RSS-Readers and the Tech behind it...

[Paul]

I was linked to this page (http://blog.johnkerry.com/blog/archives/001855.html) and it got me to thinking just what is rss (http://blog.johnkerry.com/what_is_rss.html)...

The idea is great: a personal, customizable news stream... but how well does it work in practice?

who here uses rss feeds? on what sites? what rss client (http://www.reallysimplesyndication.com/directory/22/reviews) do you use?

Do any web browsers support it natively?

Anyone know of some relevant links that will help others understand the tech? I remember reading a review months ago that was pretty good but it didn't capture my interest...

I'm going to test it out tomorrow but I figured I would start a thread to see how you all use the tech...

[staph]

I went through this epiphany about 6 weeks ago: I suddenly realised that RSS was very very cool.

I was linked to this page (http://blog.johnkerry.com/blog/archives/001855.html) and it got me to thinking just what is rss (http://blog.johnkerry.com/what_is_rss.html)...

The idea is great: a personal, customizable news stream... but how well does it work in practice?

Rather well. It stops me obsessively checking sites to see if they've been updated ;)

Basically, your client will periodically check the feed for new headlines, and present them them to you as "unread" items, often in a email-like kind of metaphor. Headlines sometimes come with some commentary, sometimes not. You click on the unread item, and double click/single click/hit return, depending on the program to open up a browser, internal or external to the program, which allows you to view the page.

who here uses rss feeds? on what sites? what rss client (http://www.reallysimplesyndication.com/directory/22/reviews) do you use?

Shrook (http://www.fondantfancies.com/shrook/) is the client I use, largely because its distributed checking is very efficient, and makes it very easy to switch between machines seamlessly (basically, every time a Shrook client checks a feed, if it changes, it submits the changes back to Shrook central, which then distributes the change information to all other clients. Shrook central also stores info on which items you have/haven't read from your subscribed feeds, so that when you fire up the client on another machine, things are marked read/unread correctly)

Do any web browsers support it natively?

A better question might be: which RSS clients for Mac OS X don't contain integrated web-browsers? It seems WebCore adoption has been particularly rapid in this area. Shrook and Pulp Fiction are examples of this. Personally, I just get them to spawn an external browser (Safari) in the background, and this works just fine for me.

Having said that, Omniweb (http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omniweb/gallery/) does something fairly similar (it checks your bookmarks to see if they have changed, at specified intervals, without RSS).

[Ryan]

I use NewsYouCanUse. It sits in the menubar. Sometimes it can get a bit slow, and it does crash a bit, but only when I try to open it while it updates itself.

[Barto]

I use NetNewsWire Lite (http://ranchero.com/netnewswire/) but only because I've never used anything else. It is free and has an Apple Mail like interface (only, obviously, for RSS).

Barto

[autodata]

NetNewsWire

But these days I don't really like rss anymore. Not enough of a benefit. I use it only for a bunch of blogs that aren't updated very frequently or that aren't that interesting.