{"id":1632,"date":"2013-06-25T23:17:07","date_gmt":"2013-06-25T23:17:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/?p=1632"},"modified":"2013-06-25T23:17:07","modified_gmt":"2013-06-25T23:17:07","slug":"digg-reader-doesnt-understand-rss","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/2013\/06\/digg-reader-doesnt-understand-rss\/","title":{"rendered":"Digg Reader doesn’t understand RSS"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Here\u2019s how that might play out in a typical reading experience. Let\u2019s say you want to subscribe to all the photos from your Flickr contacts tagged \u201cfood.\u201d That\u2019s a unique subset of photos that Digg has to grab from an API call. Every time you hit Digg Reader, it has to pull this data set, just for you. That kind of computational power gets very big, very quickly as you throw more and more users into the mix.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

But if you do all that locally for one user on his computer and not \u201cin the cloud\u201d for thousands of them, it\u2019s nothing. My old 2004 Pentium M laptop could do that without breaking a sweat on 100+ feeds.<\/p>\n

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\u201cRSS is painful. Take the Wired RSS; I have to check it every so often.\u201d (At this point, Young begins to impersonate a computer pinging a server.) \u201cIs there a new story? Is there a new story? Is there a new story? If it\u2019s more frequent than, say, every 15 minutes, some publisher sites will block me.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Subscribers want to see new stories in their feed readers as soon as they appear online.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

If getting news every quarter of hour is not fast enough for you, you have a problem or you are a journalist. If so, there\u2019s Twitter for real time information. RSS readers are retrievers<\/strong> that\u2019s the core function, the speed at which they get information is fast enough if not irrelevant. You don\u2019t subscribe to real time traffic updates with RSS, you download an app or you go on a website for that. RSS doesn\u2019t do and will not cover every news delivery scenario and it\u2019s OK.<\/font><\/p>\n

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It has read counts, and they work, which sounds easy to pull off but requires lots of complex things happening in real time on the back end.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Utterly useless. Any long time RSS reader will tell you that the unread count is bad and pushes you in this FOMO (fear of missing out) race because you can track items. It\u2019s terrible design, the only thing needed is to bold a feed to say something new arrived but hell no, no read counts. It\u2019s the worst and developers all work insanely hard to make that happen. Sigh.<\/font><\/p>\n

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The biggest problem with RSS has always been THERE IS TOO GODDAMN MUCH RSS OH MY GOD HELP ME I\u2019M DROWNING. <\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

No. The problem always has been how complicated it is to subscribe to feeds. RSS still doesn\u2019t have a one-button subscription system. If it had, people would just subscribe\/unsubscribe without the need of awkward manipulations or the need of a \u201csuggestion engine\u201d.<\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here\u2019s how that might play out in a typical reading experience. Let\u2019s say you want to subscribe to all the photos from your Flickr contacts tagged \u201cfood.\u201d That\u2019s a unique subset of photos that Digg has to grab from an API call. Every time you hit Digg Reader, it has to pull this data set, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1632"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1632"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1632\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1632"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1632"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1632"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}