June 23, 2005
@ 02:42 PM
Comments [6]
RSS Bandit [Nightcrawler Edition] Progress Report

I've been really busy at work and haven't had free time left over to do significant work on RSS Bandit for the past few weeks. I should have some more free time starting this weekend and will begin to start making progress again. In the mean time there have been decisions made which are probably worth sharing.

Synchronization with Bloglines and Newsgator Online
I've mentioned in the past that I'd like the next version of RSS Bandit to be able to synchronize it state with a user's account in Newsgator Online or Bloglines. However I've also mentioned the various limitations of the Bloglines sync API which make it less than ideal as a way to synchronize the state of a desktop RSS reader with an online aggregator. On the flip side, I've had some discussions with folks at Newsgator which imply that I'll be able to get a full synchronization API from them by the time Nightcrawler ships.

My current decision is that I am dropping plans for supporting synchronizing RSS Bandit with Bloglines due to the limitations of its API which is guaranteed to leave users with a poor user experience. Instead the only new synchronization target added in the next release will be Newsgator Online.

Newsgroup support
One interesting problem that came up when integrating newsgroups into the RSS Bandit  user interface was what to use as permalinks for newsgroup posts. Thankfully, Google Groups comes to the rescue here. All newsgroup posts are given a permalink that maps the the Google Groups URL for that message ID. This works fine with public newsgroups that are archived by Google but leads to broken links for internal newsgroups. I think this is a decent trade off.

The screenshot below shows this feature in action

Subscription Wizard
Given that we now provide the ability to subscribe to both newsgroups and RSS/Atom feeds we've decided to revamp the feed subscription mechanism. We'll be adding an "Add Subscription" wizard which gives people the option of adding an RSS or Atom feed, a newsgroup, a web page (which we then scour for feeds) or a search term (which we map to an MSN Search or Feedster search results feed). My initial instinct with the last option was to just go with PubSub but it doesn't seem to have a straightforward mechanism for people to create search feeds programmatically. REST wins again.

Screenshot below 


 

Categories: RSS Bandit
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Thursday, 23 June 2005 15:34:48 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
Are you planning on making the synchronization stuff plugin-based? It would be nice to be able to add support for, say, sync'ing with NetNewsWire's format (so I could share my subscriptions between OS X and Windows), or sync'ing with a PalmOS-based reader, or any number of other things.

By the way, and I don't know if you're aware of this or not, but your CSS breaks horribly under Safari (like, almost unreadably so).
Matt Spong
Thursday, 23 June 2005 15:59:48 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
I'm really disappointed to learn that you're dropping plans for Bloglines support. Regardless of their limited sync API, it still would work fine to manage subscriptions at Bloglines.com and then do most of the reading through RSS Bandit.

Maybe you'd consider making a Bloglines Support Add-On that Bloglines users could elect to add to their RSS Bandit experience? That way, we'd be choosing to have what you call a "poor user experience" at our own risk.
Jason
Thursday, 23 June 2005 17:10:46 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
I'm REALLY going to like the integrated NNTP support (finally stop using Outlook Express)

I think ideally, this integration would take place at the protocol level instead; maybe ATOM will find a way to obsolete NNTP.
J. Daniel Smith
Thursday, 23 June 2005 22:20:43 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
Matt,
I don't plan to make it plugin based. Over time I've realized that few people take advantage of the extensibility we've provided so now I only do it if it offers large bang for the buck for us.

Jason,
It is unlikely I'll spend time working on a feature that will be B.A.D. (broken as designed)
Dare Obasanjo
Thursday, 23 June 2005 23:00:05 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
What kind of difficulties did you see when looking over the Bloglines sync API? NetNewsWire seems to have it working fairly well? Maybe you could trade notes with Brent Simmons over in Ballard and the two of you could put pressure on Bloglines to make it better?
Scott
Wednesday, 29 June 2005 00:29:57 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
While I still use Bloglines (somehow) and wouldn't mind support for its sync API I also know its limitions (well, it's more like designed to be used for anything but more than the simple check if some feeds have new items - if I recall correctly some response uses the user feed ID exclusively while others use the global feed ID only so matching both response is not as trivial as it could be) of its consumer only design.

On a different topic: I really like the new news paper style and would have published my formatter stylesheet if it wouldn't require a "hacked" (as in: JS enabled detail pane) RSSBandit...

-- b.gr

P.S.: While the CSS of this site has been mentioned already, how about a bit more visible separation of the individual comments? (I'll leave the missing fragment identifier in the comments link on an entires page for a later post scriptum =])
Björn Graf
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