Dr. Strangefeed or How I Came to Love RSS

Warning:  This is a semi-technical post.  If that is not your thing, check back tomorrow.

I’ve always liked the idea of RSS feeds. For those of you who don’t know what an RSS feed is, it is a specially formed XML file that contains content that can be read by a – you guessed it! – an RSS Reader.  Most RSS feeds, particularly those used by bloggers to make their content more easily accessible, are created dynamically by the blogging platform itself.  Both WordPress and Google’s Blogger include the generation of an RSS feed as a core component.  Even if you have never used an RSS feed you have probably seen the feature on sites ranging from the lowliest blog to the New York Times website.  The table below shows the examples of the icons used to represent RSS feeds.

Old Style	Current Style	Hybrid (NYT Style)

Like many standards, the middle icon (Current Style) just kind of happened.  That icon was introduced in Mozilla Firefox in order to indicate a web feed that could be used in conjunction with the Live bookmarks function was present on a particular web page. Both Microsoft and Opera have adopted the icon in order to promote a defacto standard.

RSS feeds come in two main types based on the format, or schema, of the XML file itself.  The more generic RSS2 is still widely used, but the Atom format is growing in popularity.  For most users, there is not much difference, however, if you want to use a feed to programatically generate content like the "ITI Blogs – Latest Posts" section of the Information Today, Inc. homepage you should stick to Atom.  Atom feeds, at least as implented in WordPress, are far better at handling special characters in RSS article titles.  Firefox’s Live Bookmarks and most other readers work equally well with either format.  Atom feeds are the default feed type for Blogger’s Blogspot blogs while Feedburner uses the RSS2 format.  Feedburner does a much better job with RSS two than WordPress, but WordPress’s Atom feed creator is fine.

WordPress Blogs can create the original RSS feed format, RSS2, Atom, and the RDF format.  If you would like to compare the formats, you can look at http://blog.techfun.org/rssfeed, http://blog.techfun.org/rss2feed, http://blog.techfun.org/atomfeed,  and http://blog.techfun.org/rdfeed.

RSS feeds initially required that users install a separate RSS reader.  That requirement, thankfully, is a thing of the past.  The current versions of Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Opera all have integrated methods for handling RSS feeds.  If you are a Firefox user you probably have an RSS feed from the BBC News site.  Firefox uses the bookmark system to display RSS feeds.  It creates a folder containing links to articles found in RSS feeds added to its Live Bookmark system.  The feeds are typically updated when you open the browser.  This works, but using a real RSS reader offers you more options and usually the ability to archive old articles instead of letting them scroll off into oblivion the way Live Booksmarks do.

My problem with RSS feeds has always been the fact that I just don’t have the time necessary to use an RSS reader and I am not one of those people who always has their web browser open.   The one application I have open, from the moment I sit down at my home or office PC until I log off, is my mail client.  At least half of my work at the office is kicked off by an incoming e-mail message.  The ability to quickly scan through messages and prioritize them in a way that makes the best use of my time is a critical part of my time management processes.

There are at least a a dozen blogs I watch regularly.  Some are updated several times per day, some are a once daily thing, and others are only updated occasionally.  Using RSS feeds to read these blogs should be a no-brainer.  Using an RSS reader I can put them all in one place, and that is exactly what I did.  I had them all set up in Liferea (a Linux RSS aggregator), sorted by category, and configured to archive or expire articles based on my interests.  Once I had that all set up, I promptly forgot about it.  I would remember to take a peek at Liferea about once or twice a week.  It was not part of my routine and that kept it from ever being a truly useful tool for me.  Most of the time I would end up browsing to the blog or website itself and look for new content.  

This dysfunctional system resulted in my missing articles and discussions that I would have enjoyed participating in with annoying frequency. This became too annoying to stand with after I began participating in BlogCatalog.com discussions.  Each discussion on Blog Catalog has it’s own RSS feed.  The feed contained the original post as well as each comment.  Since it was dynamically created you can easily follow discussions that interest you by subscribing to that thread’s feed.  My original problem with RSS feeds kept this wonderful tool from functioning in a way that fit my lifestyle so I started looking around for a solution.  I used Google to look for a solution using the basic idea of somehow getting RSS feed content to reach my email inbox.

I quickly came across RssFwd.  RssFwd is a website that lets yo subscribe to a feed and have the feed content delivered to your mailbox.  It has some nice features including the ability to get the feed’s new articles individually or clustered with morning, afternoon, evening, or night delivery times.   I am sure that its a nice service, but I prefer not giving out my primary e-mail address when I can avoid it and for this to work, the mail needs to go to that box.

A little more digging solved the problem.   I found rss2email, a Python based command line tool for Linux or Windows with excellent install instructions.  Debian and Ubuntu users can install it with just a simple apt-get command:

sudo apt-get install rss2email

The program installs as r2e and the easy to follow instructions are available via man r2e.   In just a few minutes I had created the config file and was adding all my friend’s blogs and the feeds for a few Blog Catalog discussions.  Ths resulted in a flood of messages – one for every discussion comment/blog post/article in each of the feeds I added.  After that initial flood, it worked as I expected and I only got an e-mail when there was new activity on those feeds.  I set up a cron job to run r2e every five minutes between 8:30am and 10:00pom and it has worked quite well.

If you decide to go this route, here is some advice.   After you have initially added your feeds, use r2e run –no-send once.  This will pull the feeds but not generate the email.  After that, just plain r2e run by hand or via a cron job does the trick.  When I want to add a new feed I use r2e run manually so I get anything  new, then I add the feed with r2e add feedurl, and execute r2e run –no-send.  By letting it read the new feed without mailing anything I avoid those floods of messages.  New content arrives by mail when the scheduled job runs.

This method of utilizing RSS feeds has made me a huge fan.  I am thrilled to be able to like RSS itself instead of just the idea of RSS.