I have been a heavy user of
RSS since around 2001 or 2002.
I subscribed to some
Netscape channels
using the first incarnation of RSS back in the late 1990s. That was quite a while ago. It was interesting but interest fizzled out after a couple of years. It almost caught on back then, but not quite.
A year or two later, some folks resurrected it. RSS would not die.
At first, I just subscribed to RSS feeds with RSS news aggregators like the originally one at O'Reilly. They called their
Meerkat
and they just announced its retirement a few months ago.
I also subscribed to a lot of RSS news feeds using the popular Yahoo portal website
http://my.yahaoo.com/Then I got a fantastic application for the Macintosh called
NetNewsWire.
The great thing about NetNewsWire is that it made finding, subscribing too, searching/filtering, and reading RSS feeds a breeze. I started using it back when it was in beta and I was probably one of the author's first customers for that product.
I still use NetNewsWire to this day. It is one of my most oft-used programs on my computer. It is the best way I have of
keeping an eye peeled
on the tech worlds that I am intent on keeping up with.
When I heard about Dave Wiener's
Radio service for doing something called
blogging
back around 2002, I had to try it. I subscribed and posted on it a bit. Eventually, I got kind of bored with Radio.
There was too
much complexity. Too
many things were going on that I really did not understand, at least at the time. It seemed kind of
slow on my Mac too.
A couple years ago, after Google bought the Blogger service - they decided to make it free.
I piled on with my second attempt at a half-decent weblog -
Johnny Software Saloon.
The idea was to muse about little things going on in the world of software in a relaxed, informal way. Like the atmosphere in a saloon - only without the fights.
It has not proven really popular. At least as far as I can tell.
I think that is because it discusses so many different topics under the broad categories of software, programming, and computing - it does not really have a chance for an avid following. Not unless you are a Mac-loving, Java-swilling, XML-enthusiast like myself.
Almost exactly a year ago,
Apple computer turned the switch
on
for their new podcasting subscription service via
iTunes and the wildly popular iTunes music store.
I had been subscribing to a few podcasts for about a year. But when Apple did that, let me tell you - the podcasting world exploded.
This year, my
TiVo started letting me subscribe to audio podcasts and to certain select video blogs (AKA vlogs) such as Rocket Boom.
All of these things rely on RSS to get their message out.
What is RSS?
A lot of people assume it is a protocol. Nothing could be
further from the truth.
Like so many things in the post-2000 high tech world, RSS is simply a file format. Yet one more file format based on XML, actually, is what it is.
RSS is one file format that pretty much all programmers should learn. Certainly any programmers who work with the Internet, intranets, or web applications. Arguably, any programmer who works on software that produces or allows the editing of documents should be learning it too.
RSS is a very handy solution to a very common problem: keeping track of what is new. It can actually be used to catalog an entire set of things too.
RSS does not presume the presence or use of networking, really. All the links to other documents use URLs.
But a URL uses a network, right?
Nope. Ever see a URL that starts off with something that looks like
file://
?
Well, that is about as non-network related as anything could be! It simply says I want to read a file from the local computer.
Now, underlying that there could be virtual file systems, pseudo file systems mocked up by some application-specific program hooked into the operating system or language/development runtime environment, or a networked file system. Who cares?
The important thing is it is referring to a document, and it wants that document if they link is activated/traversed.
The
Flock and Safari web browsers come with excellent RSS support for them built right in.
Firefox has some RSS support (
live bookmarks
) but I find the current version (1.5) of Firefox pretty weak as an RSS client. When I do use it for that, I use the Sage extension.
Sage is a free sidebar extension for Firefox. You can open Sage when you want to do some RSS reading or subscribing, and ignore it when you are not. It has its own bookmarks view, so that you do not have to hunt for them in your regular bookmarks.
When Firefox 2.0 comes out later in 2006, it is supposed to have some improved RSS support. I hope so. It really is not nearly as convenient for RSS news feed reading as everything else out there right now. It does work but it is not particularly useful.
Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 is supposed to have RSS feed support in it. As far as I know, it is okay. I have not seen it yet. I am all read up on the standards, so my attitude as far as what it can do with them is,
surprise me
.
Well, that is a good overview of what the RSS document standard is and how it is being used by some of the most popular and powerful programs and services. I know I left a few off but I think anyone can find any major ones extremely quickly by searching or asking someone.
Respectively RSS,
John
