How's it going?
I've found a lot of more detailed answers relating to specific problems relating to RSS feeds, but I can't really figure out how you USE one, basically.
Could someone explain?
I see the RSS feed icon at the top of a lot of Wordpress sites, including my own, but when I click it, it just seems to be a long XML file. I don't know what to do with it, or even why it would be there.
How do you use this? Are you meant to hit it with an API request, or is there a particular kind of software that you use?
Cheers
Before telling you what RSS, let me describe you a common problem that many people have.
Say there is a bunch of sites that you really like and it's sort of a
daily routine for you to go thru them. They may be a news site, your
friend's blog, but also craigslist bcause you're currently looking for
a new house and maybe a weather site to know how late you should stay
at work :)
The first thing you do when you get to work, is open your web browser
and these sites in new tabs. It's not particularly cumbersome because
there are just 4 sites. But think about it: maybe there is a new blog
that you start to like and ho, these cartoons are really funny. Maybe
there is also a bit of financial info that you're interested in and
the pictures that your brother is posting to Flickr every couple day:
they just had a new baby! Also, as you're trying to buy a house, you'd
love a little raise and you've figured that your boss really likes it
when you tell her that you've read about your company in the news or
when you tell her about a new competing product... There is also
StackOverflow. You're desperately trying to get this "expert" badge
and boost up your reputation: this may help with your boss too or even
when you're looking for a new job.
Opening all these tabs is starting to take a toll and you keep
forgetting an important one. You're also slowly getting tired of the
different reading experience that all these sites have: small fonts,
large fonts, ads all over...etc. Now you have a problem.
Imagine there is a tool that does the following: you can tell it what sites you care about, and then, this tool will look up the new stuff for you. It will show everything in a nice looking format. It should also help you identify what's really worth seeing ASAP or maybe have some kind of "serendipity" mode that you can go into and find interesting stuff that you would have missed otherwise. The tool will obviously send you to the original sites should you need more info about any particular story or classified...
This tool exists. It's usually called a Reader, mostly because it lets your read more things online. Often times you'll see them called "RSS reader", because RSS is what they use to get the information from all these sites. RSS is the pipe. You as a user should probably not know about it, but that's what the readers depend on. In an ideal world, when you're on site you like, you should just hit "follow" on a button like this one and then you'd be redirected to your reader of choice. Later when new content is added, you'll get it straight in your reader.
To get a bit into more technical details, RSS (like Atom) is an XML flavor. It's a collection (mostly reverse chronological) of entries. Entries have at least a title and a link to the actual story. They should also include a unique identifier and could have other elements like a description, an image, tags, author information... etc.
RSS is great because it's content agnostic. It can be used to represent a lot of different things (as described in the little story) and decouples the publishing platform from the subscribing platform: they don't even know the other one exists. RSS is their lingua-franca.
I wrote a blog post about this very question not long ago. Here's the link if you're interested in reading my personal interpretation. https://www.rss.com/whatisrss
An XML file is all the content of a page, with no markup. The XML represents the data in its rawest, most descriptive form. Many readers can interpret XML sources from a variety of places, and format all of the data in its own unique way.
Related
I started using Hukkster.com a few days ago. It is really fast and accurate.
The bookmarklet of hukkster always fetches correct price from the product page.
This happens for all the featured merchants it supports.
I was really curious to know what technology stack they might me using for such a fast and accurate response ?
I have tried to search everything I could on google. I found nothing other than Hukkster success story, Hukkster in NEWS etc.
There was nothing related to technology stuff used by Hukkster.
It is Mozenda .
Found it. Here it is:
http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2012/08/29/the-founders-creators-of-new-shopping-app-hukkster-definitely-not-brogrammers/
The co-founders believed in their idea. There was just one problem–neither one knew how to code. They didn’t let that stop them. They developed a “paper prototype” that they could run without coding. They built a crawler using a data extraction service called Mozenda, and did the rest of Hukkster’s legwork with spreadsheets, emails and phones.
http://www.mozenda.com/
This question is coming from a non-technical person. I have asked a team to build a sort of RSS reader. In essence, its a news aggregator. What we had in mind at first was to source news directly from specific sources: ft.com, reuters.com, and bloomberg.com.
Now, the development team has proposed a certain way of doing it (because it'll be easier)... which is to use news.google.com and return whatever is the result. Now I know this has questionable legality and we are not really that comfortable with that fact, but while the legal department is checking that.. we have proceeded working with a prototype.
