Tuesday, May 7, 2013; 12:49:25 PM Eastern
Q&A w/Brent re River of News
- On April 11, Brent Simmons sent an email, included below. My words are indented beneath his in italic.
- I like the river of news style of feed reading, despite having once written an RSS reader that doesn't use that style.
- But I'm not actually 100% sure what the technical definition is. I'm not trying to be obtuse about this -- I want to be sure I understand.
- I think it's something like this, but I'm not sure which parts are optional, and I might be missing things.
- 1. It presents a list of articles from multiple feeds in a scrollable list.
- 2. There might be multiple scrollable lists -- tabs of some kind.
- Not required, but you can do it that way (I have it with my mediahackers site). But each one is a river, not the whole thing.
- 3. Items in the list are sorted in reverse-chronological order by arrival date (date the feed scanner saw the item) rather than by pubDate. (True?)
- True. By arrival date. pubDate is not important for ordering.
- 4. Items are presented with title, link, and an excerpt. The excerpt should be just long enough to be meaningful (around 280 characters).
- You could leave out the excerpt and it would still be a river. The important thing is that the excerpt be of determinate length, and short enough so you can see a lot of items on screen at the same time.
- 5. It handles edited items by ____? (I don't know. Does it show them again?)
- Does not show edited items again.
- 6. There is no notion of read/unread whatsoever, and thus no unread counts.
- Correct. No notion of read/unread.
- 7. There is no notion of starred (or flagged, or saved) items whatsoever. (Users can blog, send to a read-it-later service, etc. as they normally would for any web page.)
- Not true -- you can do whatever you want there. I include a RT link on my items. Just as long as it's small and doesn't interfere with skimming.
- 8. A river of news feed scanner outputs river.js data. (Is this optional? Could it be RSS?)
- Not required. It would however be useful to have a standard here. I want to write all my displayers in JS running in the browser.
- 9. Do river-of-news readers have to be web pages? Could an iOS or Mac app qualify, if it met all the criteria?
- Of course it could be an IOS app.
- The main idea aren't the details, but the way its used. I can scroll back to the point where I hit something I seen. Quickly. My memory is perfectly capable of telling me I've seen something before. You can rely on it, people can do this.