RSS Readers and Feeds
Have any of you checked out RSS (Really Simple Syndication) Readers? The feeds are well-defined and -structured XML files with automatically updated and up-to-date links to news services, data, publications, etc. -- things that generally are and can be syndicated -- and the readers provide various ways to 'watch' the feeds and give you access to the news, sites, data, etc.
I noticed that UBS now has RSS feeds available for their publications (you do need an account with them -- which I think is a formality -- to view the reports from the web site). I downloaded the free version of Awasu and added in a few feeds. Pretty cool. Give it a check if you want. I think these will be valuable technology in short order. There are other RSS Readers out there as well -- Awasu got a good review from CNet and the other one well reviewed -- Pluck -- wouldn't install on my machine.
posted by HDShea @ 10:46 AM
3 Comments:
I actually did get the web version of Pluck set up. As you can see, I added a few Pluck icons -- one to add the site feed and one to get to Pluck -- to the blog.
The Pluck Web version is convenient in one sense -- you can have your aggregated feeds from anywhere -- and inconvenient in another -- you incurr the internet traffic slowness for every operation.
The machine versions -- Pluck for IE and Awasu -- are based on your machine (I've seen talk about setting these up -- also with Skype -- so they reside entirely on a USB drive so that they are relatively portable), but they have many additional perks beyond the Pluck Web version and they are considerably faster.
OK, I now really don't like the web version of Pluck even though it allows access from anywhere.
One of the things I thought would be a real benefit of RSS is that it really is simple. And, as such, one could easily be expected to be able to generate their own -- even by hand -- RSS xml files for aggregating whatever web content they wanted.
I, in fact, did this with the simple file that you can see at
http://vasuki.ct7.us-ct.citicorp.com:8080/ProductData/GlobalProducts/rss/mainmenu.xml
Which aggregates the second tier CAM Investment sites (i.e., PAC, Risk desk, etc.) into a feed.
Pluck Web Version refuses to see this -- or any other rss xml files -- as an RSS feed, presumably due to navigation problems back through the intranet site. Awasu has no such problem.
I also really like the way that Awasu handles variations in the RSS specification (and broader aggregagation variations like the use of ATOM as a competing standard): they use XSLT stylesheets to transform the variations and competing standard XML into the (a) version that works with their code.
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