I'm creating an application that generates RSS feeds that include an <enclosure> (for showing an audio player).
Since RSS readers are kinda flaky, in my experience, I'd like to test how my feeds look in as many readers as possible.
I only use Google Reader. What other RSS readers (websites or installable apps, for Windows, Linux AND Mac) are popular? Which are the ones I must test on?
Thanks!
Daniel
Edit: a more recent list (just one feed, so might not represent population) is at http://pelfusion.com/tools/top-11-feed-readers-and-aggregators/
here's a helpful list from http://www.internetnews.com/xSP/article.php/3458291
A few years old, but possibly a good start
Aggregator Name (Market Share Percentage)
Bloglines (32.86%)
NetNewsWire (16.95%)
Firefox Live Bookmarks (7.78%)
Pluck (7.20%)
NewsGator Online(4.45%)
(not identified) (4.07%)*
FeedDemon (3.83%)
SharpReader (3.27%)
My Yahoo (2.58%)
iPodder (2.42%)
NewsGator (2.23%)
Thunderbird (2.13%)
RSS Bandit (1.12%)
NewsFire (1.05%)
iPodderX (1.02%)
Sage (0.71%)
FeedReader (0.67%)
RssReader (0.54%)
LiveJournal (0.46%)
Opera RSS Reader (0.45%)
Maybe the information on these links will help you:
email.about
feed-readers
Web: Bloglines: http://bloglines.com/
Mac OS X: NetNewsWire: http://www.newsgator.com/INDIVIDUALS/NETNEWSWIRE/
Windows: SharpReader: http://www.sharpreader.net/
Linux: Liferea: http://liferea.sourceforge.net/
Top 9 Windows RSS Feed Readers:
NewzCrawler, FeedDemon, Omea Reader, Bloglines, NewsGator Online Services, NewsGator Inbox for Outlook, Awasu and SharpReader are the most popular RSS readers.
edit: according to http://email.about.com/od/rssreaderswin/tp/top_rss_windows.htm
Related
I am thinking of using either RSS or Atom in my project, but also "enhancing" the feed with some of my own special attributes specifically used by my project.
So I have two questions:
1) Which is most used of RSS and Atom on the web and by the big sites?
2) Which is most suitable to be build from by adding my own tags?
Update:
So RSS is most used, but I should pick Atom since I need to make my own tweaks on a feed? If RSS is more popular, why not pick that? Why didn't Google pick that?
There was a day when I was really interested in syndication and publishing formats. I knew all the quirks of RSS 0.91/1.0/2.0 and Atom 1.0 (and the 0.3 version). Atom was basically born to create something more complete out of the RSS experience which consisted roughly only on the very specifications of Dave Winer's and Netscape's (now only the RSS 2.0 makes practical sense and its specification is here: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/rss/rss.html). Atom was started by Sam Ruby, then was adopted and developed by a committee of savvy people and it resulted in two things: an XML based syndication format and a publishing protocol. Since 2005 Atom is an IETF standard and in my opinion more complete and better specified than RSS.
As of adoption I think that in raw numbers RSS is still in advantage. A lot of sites decided to stick with the version they already had in place (RSS) and podcasting is usually done on RSS too. There a ton of websites offering both by the way.
As of expanding the format, your second question, Atom has been created with this in mind so you should go down that route. Google GData format is basically an extension of the Atom format: https://developers.google.com/gdata/docs/1.0/elements
Atom is absolutely the standard to go for.
I presume you're using the standard to share (or move) information - so it's like a pipe that your information is padding along. By adopting Atom you can be confident that both ends of the pipe are in agreement about what's in there. It's more hit & miss with RSS.
I'd like an rss feed from this google scholar search: Scholar Fish Oil Search
I've looked a little bit at yahoo pipes, and I thought I had found a solution when I found this pipe: Old Pipe But it doesn't work (it's a couple years old now). If someone can either tell me what's wrong with that pipe, or tell me how to retrieve a feed from that search through another means, I'd be very appreciative.
Thanks for your time,
-Landon
You could try a 3rd party website that creates feeds from other websites. See 7 Tools To Make An RSS Feed Of Any Website. (Disclaimer: I have no idea if they work or are any good, but they may be worth investigating).
[Edit: Google disallows indexing of this content via their robots.txt file, apparently. Check out http://scholar.google.com/robots.txt. Yahoo Pipes respects the robots.txt file—perhaps one of the other tools doesn't suffer from this snag?]
It appears that markup may have been altered slightly since the publication of this Pipe.
