Where's Mama?
I’ve used FeedDemon as an RSS reader for a number of years, and just had a quick look into how easy it is to view your subscriptions on an iPhone. I’m pretty impressed with the experience.
There is no ‘native’ iPhone application that I could find, but a mobile interface that is very impressive. Browse to m.newsgator.com on your phone, bookmark and add to your home page. Easy way to stay in touch which catching the bus to work etc.
As far as I can see, the majority of RSS feeds exposed on most sites provide access to very generic, summary information. I’m quite surprised that RSS hasn’t really been embraced for the kinds of thing for which it would be most suited – i.e. bringing you highly targeted, highly relevant information based on some prior knowledge of who you are.
I would love to be able to give a list of my favourite bands, and subscribe to a feed of gigs they are planning in my area; or give a list of my preferred cinemas, and find out whenever a new film is showing at any of them.
Once you are providing more personal feeds, then authentication becomes an issue. There is fairly widespread support in aggregators for both SSL and Basic Authentication, but this can be overkill for certain situations.
The data we are exposing is not particularly sensitive, and it would be a real pain for a user who has authenticated with the main site to be challenged when they subscribe to a feed. Instead, the approach we’ve taken in…
This means…
We’re exposed to the feed URL and token being sniffed on the wire, but unless the content is particularly sensitive this seems like a suitable, practical approach to ensuring some degree of privacy without introducing complexity and barriers to subscription.
I’ve been chatting to a friend about how to incorporate RSS with an existing site, and ways in which the technology can be applied.
You almost always hear about RSS being used where the XML is generated server-side using a technology like ASP.NET or PHP and querying a database. This is fairly familiar if you’re a programmer, or using a blogging product. However if you have an existing static site without a database, it seems like quite a lot of hassle to go down this route simply to provide an information feed.
However, RSS just requires an XML document that adheres to a particular format to be accessible via HTTP. There is no reason why this can’t be a static document that is maintained like any other static resource on your site.
For some reason I hadn’t really even thought about that before – I’d always figured that manually maintaining an XML document isn’t really a fun night out for most people. However, there are various utilities available which put a friendly interface on top of the generation of an XML document using the RSS schema. Some also have FTP features so that you can upload and replace an existing hosted feed file.
I think it’s definately less maintenance long term if you auto-generate your feed from a database, but if you have hosting constraints or just want to offer RSS without getting at all complex I think this can be a really good approach.
I’ve just upgraded to the latest version of FeedDemon and just wanted to fling some joy around about this great product.
I had previously been running 1.5. In V2 there are a number of improvments which have made my life much more pleasant. My favourite feature is the integration with a Newsgator online account. This means that any actions taken on one machine will end up synchronised against any others – so reading a news item at work means that it shows up as read on your home machine.
I would say this feature alone is worth the upgrade (well… upgrading is free anyway). I previously used to use the reader on my work machine, and although installed on my other machines it would never see the light of day. It was too much hassle wading through the items I’d already seen at work.
The interface is a lot more friendly too – organising feeds into different folders allows much easier viewing than ‘Channel Groups’ in the previous version.
Go and upgrade. Or buy it. Honestly. Go on.
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