0xDECAFBAD - Tag: rss

The Readerpocalypse, or Occupy Google Reader

2011-11-01T10:31:54+00:00

TL;DR: Google gave Reader a face-lift and removed built-in following & sharing. In exchange, they added +1 buttons and ways to share to Google+. But, the changes seem to have removed most of the value from the service for me, so I'm moving on as I was invited to do.

What happened?

Almost a year ago, I wrote about how my habits had gotten less del.icio.us. One of the main culprits that stole my sharing flow was Google Reader: I went from using a quick bookmarklet to an even quicker icon-click in my feed reader. That meant I left most things untagged, but I shared even more than before. Eventually, Google Reader released a bookmarklet for use off-site, which meant I started sharing everything everywhere to Reader.

I also found a replacement for my old del.icio.us network in Google Reader's social features. I could follow people, and the stream of things they shared and annotated turned into a great source of news curated and pre-filtered by likeminded people.

Well, as it turns out, Google's recent changes to Reader just removed all of the above. In exchange, they added a couple of buttons to +1 and share items to Google+, which streamlines things for them and encourages more use of the new service.

As I wrote on Google+, the net result is nothing to stomp and shout about, but there's nothing there that makes me happier. As I played more, though, I came to realize that most of the value I derived from the service had evaporated.

Item-centric vs People-centric, Efficiency vs Engagement

There's a big difference between the way sharing happened on Google Reader, and the way it happens now on Google+. The best way I can think to explain is that the old way was item-centric and the new way is people-centric. In other words, people seem to be the dominant social objects in Google+, whereas Google Reader used to treat items that way.

Before, we all gathered around the news. The headline and summary were primary, and our comments were collected after the item. The result was a de-duped stream of great news filtered through smart brains. Even if the people I followed never said a word, the fact that they'd clicked "share" was value enough. In fact, it was better that way most of the time, because we all got out of the way of each other and the news.

This, by the way, is what I loved about del.icio.us and now pinboard.in: It's anti-social networking. We can provide low-effort, intelligent inputs to build something useful for each other, but we're not there to assert a presence or distract each other from the things we each came to see.

But now, that filtered news stream is gone. In its place, on a different site entirely, removed from the flow of feeding on news, is a highly-engaging flood of people babbling away, which occasionally includes repeated shares of things that have bubbled up during the day.

What's wrong with that, for me?

I don't want to wade through a heavily-padded, user-friendly flood of duplicated, echoed items.
I don't want to engage with the people—at least, not when I'm in a mood to feed on news. I want to catch up on what's been put out into the infosphere already, and then start talking about it.

The design of Google+—which has spilled over into the Google Reader face-lift—is about engagement and not fast & efficient processing of the day's news. Engagement in general puts a drag on the task—which for me is like a GTD, Inbox Zero, headline skimming, pattern recognition zen thing that might not be everyone's cup of tea.

But, for all I know, avowed weirdo and info freako that I am, these changes may drive Google Reader growth through the roof for mainstream users. But, it's no longer a product for me. The changes in sharing have removed most of the value for me, because I no longer have the warp speed cruise through news that other people used to power for me.

Circles point the wrong way

One of the things Louis Gray touted about the new sharing features reads like so:

In Reader’s previous sharing model, as a follower of your items, I would see every single item you shared, no matter what it was about. Obviously, as I have different interests than you do, not everything you shared was something I cared about, which often led to reduced sharing of off-topic content. Now, you are more in control, so you can share sports items to your sports circles, great recipes with your foodies circle, or local news to family and friends. You can keep sharing, like you always have, but now, you can better select who sees what.

But, for this purpose, Circles point the wrong way.

Circles on Google+ are lists of people controlled by me. They're not topics—again, people-centric and not item-centric. Circles are a targeting mechanism for sharing to people, and a filtering mechanism for items from people. That is, I can use a circle to set who sees something and I can decide who's stuff I see and when.

But, things that Circles don't do include:

Letting me follow Circles without the Circle-owner needing to manage membership - eg. Don't make me send a message saying "I am interested in your ideas and would like to subscribe to your newsletter". RSS doesn't work that way and it's better for it.
Letting me and others filter for what gets sent to specific Circles - eg. I'm in both your "scifi" and "politics" circles, but just show me what you sent to your "scifi" circle.