When I use the URL builder module in Pipes and populate the sample query with "fish oil", I get the following search string:
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?scoring=r&q=%22fish+oil%22&lr=&hl=en&as_ylo=2007
(Which, when entered into a browser window, does generate results.)
I am currently parsing through their regular expressions to make sure the proper elements are captured.
Did you have any luck with the tools Dan mentioned? Would also be quite interested if any were simple, effective, and (ideally) non-proprietary or self-hostable.
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I know that services like my.yahoo.com allow you to add content from RSS feeds to your personal page, but in general they are links which draw the user to the site which provided the feed. What are the legalities and implications of using RSS feeds as a data source for a site which repackages the data so as to be unrecognizable that it came from said source.
Does credit need to be given? It is a copyright violation? What is ethical?
What if credit is stated? Does this change your opinion? Does permission need to be granted?
Of course it's ethical! What on earth is RSS for if not for syndication, into as many varied and wonderful forms as developers can think up?
Permission, of course, must be asked for - in the form of a "GET /feed/ HTTP 1.0". And it must be granted in the form of a "200 OK" - or denied in the form of a "403 Forbidden".
Screen scraping is at least morally ambiguous, since perhaps the author only wants humans, and not programs, to view the content (assuming you believe it's within the rights of the author to make that distinction). But RSS? Seriously? No one forces anyone to make a syndicated, easily-mungable format of their content. It's not just useful for new presentations, it's meant for it.
In my opinion it depends on the data source company as to whether they allow it in their terms and conditions.
It probably also depends on where your servers are located (i.e. Which legal framework they fall under.)
Unless it is allowed explicitly or you have written consent I don't think it's ethical.
It also depends on how big your legal department is.
I would say publishing someone else's work without giving them credit will definitely lead to lawsuits or at least strongly worded cease and desist letters (followed by lawsuits).
Well, legalities aside it isn't ethical to not give credit to the source. The AP for example wants credit
The difference between what you are proposing and services like my.yahoo.com, Netvibes, Bloglines, Google Reader, etc, is that you are the one choosing the feeds, whereas with those other services the user is specifying the feed, and is therefore aware of it's original source.
Even though content is being published in feeds, and is therefore expected to be used with services like the ones I mentioned above, the publisher still retains the copyright over their content, and would usually expect it to be republished as-as. It is also customary to provide the link back to the original source of the content and republishing content without it would be frowned upon at the very least.
I've wondered the same thing for a while and am very hesitant to republish RSS feeds FeedForAll says there is no inherent right to reproduce content. You're asking whether it's ok to mangle the content, I'm pretty sure it's not alright to even reproduce the content. I think it would be like putting
<iframe src='www.stackoverflow.com'> </iframe>
on my website.
BTW. This is not a subjective question and this it is important. I'd re-ask this question or edit the title and get more relevant feedback.
Talk to your lawyer.
From AP's RSS site...
AP provides these RSS feeds to individuals for personal, noncommercial use under the following terms and conditions. All others, including AP members or Press Association subscribers must obtain express written permission prior to use of these RSS feeds. AP provides these RSS feeds at no charge to you for your personal, noncommercial use. You agree not to associate the RSS feeds with any content that might harm the reputation of The Associated Press. AP provides this content "as is" and AP shall not be held liable for your use of the information or the feeds. TO THE FULLEST EXTENT ALLOWED, AP DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES INCLUDING WARRANTIES FOR MERCHANTABILITY, NON-INFRINGEMENT AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. You agree to use the RSS feeds only to provide headlines, each with a functional link to the associated AP story that shall display the full content immediately (e.g., no jump pages or other intermediate or interstitial pages). You further agree not to frame or otherwise control the browser window (if any) in which the AP content opens, including limiting the size or position of such window. You agree to provide proper attribution to The Associated Press in reasonable proximity to your use of the RSS feed(s), and you agree that you will not modify the format or branding of the headlines, digests and other information provided in the RSS feeds. The RSS feeds may not be spliced into or otherwise redistributed by third-party RSS providers. No content, including any advertisements or other promotional content, shall be added to the RSS feeds. AP reserves the right to object to your presentation of the RSS feeds and the right to require you to cease using the RSS feeds at any time. AP further reserves the right to terminate its distribution of the RSS feeds or change the content or formatting of the RSS feeds at any time without notice to you. By accessing the RSS feeds or the XML instructions provided herein, you indicate that you understand and agree to these terms and conditions. Note: If you do not qualify to use the RSS feeds under this license or are an AP member or Press Association subscriber and wish to uses these feeds, please contact AP Digital.link text
From Reuters RSS site...
