Feeds

There are 119 posts filed in Feeds (this is page 1 of 12).

Disappointing results for RSS feeds from US newspapers

As part of my News Archive project, I am trying to add feeds from one major US newspaper per day. As a start, I used this Wikipedia page (which has a list of the top 10 US papers by circulation). Only 7 of 10 papers had feeds (Chicago Tribune, USA Today, and Newsday did not have feeds). Some of them have feeds by default because their sites are built using WordPress (there were no links to those feeds, but by going to sections and adding “/feed/” to the end of the URLs – voila! Feeds!

Another interesting possibility is the existence of sitemaps in XML format. It appears this is being done so that Google can index content. I used Claude to create a script for creating a RSS feed from a sitemap file (see Github gist here). I am going to start using this for sites that do not provide feeds.

I appreciate blogs and RSS

I use River5 to read feeds (see here). When I read feeds on my phone, I open tabs with posts I want to read/keep. At this writing, the number of tabs is 81. Why is the number so high? Because I read a lot of feeds, and these feeds are from blogs, not news websites. I check news websites, but I do not subscribe to many feeds from news websites (too much flow there).

I appreciate blogs because I would not be able to get the wide variety of information/viewpoints if I only subscribed to mainstream media. Also, I can drop feeds if they no longer are of interest. Finally. almost all blogs have feeds to which I can subscribe. Interestingly (or perhaps sadly), many mainstream media newspapers/news websites do not provide feeds – grrr!

I want to send out a big “Thank you!” to Dave Winer for his work in making blogging and feed reading available to all, and for developing and promoting the use of RSS to share the work of our blogs with the world.

Here’s a task where AI did a poor job

In a previous post, I mentioned that I asked Claude to collect RSS feeds for US newspapers. Here was the prompt:

Create a list of RSS feeds and save them using the following steps:

* Review all of the newspapers linked from this page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_newspapers_in_the_United_States ), identify if they have a website, and make a list of the RSS feeds available from the website.

* Identify which newspapers do not have RSS feeds

* Identify which newspapers do not have websites

* Create a OPML subscription list of all RSS feeds identified and save this file to C:\Users\sylve\Documents\Claude_Projects\News_Archive

* Create a text file that lists the newspapers that do not have RSS feeds and save this file to C:\Users\sylve\Documents\Claude_Projects\News_Archive

* Create a text file that lists the newspapers that do not have websites and save this file to C:\Users\sylve\Documents\Claude_Projects\News_Archive

* Add the OPML and text files created to a new repository in my Gitlab account called news-archive

The result of this prompt was an OPML file with 386 feed URLs, but only 22 of them had any items. I looked at the first 5 feeds, and saw that Claude had taken the root URL of a site and added “/rss/” to the URL. There was nothing there. Why did Claude do that? Why did it not search on the site to find a valid feed, and if there was none, to add it to the list of newspapers that do not have feeds? If anyone has any insight into this, I would love to hear it.

Blogs, comments, and feeds – oh my!

In the past few days. it looks like Manton Reece implemented a feature request from Dave Winer in the Micro.blog service that Manton runs. Dave asked for a RSS feed to be created so that he could be aware of when people comment on linkblog items that he posts to Micro.blog. If this were available, Dave would not have to go to the Micro.blog user interface to the Mentions link to see if anyone “mentioned” him in a post.

Now, in and of itself, I would agree that this is a useful feature. To me, being able to use RSS and feeds in general to get some notification of content updates from a web site or weblog is incredibly useful. As an aside, WordPress has supported this from day 1 (here is a comment feed from my blog). As another example, when Colin Walker and I were collaborating on MyStatusTool, Colin proposed a RSS namespace to support comments within a RSS feed.

However, the nit I want to pick at is – Dave Winer was interested in who was commenting on his linkblog posts. But – in past posts/podcasts, Dave has said that blogs should not have comments. Yet, he wants to know who is commenting on his posts. This begs the question – how can people let Dave know that they have commented on his posts? Answer: they can’t. Well, here is one way that this can happen (for Micro.blog users).

Another way is the comment system that Dave is implementing as part of his WordLand development project. But….he hasn’t rolled it out yet. And… you have to use his tool to make a comment so that he can then be made aware of that someone had a comment. Seems limiting, doesn’t it? In the past, Dave has relied on Github as a comment space (when he wants to have a discussion, he creates an issue there and points to it). However, that is a space controlled (and moderated) by him, so some comments might get deleted by him. Again, not encouraging.

So – how can people comment and/or have a conversation? They have to be using a tool/service that supports this (as an example, Micro.blog). Just this morning, I can see several Micro.blog conversations where Dave Winer is participating (see here, here, and here.) I am guessing that Dave is using the Micro.blog reading interface to respond – that is what I do, but maybe there is another way to do it.

It just seems to me that there is something of a double standard here (write comments about my posts on your blog, I don’t want it on my blog, but I want to know what you are saying…) – am I missing something here? Anyone – feel free to share your thoughts as comments on my blog!

Creating new types of feeds

I saw a post by Tantek Celik today describing how he created an h-feed microformat from a list of HTML elements. He then showed how this microformat could be read and parsed by the Monocle feed reader. He then pointed to a post by James Gallagher about how he publishes h-feed and uses the Granary tool to convert to RSS and other feed formats.

This is an interesting topic. I have looked at microformats before, to me it seems to be a way of adding to HTML to make it machine-readable without the construction of a separate feed. I have nothing against innovation in feeds, but I am not sure how popular the use of microformats is within the feed reader ecosystem.