I got an Echo Studio a couple of weeks ago, now I'm ordering a second. Wonderful product. I love the sound and the feeling of the sound. #
I had broken the mailbox template for the feeder app. It's back. Here's a demo. I'm also making sure that we don't break urls as we go along and I change things. For example, this is a request that changed in two ways. It should still work, getting us a mailbox view of the feed for this blog. I'm probably the only person who cares about this. 😄#
Have you noticed how some feeds look great in a mailbox-style reader while others don't. For example, feeds from Substack are good in mailbox readers because their items are full-text titled essays. But NYT feeds look terrible in mailbox readers, as does Scripting News. #
The mailbox reader, which was popularized by Google Reader, is designed for titled full-text feeds. The NYT has titles on its feed items, but not full text, just a synopsis. There's so much wasted space in the display. It feels unbalanced. I like whitespace, but that's not what this is. #
The incredibly useful Hacker News feed looks pretty weird in a mailbox-style reader. #
In my feed, and feeds of Drummer blogs, some posts have titles, but most don't. A mailbox reader can't deal with untitled posts, I've given up on trying to make it work, it just doesn't.#
The NYT and Scripting work much better in a river-style display, which is the pattern that Twitter and Facebook use, as examples. #
The bottom line: We have to move away from mailbox-only feed readers. Mailboxes are great when the items are like email messages. But that's far from all there is. We have to try out new ideas, lots of them. And to do that I'm making it easier to try new ideas out. 💥#
I have the same attitude about RSS in 2022 as I did in 2002. I wanted to move, to clean up the mess, start with a fresh new foundation. It worked then, and I believe now twenty years later it'll work again.#
So much has changed. There was no Twitter or Facebook in 2002. None of the writing systems we use now existed. I think RSS 2.0 even predates Wordpress.#
I have found a way to make it much simpler and easier to evolve feeds on the web, and I'm not waiting for permission I'm just going ahead. That's in fact what happened after RSS 2.0 with podcasting. We just did it, no one objected, and off we went. #
The theme is totally opposite of the one in 2002, when I was basically finishing RSS, and giving it over to everyone to do with as they please. The roadmap said it clearly. This is it. No more new stuff in RSS itself. If you want to add to it, you can, but to get support for your ideas you're on your own. I wasn't signing up for another stint as notetaker for this particularly community. It was too thankless a job. But guess what, not much happened. The RSS people are using today is pretty much what they were using 20 years ago. There have been some new applications, and there are some respectful projects to add a new namespaces. That's more or less what the roadmap called for. So without any leadership, it kind of took care of itself.#
Anyway, RSS as they say is what it is. There's also Atom and RDF, these exist and are in use. Very little if any innovation across the whole market, all of the new stuff has been in the individual products, but there are severe limits on what they can do because the format isn't moving.#
My thought is that I can write some new software, as everyone else is, but with the thought that I want people to do the same as I am doing. At the same time, I don't care if you do it or not, if you pick up the ideas or don't. All I'm looking for is a critical mass of people who want to experiment with a new cleaned-up simplified feed system built on what was built before. #
Last update: Wednesday June 22, 2022; 9:21 PM EDT.
You know those obnoxious sites that pop up dialogs when they think you're about to leave, asking you to subscribe to their email newsletter? Well that won't do for Scripting News readers who are a discerning lot, very loyal, but that wouldn't last long if I did rude stuff like that. So here I am at the bottom of the page quietly encouraging you to sign up for the nightly email. It's got everything from the previous day on Scripting, plus the contents of the linkblog and who knows what else we'll get in there. People really love it. I wish I had done it sooner. And every email has an unsub link so if you want to get out, you can, easily -- no questions asked, and no follow-ups. Go ahead and do it, you won't be sorry! :-)