Now comes the technical problem... because the method was actually simulating search via news.google.com, after a period of time it returns a captcha. I'm suspicious that its because the method was SEARCHING WITH RESULTS SHOWN AS RSS as opposed to an outright RSS... however the dev team says RSS is exactly the same thing... and that it will give captcha as well.
I have my doubts. If thats the case, how have the other news aggregator sites done their compilation of feeds from different sources?
For your reference, here is the same of the URL that eventually gives the CAPTCHA
https://news.google.com/news/feeds?hl=en&gl=sg&as_qdr=a&authuser=0&q=dbs+bank+singapore&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.,cf.osb&biw=1280&bih=963&um=1&ie=UTF-8&output=rss
"Searching" is usually behind a captcha because it is very resource intensive, thus they do everything they can to prevent bots from searching. A normal RSS feed is the opposite of resource intensive. To summarize: normal RSS feeds will probably not trigger CAPTCHA's.
Since Google declared their News API deprecated as of May 26, 2011, maybe using NewsCred as suggested in this group post http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/news/RBRH8pihQJI could be an option for your commercial use.
So I have played with the idea of making a specialized RSS-reader for some time now, but I have never gotten around to it. I have several project that could benefit from reading feeds in one way or another.
One project for this is an RSS-bot for an IRC-channel I'm on. But I havent quite wrapped my mind around how I can "mark as read" a story, so that it doesn't spit out all the stories in the feed everytime it runs.
Now, I haven't read the specs extencively yet either, so there might be some kind of unique ID I could use to mark the entry as read using a database of some kind. But is this the right way to do it?
From reading the specs for RSS 2.0 at ttp://cyber.law.harvard.edu/rss/rss.html#hrelementsOfLtitemgt it seems each item has a GUID which you can use to know which articles have been read or not.
I've been experimenting with writing my own RSS reader. I can handle the "parse XML" bit. The thing I'm getting stuck on is "How do I fetch older posts?"
Most RSS feeds only list the 10-25 most recent items in their XML file. How do I get ALL the items in a feed, and not just the most recent ones?
The only solution I could find was using the "unofficial" Google Reader API, which would be something like
http://www.google.com/reader/atom/feed/http://fskrealityguide.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?n=1000
I don't want to make my application dependent on Google Reader.
Is there any better way? I noticed that on Blogger, I can do "?start-index=1&max-results=1000", and on WordPress I can do "?paged=5". Is there any general way to fetch an RSS feed so that it gives me everything, and not just the most recent items?
RSS/Atom feeds does not allow for historic information to be retrieved. It is up to the publisher of the feed to provide it if they want such as in the blogger or wordpress examples you gave above.
The only reason that Google Reader has more information is that it remembered it from when it came up the first time.
There is some information on something like this talked about as an extension to the ATOM protocol, but I don't know if it is actually implemented anywhere.
As the other replies here mentioned, a feed may not provide archival data but historical items may be available from another source.
Archive.org’s Wayback Machine has an API to access historical content, including RSS feeds (if their bots have downloaded it). I’ve created the web tool Backfeed that uses this API to regenerate a feed containing concatenated historical items. If you'd like to discuss the implementation in detail please get in touch.
In my experience with RSS, the feed is compiled by the last X items where X is a variable. Certain Feeds may have the full list, but for bandwidth sake most places are likely limiting to just the last few items.
The likely answer for google reader having the old info, is that it is storing it on its side for users later.
Further to what David Dean said the RSS/Atom feeds will only contain what the publisher of the feed has up at that moment and someone would need to be actively collecting this informaton in order to have any historical information. Basically Google Reader was doing this for free and when you interacted with it you could retrieve this stored informaton from the google database servers.
Now that they have retired the service, to my knowledge you have two choices. You either have to start collection of this information from your feeds of interest and store the data using XML or some such, or you could pay for this data from one of the companies who sell this type of archived feed information.
I hope this information helps somebody.
Seán
Another potential solution that might not have been available when the question was originally asked and shouldn't require any specific service.
Find the URL of the RSS feed you want and use waybackpack to get the archived urls for that feed.
Use FeedReader or a similar library to pull down the archived RSS feed.
Take the URLs from each feed and scrape them as you wish. If you're going way back in time it's possible there might be some dead links.
