News Aggregator

[Dody Gunawinata]

This is my first attempt to write a news aggregator so I have a basic question. Is it fine to just handle RSS 2.0 (and 0.92) and Atom 1.0 and ignore the RDF RSS 1.0?

[Dave Winer]

Dody, there's no way to answer that question -- if you have a user who wants to read a feed and it's in RSS 1.0 format, you're going to have to either tell them you can't do it, or support RSS 1.0.

For what it's worth -- River2 does support it. 

Dave

[Dave Winer]

BTW, I added a callback script to my River2 install that tracks the formats of the feeds as they update.

By the end of the day I should have some good data. But based on the first run, there was one RDF feed that updated already. So yes -- they are out there, carrying interesting data (at least to me) and updating.

Dave

[Dody Gunawinata]

.Net framework comes with built in support for RSS 2.0 and ATOM 1.0 parsing which saves tremendous amount of time. I think I'll skip RSS 1.0 for now.

[Dave Winer]

That in itself is an interesting bit of data.

[Matthew Terenzio]

Most interesting indeed! ; )

[Paul Clark]

I'm looking forward to this feature -- let me know when it's out and I'll poke around in it. Is this the github repository for your river app?

https://github.com/dodyg/hobi-hobi

If so, bravo for open sourcing it.

Regards,
Paul

[Dave Jones]

Just looked at my php aggregator.  Out of 801 feeds, only 3 are RDF.  Also worth noting is that the sites for those 3 feeds also provide alternate formats (RSS 2.0 or ATOM 1.0).  The effort to return ratio seems really high.

DJ

[Dody Gunawinata]

Yup. That's the source code (under AGPL). It is also hooked to appharbor infrastructure so that whenever I sync with GitHub, it got automatically deployed to the server. The neat thing is this, anybody can sign up to appharbor for free (I am not associated in anyway with them), hook the source code to the GitHub source and got the app up and running. 

I am working on a feature to manage an OPML RSS subscription list. Then I'll construct a draft version of a News Aggregator that consume the OPML file then it will spit out river.js format. Than voilla, any Tabbed River can read them.