Reuters offers RSS as a free service to any individual user or non-profit organization, subject to the following terms and conditions:
Use will be for non-commercial purposes.
Use is limited to platforms in which a functional link is made available allowing immediate display of the full article or video on the Reuters.com platform, as specified in the feed.
Use is accompanied by proper attribution to Reuters as the source.
By accessing our RSS service you are indicating your understanding and agreement that you will not use Reuters RSS in contravention of the above conditions. Reuters reserves the right to discontinue this service at any time and further reserves the right to request the immediate cessation of any specific use of its RSS service.
If you would like Reuters news for your commercial website, please visit
about.reuters.com/media.
It seems like such a simple thing, but I can't find any obvious solutions...
I want to be able to take two or three feeds, and then merge then in to a single rss feed, to be published internally on our network.
Is there a simple tool out there that will do this? Free or commercial..
update: Should have mentioned, looking for a windows application that will run as a scheduled service on a server.
There are a whole pile of options here: http://allrss.com/rssremixers.html.
Maybe http://www.planetplanet.org/
will do what you want.
It's for creating blog aggregations like planet lisp.
Google reader, create a group, add your feeds into the folder and then share that as an RSS feed.
:-)
Works while you're asleep!
Yahoo Pipes could be nice. Depends on how much "private" you want the resulting feed to be.
For 100% offline solution investigate Atomisator. It's a Python framework basically for doing offline what Yahoo Pipes does online.
If you're using PHP, the SimplePie library will do this. Here's a tutorial.
I wondered if anyone can give an example of a professional use of RSS/Atom feeds in a company product. Does anyone use feeds for other things than updating news?
For example, did you create a product that gives results as RSS/Atom feeds? Like price listings or current inventory, or maybe dates of training lessons?
Or am I thinking in a wrong way of use cases for RSS/Atom feeds anyway?
edit #abyx has a really good example of a somewhat unexpected use of RSS as a way to get debug information from program transactions. I like the idea of this process. This is the type of use I was thinking of - besides publishing search results or last changes (like mediawiki)
Some of my team's new systems generate RSS feeds that the developers syndicate.
These feeds push out events that interest the developers at certain times and the information is controlled using different loggers. Thus when debugging you can get the debugging feed, when you want to see completed transactions you go to the transactions feeds etc.
This allows all the developers to get the information they want in a comfortable way and without any need to mess a lot with configuration. If you don't want to get it there's no need to remove yourself from a mailing list or edit a configuration file - simply remove the feed and be done with it.
Very cool, and the idea was stolen from Pragmatic Project Automation.
Most of the digital libraries uses RSS/ATOM to display their search/results, data update, according to the OAI-PMH protocol
With our internal TRAC server, I'm subscribed to the timeline view for each project that I work on. It's great for keeping track of checkins and bug tickets. This is pretty exclusive to a developer position though.
I also am subscribed to the recent changes for our installation of MediaWiki that we use for our intranet. That way it's easy to see if documents that I need have been changed, or if there's new policies etc.
Our website has a news page that I wrote an RSS feed for as well. While you mentioned that you weren't really interested in recent news, it is nice to keep up with our press releases.
I have seen RSS used to syndicate gas prices from a service for a specific zip code.
there are many examples. Here are a couple.
SharePoint provides RSS feeds from its lists.
Many faceted navigation products allow you to get an RSS feed based on a selected filter. For example, you can navigate to view 24" LCD Monitors on newegg.com and then get an RSS feed of that view.
Mantis bug tracker includes RSS feeds although I wish they were more configurable. Also we use MediaWiki for documentation which has all sorts of RSS Feeds including a per page watch, and recent changes.
I just added RSS feeds to the ticketing system I use at work (TicketDesk) and that feature should be in the next release of the product.
It's nice because it basically provides me a custom search view of outstanding trouble tickets or work requests that comes to me rather then me having to go to the application. It also allows users to get feeds of issues they may be interested in, but not require them to get emails on each update.
I'm looking at implementing an RSS feed for calls for service that our agency takes, to provide the administrators a quick and easy way to see what has been going on.
Atom feed documents and Atom entry documents are used as the representation format for RESTful web services that follow the Atom Publication Protocol (AtomPub).
I personally have used syndication feeds to expose a sub-set of the Windows Event Log information so that I could subscribe and be notified of critical events on a server.
immobilienscout24
they use RSS feeds for updates on your search.