All previous answers more or less relied on existing services to still have a copy of that feed or the feed engine to be able to provide older items dynamically.
There's though another, admittedly pro-active and rather theoretical way to do so: Let your feedreader use a caching proxy which semantically understands RSS and/or Atom feeds and caches them on a per-item base up to as many items as you configure.
If the feedreader doesn't poll feeds regularily, the proxy could fetch known feeds time-based on its own to not miss an item in highly volatile feeds like the one from User Friendly which has only one item and changes every day (or at least used to do so). Hence if the feedreadere.g. crashed or lost network connection while you are away for a few days, you might loose items in your feedreader's cache. Having the proxy to fetch those feeds regularily (e.g. from a data center instead from at home or on a server instead of a laptop) allows you to easily run the feedreader only then and when without loosing items which were posted after your feedreader fetched feeds the last time but rotated out again before you fetch them the next time.
I call that concept a Semantic Feed Proxy and I've implemented a proof of concept implementation called sfp. It's though not much more than a proof of concept and I haven't developed it further. (So I'd be happy about hints to projects with similar ideas or purposes. :-)
Why does this problem exist?
Most RSS readers need to import feeds through a live URL, which makes things harder for sites that are unindexed on Wayback Machine.
The reason why Wayback Machine feeds can be imported is that the reader can regularly poll the server for updates according to its defined TTL configuration. The reader compares the current datetime with the RSS feed posts pubDate or lastBuildDate keys in the XML response. We can't hack the machine datetime to work around the datetime resolution because the current datetime is fetched live.
I've outlined an alternative solution without Wayback below. Unfortunately, I have not been able to find a universal solution for all feed sources.
Alternative Solution(s)
In my experience, NOT ALL feeds are partial though. The XML doesn't have to specify the datetime of each post. This means the RSS Reader doesn't have a datetime to filter the feed with. An example of this feed type can be found here.
This kind of reading experience is useful when chronological order is irrelevant, and the content doesn't need to be sorted. This approach is useful for sites where ALL the content is valuable, and the linked Essays of Paul Graham is a good example.
If the site has a generic, non-chronological feed option, subscribe to that RSS instead (the preferred option).
Download the linked timestamped .rss file, strip datetimes and host the file on your own server. Note, we can implement this via an AWS Lambda.
Set up a server that fetches the RSS from live.
Strip the pubDate tags from the XML file on fetch.
Host the modified RSS on your own server.
Note
These are suboptimal solutions due to loss of orders, however, I wanted to provide a potential alternative to WaybackMachine.
In addition, some existing answers require advanced SysDesign workarounds, more prework and in some cases are outdated (Google Reader is shut down). I hope it's helpful for those who really need a solution for a complete feed list. Constructing new RSS feeds is not too hard from the original RSS file.
Often when I post a comment or answer on a site I like to keep an eye out for additional responses from other people, possibly replying again if appropriate. Sometimes I'll bookmark a page for a while, other times I'll end up re-googling keywords to locate the post again. I've always thought there should be something better than my memory for keeping track of pages I care about for a few days to a week.
Does anyone any clever ideas for this type of thing? Is there a micro-delicious type of online app with a bookmarklet for very short term followup?
Update I think I should clarify. I wasn't asking about Stack Overflow specifically - on the "read/write web" in general I add comments to blog posts, respond to google group threads, etc. It's that sort of mish-mash of individual pages on random sites that I would care to keep track of for seven-to-ten days.
For stackoverflow, I put together a little bookmarklet thing at http://stackoverflow.hewgill.com. I use it to keep track of posts that I might want to come back to later, for reference or to answer if nobody else did, or whatever. The backend automatically retrieves updates from the SO server and updates your list of bookmarklets.
In my head mostly. I occasionally forget things, but it works well enough.
That's a very interesting question you asked here.
I do th efollowing:
temp bookmarks in browser
just a tab in Firefox left opened for weeks :)
subscription to email\rss when possible. When email notification comes I often put it into special folder in my email tree.
Different logins, notification types etc are complicating following info in the web :(
Other interesting questions:
how to organize information storage (notes, saved web pages, forum threads etc) for current usage and as a read-only library, sync it between different PCs and USB disks, how to label (tag) it and search it
how to store old mails, conversations, chats,..?
store digital photos for future: make hard-copy printouts or just regulary rewrite it from CD to a new one
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