with it from the end user perspective, assuming you are okay with storing the full text of tens of thousands of items when you will only read 2% of them. But I don't see anything wrong with that in an era where even our phones have 64GB of storage... EDIT (my touch device over zealously submitted): but IMAP isn't the right solution, even though it could work, and work better than google reader even. A RSS sync system really shouldn't require the user to download all the items and then sync against their own copies of them---it should be able to sync what has been read[1] based on the canonical URI of the item, with some intelligence to grok the mod dates to track updated items. Storage isn't a problem anymore for mostly-textual content, but mobile latency and data caps are. [1]: and, in my opinion, notnjust what has been read, but what has been flagged, labeled, tagged, reposted, liked, hated, and／おr assigned whatever other arbitrary metadata
  - bentcorner 13y ago
    It seems like it gets you far enough. A custom IMAP client can just not download anything locally (just grab the headers and cache content of anything you've read), plus UI niceties (click on header to navigate to page). IMAP allows you to use this reader on platforms where no friendly client exists yet.
    - veidr 13y ago
      Oh yeah, totally; by having to "download all the items" I meant on the server. Assuming your were importing feed to an IMAP server that you owned, and reading feeds with a standard IMAP mail client. (Sounds kludgey, but really did work better than 90% of solutions to date.) But if you mean a provider providing IMAP access to RSS feeds, that could work great. I don't know how to deal with updated items, but there is probably a way, especially if you had a custom client for key platforms. And 2nd tier platforms could still use an IMAP mail client. Ok! Great idea, so... Somebody: go!!
- StavrosK 13y ago
  That... actually sounds like a fantastic idea. One folder per feed, you could read your feeds with your email client. Interesting...
  - TranceMan 13y ago
    That's how I view some rss feeds via thunderbird: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Thunderbird_:_FAQs_:_RSS_Basics http://kb.mozillazine.org/Thunderbird_:_FAQs_:_RSS_Basics Edit: Also this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5939742 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5939742
  - Concours 13y ago
    Stavros, that's exactly what we do at http://www.feedsapi.org http://www.feedsapi.org , we make it simple for our users to read their full text rss feeds from the comfort or ANY email client and we also delivr those in realtime (under 60 seconds).
    - StavrosK 13y ago
      Oh man, your site is pretty but the initial summary is waaaay too intense: > Yes, Others May Offer “Real time” RSS To Email or RSS Readers for Free. But They Do NOT Fetch The Full Articles Content. They Do NOT Send Full Content but Only The Titles with Ads. They Do Not Fetch The Content in Real Time, They Call 15-minutes Real Time. We Check Your Sources Every 30 Seconds. That IS Real Time. They Do NOT Turn Shortened RSS Feeds Into Full Text RSS Feeds. They Do NOT Support other RSS Reader , We Support ALL RSS Reader Clients And You Do NOT Need Yet Another RSS Reader When Using Our RSS to Email Feature. You Do Not Need to Signin To Yet Another RSS Reader to Read Your Favourite News Articles, Feeds And Blogs, We Bring Them To You. Real-time isn't something I'm really worried about, RSS feeds aren't something I read in real-time, they're something I let accumulate until I have some downtime. That said, your service is pretty useful, but not for my usage. I prefer something that doesn't clutter my inbox and just sits there with tens of unread items until I get to it. I would love it if you provided an actual IMAP mailbox I could connect to and read RSS with my email client.
      - 13y ago

veidr 13y ago

Yep, you are exactly right, that is the only proper solution. Like you say, though, the proverbial "community" doesn't seem any closer to building that then they were when Google Reader was created in 2005. I had hoped that the demise of the proprietary Google Reader would finally inspire the creation of such an open standard, but so far all it seems to have inspired is more crap like Google Reader... (But, lacking the good solution, I would still pay for another crappy proprietary solution in the meantime.)

zeckalpha 13y ago

What about something as simple as reusing IMAP for RSS?

veidr 13y ago
I actually hacked up a feed-horfer that populated an IMAP account some years ago. IMAP gets you like 90% of the way there. There's no facility for updating items, that was about the only thing really wrong with it from the end user perspective, assuming you are okay with storing the full text of tens of thousands of items when you will only read 2% of them. But I don't see anything wrong with that in an era where even our phones have 64GB of storage... EDIT (my touch device over zealously submitted): but IMAP isn't the right solution, even though it could work, and work better than google reader even. A RSS sync system really shouldn't require the user to download all the items and then sync against their own copies of them---it should be able to sync what has been read[1] based on the canonical URI of the item, with some intelligence to grok the mod dates to track updated items. Storage isn't a problem anymore for mostly-textual content, but mobile latency and data caps are. [1]: and, in my opinion, notnjust what has been read, but what has been flagged, labeled, tagged, reposted, liked, hated, and／おr assigned whatever other arbitrary metadata
- bentcorner 13y ago
  It seems like it gets you far enough. A custom IMAP client can just not download anything locally (just grab the headers and cache content of anything you've read), plus UI niceties (click on header to navigate to page). IMAP allows you to use this reader on platforms where no friendly client exists yet.
  - veidr 13y ago
    Oh yeah, totally; by having to "download all the items" I meant on the server. Assuming your were importing feed to an IMAP server that you owned, and reading feeds with a standard IMAP mail client. (Sounds kludgey, but really did work better than 90% of solutions to date.) But if you mean a provider providing IMAP access to RSS feeds, that could work great. I don't know how to deal with updated items, but there is probably a way, especially if you had a custom client for key platforms. And 2nd tier platforms could still use an IMAP mail client. Ok! Great idea, so... Somebody: go!!
StavrosK 13y ago
That... actually sounds like a fantastic idea. One folder per feed, you could read your feeds with your email client. Interesting...
- TranceMan 13y ago
  That's how I view some rss feeds via thunderbird: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Thunderbird_:_FAQs_:_RSS_Basics http://kb.mozillazine.org/Thunderbird_:_FAQs_:_RSS_Basics Edit: Also this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5939742 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5939742
- Concours 13y ago
  Stavros, that's exactly what we do at http://www.feedsapi.org http://www.feedsapi.org , we make it simple for our users to read their full text rss feeds from the comfort or ANY email client and we also delivr those in realtime (under 60 seconds).
  - StavrosK 13y ago
    Oh man, your site is pretty but the initial summary is waaaay too intense: > Yes, Others May Offer “Real time” RSS To Email or RSS Readers for Free. But They Do NOT Fetch The Full Articles Content. They Do NOT Send Full Content but Only The Titles with Ads. They Do Not Fetch The Content in Real Time, They Call 15-minutes Real Time. We Check Your Sources Every 30 Seconds. That IS Real Time. They Do NOT Turn Shortened RSS Feeds Into Full Text RSS Feeds. They Do NOT Support other RSS Reader , We Support ALL RSS Reader Clients And You Do NOT Need Yet Another RSS Reader When Using Our RSS to Email Feature. You Do Not Need to Signin To Yet Another RSS Reader to Read Your Favourite News Articles, Feeds And Blogs, We Bring Them To You. Real-time isn't something I'm really worried about, RSS feeds aren't something I read in real-time, they're something I let accumulate until I have some downtime. That said, your service is pretty useful, but not for my usage. I prefer something that doesn't clutter my inbox and just sits there with tens of unread items until I get to it. I would love it if you provided an actual IMAP mailbox I could connect to and read RSS with my email client.
    - 13y ago