Google Reader didn't have this to begin with, but what I'm looking for is an equivalent to tagging on pinboard.in. For example, if you like my taste in scifi but could care less about my views in politics, you can subscribe to just the tag feeds you want.

I'm happy to tag my shares with topics; that's beneficial to me for search later, and helps interested people besides. But, the last thing I want to do is manage subscriber lists. That doesn't scale. There's no way for you to even know I have "scifi" or "politics" Circles, and you have no way to join either of them without asking for an add.

Too much coordination, not enough benefit. I just can't see the value in people-centric Circles here.

Other things broke, too.

And beyond the fundamental shift in sharing and reading, these things have broken for me now too:

The bookmarklet is dead, so there goes my off-site sharing.
No sharing at all from the mobile web version, so there goes at least half of my sharing on-site.
Android apps like my favorite gReader Pro still think sharing works, but they're just deluded and use an unsupported API anyway
No more feed to Facebook, so there goes most of my Facebook output. (Though, that might be a boon some friends over there.)

Now what?

The remaining value of Google Reader is as just a plain old hosted feed reader—one of the last of them out there, in fact. The problem here is that I'm a weirdo who wrote a book on feeds and feed readers, and so I'm perfectly capable of providing the remaining value for myself.

I'm sure most people won't want to do that, which is probably why "you're not going anywhere". But, there are alternatives even for people who don't want to D.I.Y. entirely:

Dave Winer's River2 (also open source, in UserTalk on the OPML Editor) runs on my laptop and lets me circle back to the code that ran my second-ever news reader, Radio UserLand. (My first was a thing called News Clipper in Perl from many, many moons ago.) And, of course, River2 is one of a suite of apps Dave's working on to build a decentrallized network of feeds and outlines.
NewsBlur looks mighty fine, and the guy running it only asks US$12-36 (your choice) for a year's worth of premium access. Remember: if you're not the customer, you're the product. And, if you want to try installing it, it's an open source Django site. While not yet very social, NewsBlur's creator has plans to head in that direction.
Tiny Tiny RSS installed on my Wordpress-capable web server in about 10 minutes, gobbled up my list of 800 feeds with no problem, and appears to have 90% of what I wanted from Google Reader. Also, it's an open source PHP site. For sharing, Tiny Tiny RSS lets you "publish" shared items in an RSS feed—kind of like the old reBlog web app—and has some experimental cross-instance sharing features.

At the end, the funny thing is that I've circled back to my old del.icio.us habits and have started tagging items on pinboard.in like never before. I'm sure there aren't nearly as many people watching me as before on either del.icio.us or Google Reader, but it's a place to go at least.

It'll probably be recognized as an illness someday, but my sharing feels compulsive at this point and I get itchy without a good outlet.

Introducing Fireriver, a River of News for Firefox 4

2011-01-27T06:36:52+00:00

TL;DR: I have a history of building news aggregators. Now, I've built one as an addon for Firefox 4.

This is Fireriver, an experimental add-on for Firefox 4. You can find the source code on GitHub.

Fireriver uses Live Bookmarks to build a River of News in your browser. No unread counts, no 3-pane view like an email client. Just paddle down the page with the space bar or your scroll wheel.

Organize the Live Bookmarks into folders to split things up into multiple rivers—which is not a strict River of News, per se. But, I like using them to focus on particular topics or priorities I happen to have time for.

It also displays a more obvious notification when a site has a feed and lets you add a new Live Bookmark subscription to the Fireriver folder with one click. (I'm considering splitting this feature off into its own small add-on.)

Of course, when I say experimental, I mean that this is my first Firefox add-on ever. I'm starting to use it daily, but I'm well-versed in nuking and rebuilding my Firefox profile. I haven't had to do that yet, but I'm expecting to have to do it eventually. I'll be pleasantly surprised if it turns out I haven't totally screwed something up.

Other add-ons you may enjoy

If you like the idea of this add-on, you may also enjoy these:

OPML Support - I just used this to dump in 800 subscriptions from Google Reader
Reliby - This lets you reload all Live Bookmarks on demand
Feedly - A more "magazine" style news aggregator in the browser
Feed Sidebar - Live Bookmarks in a sidebar
LiveClick - Still under development for Firefox 4, but I liked this in 3.6

Archived Comments

fluffy
2011-01-27T18:40:35

That looks like a pretty nice interface to Live Bookmarks, but it still has the inherent problem of not being nice and cloudy. Is there any provision for Live Bookmark synchronization?

