Snell-o-vision (Merlin wants free full-text RSS feeds) Merlin: And, I’ll look forward to seeing similar CMS bugs fixed by Macworld, The New York Times, and all the other excellent sites that fell out of my reader when their full-content feeds disappeared.
Full content in RSS is awesome. Free content in general is awesome. There’s just one trick. In the end, writers need to be paid. As an editorial guy, I’ve advocated for freer approaches to RSS for a long time. RSS doesn’t generate revenue directly. I agree, that’s good. Nobody would like us to publish full-content RSS feeds more than I would. So I guess what I’m saying is, I understand what Merlin is saying on an idealistic level. (Side note: A lot of people view me as “Mr. Back to the beginning: Full-content RSS feeds are awesome. Attention Is the Real Resource. Friday, 5 March 2010 Jason Snell — editorial director at Macworld — wrote an interesting piece on his personal site regarding full-text RSS feeds, prompted by Merlin Mann’s piece last week regarding The Atlantic.
Snell writes: RSS doesn’t generate revenue directly. There are ads in RSS, sure, but they’re cheap and lousy and don’t have remotely the return as ads on web pages. The question is, if you publish all your content in RSS, does the resulting drop in traffic get offset by the fringe benefits? It should go without saying that what works for me here at Daring Fireball, as a one-man show, may well not work (or work nearly as well) for a large operation with a full editorial staff such as Macworld. The ads in most sponsored RSS feeds are indeed cheap and lousy. What is “traffic”? When I switched DF’s free public RSS feed to full-content in August 2007, DF’s web page views had been growing steadily month-to-month. Update: Jason Snell’s thoughtful response. Attention Is the Real Resource. Atom & RSS Feed Parsing. Module: RSS. Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is a family of formats that describe ‘feeds,’ specially constructed XML documents that allow an interested person to subscribe and receive updates from a particular web service.
This portion of the standard library provides tooling to read and create these feeds. The standard library supports RSS 0.91, 1.0, 2.0, and Atom, a related format. Here are some links to the standards documents for these formats: If you’d like to read someone’s RSS feed with your Ruby code, you’ve come to the right place. It’s really easy to do this, but we’ll need the help of open-uri: As you can see, the workhorse is RSS::Parser#parse, which takes the source of the feed and a parameter that performs validation on the feed. Producing our own RSS feeds is easy as well.
As you can see, this is a very Builder-like DSL. Copyright © 2003-2007 Kouhei Sutou <kou@cozmixng.org> You can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Ruby. Aasmith/feed-normalizer. Cardmagic/simple-rss. Swanson/stringer. Atom & RSS Feed Parsing.