Of course, the other problem for me is that I prefer Chrome these days, and of course Chrome solves the sync issue by having nothing to sync to begin with.
- l.m.orchard
  2011-01-27T20:58:53
  
  Yeah, lack of clouds is the drawback here.
  
  There is a bit of a sync story, though. If you're using Firefox Sync, the Live Bookmark subscriptions will carry across machines along with the rest of your bookmarks. Also, I'm using history to hide items from display, and that is covered by sync too.
  
  I need to check, but I don't think items within the Live Bookmarks are sync'd, so each machine is on its own for doing the actual feed polling.
  
  I'm also thinking a bit about Brent Simmons' notions about thin-server RSS sync, and if it has a place in this thing. Google Reader sync might also be nice.
  
  And once I get my head wrapped around add-ons for Firefox on android, I might do a mobile version of this thing so that side of things is covered.

What should be done about feeds in browsers?

2011-01-27T06:11:00+00:00

TL;DR: Browsers need help doing a better job using feeds for discovery, aggregation, and publishing on the web to keep us from swimming into self-destructing lobster traps.

Last week, I wrote some blog posts about Bug 578967, wherein the feed auto-discovery icon in Firefox 4 has been moved off the URL bar and hidden by default. I support that decision of the UX team, because that feed button is a slacker. And even if it does get used, I'm not a fan of what it does anyway.

But, I've got lots more rattling around in my head about this stuff.

What's the point of feeds?

Feeds—that's RSS and Atom and maybe even JSON—let robots pull lots of stuff from a bunch of places and pile it all together in one spot for your perusal, analysis, and remixing pleasure. Feed readers and news aggregators do the surfing for you, so you don't have to.

But, Twitter and Facebook and others have managed to make the people themselves all gather in one spot. So, to see what those people are saying and doing, you just have to go there—kind of like what feeds promised, right? Only, you go there rather than all that stuff coming here.

The problem is, even if the logo says it loves you, the people who made it say that won't always stay in charge. And, someday, when whomever's left rides off into the sunset, you'll learn how much they didn't care about you in the end.

For some people and some places, that's no big tragedy. It's just a party; you go home when it's over. You made memories, you hope to find some of those people again elsewhere. Pownce croaked, and so did Vox, but who cares? There's always Twitter next door for the afterparty.

But, what if a world you lived in evaporated while you were on vacation elsewhere for the holidays? I guess you could say that was just a game and, again, who cares?

What if Flickr went away just like that? People are not only partying there—they're leaving their visual memories at the coat check. Things are a little more real there, by some definitions thereof.

What if you never swam into that lobster trap, though? What if your words and images and creations were borrowed and copied, but never wholly kept in someone else's bucket? What if Flickr were just like Google Search? That is, a collector and an index—but never the host—of photos and conversations?

Feeds can help make that happen, but not by themselves.

Do feeds belong in the browser?

Well, yeah. Would sites like Twitter and Facebook have been as successful if feeds worked better in the browser? I think so. But, by working better, I don't just mean improvements to that funky blue thing that showed up in the location bar every now and then. No, I mean all of the following:

Discovery — help me find and follow interesting people and things
Aggregation — give me one spot where what I find and follow is delivered to me
Publishing — enable me to post things where people (and their agents) can find and follow

To me, this is where Twitter and Facebook are totally nailing it. But, much of this can happen in the browser, and I think more of it should. Projects like RockMelt and Flock have seemed promising to me in this context, but have yet to really thrill me. I don't think they go far enough.

There is a point where the rubber (client) meets the road (server)—but that point can live so much farther down the stack than it does now. Mind you, I don't want a revival of Netscape Gold as such—but recall that "the first browser was an editor, it was a writer as well as a reader".

We need some services and hosts out there as rendezvous points for our browsers and agents, but we really don't need any of those services to collapse into the next all-encompassing AOL-style singularity. There's money to be made there, but most of us are the product.

Whose job is it anyway?

I'd like to see my employer, Mozilla, do more with feeds in the browser—and I suspect we will. Mozilla Labs has had some interesting Concept Series topics, and I look forward to seeing some of those things get pursued further. If I can carve out the time, I wouldn't mind helping.

Something I find interesting about feed auto-discovery—the thing that started this latest round of buzz—is that it didn't originate with browser makers. RSS auto-discovery was itself discovered by bloggers, way back in 2002. It wasn't until we sussed out the details of that HTML link tag and shoved it into our pages that browsers like Firefox started looking for it.

Hell, even though RSS started with Netscape, it took Dave Winer and UserLand and friends running with it to keep it alive and kicking. Now, Dave's suggested forking an open source browser to show Mozilla how it's done. I support the sentiment, but there are easier ways to go about this.

Making it your job

Christopher Blizzard:

We created add-ons with the original Firefox as a way to be able to say “no” in a constructive manner. If you want something that you think is important to you, you can make an add-on.

That could be taken as a cop-out, but it's not. With the efforts behind Jetpack—now just the Add-on SDK—building add-ons for Firefox is being made easier. Rather than dealing with a morass of XUL and obscure APIs that I know has scared me personally away all these years, you can now do most everything you'd like though much-simplified JavaScript APIs and HTML/CSS.

In other words, if you are a web developer—albeit a fairly advanced one—you can make an add-on for Firefox. Hopefully, as the Add-on SDK advances, the bar to participation will continue to drop.

To be continued

I'm running out of steam and it's time for bed, so I think I'll just trail off for now. I do have a bit more in me, though. The next thing is about taking my own advice in that last section and making some of this my job to fix.

Archived Comments

Majken "Lucy" Connor
2011-01-27T06:38:04

Yay!

Feeds are soo soo soooo great, but not as live bookmarks. Google Reader is the place to be in terms of functionality, but there's no reason I have to put everything through google.

When I find a site I like, why should I have to go to it to check for new content? A feed reader brings it to me AND it remembers where I was. I've been trying to get my kids hooked on it, though they seem to forget about it.

Speaking of the kids, their teachers are getting all technical and they post the homework online, but I've been pulling my hair out for 2 years trying to get them to do it in a way that enables feeds. Several nights it happened that they didn't write down what they had and then we had to remember to check periodically because the homework wasn't updated right away.

Right now they're sent home with books with it all written down and I'm supposed to sign that I saw it, but who remembers to look at a book all the time? It's such a complicated process - kids have to write it down in the first place, then one of us has to remember to show it to me. FEEDS!!! No one has to remember, it just shows up where I'm already looking!

So glad you're on board.
- l.m.orchard
  2011-01-27T20:54:22
  
  Not sure if the homework lists online are behind a login or not, but if it's in HTML we can hack a feed out of it :)
Bee
2011-01-27T08:13:46

"Discovery — help me find and follow interesting people and things Aggregation — give me one spot where what I find and follow is delivered to me Publishing — enable me to post things where people (and their agents) can find and follow" .. Erm google reader?
- l.m.orchard
  2011-01-27T15:02:20
  
  Yup. I use Google Reader every day. Google owns it, though. It's not Facebook or Twitter, but it's not mine.
  - fluffy
    2011-01-27T17:01:25
    
    Whenever I'm going through my occasional "Google scares me" phases I go back to FeedOnFeeds. It has a few rough edges, but it has the nice advantage that it's software you install on your own server somewhere, and it works pretty much just like Google Reader in terms of aggregation. It also has some rudimentary publishing stuff, although IIRC it's in the form of a public RSS feed that other people subscribe to. Which actually isn't a bad model, really.
    - l.m.orchard
      2011-01-27T17:34:03
      
      I think I've used FeedOnFeeds before, though it looks like it's not moved in awhile. There's also Tiny Tiny RSS, which looks a little more kept-up.
CiaranG
2011-01-27T10:45:08

Do feeds belong in the browser? Well, to the extent that while looking at a web page, there may be related feeds that the browser can auto-discover. Do I want to read them in the browser? No.

All I ever wanted was for the feed button in Mozilla product A, Firefox, to be able to add a subscription to that feed in Mozilla product B, Thunderbird. You'd think that would be a simple and obvious thing that would just work, but even by hooking the two together with a selection of Heath Robinson-style scripts, it's still never been possible to get them to play nicely.
- l.m.orchard
  2011-01-27T15:06:57
  
  That's a good point - a lot of this falls under the bailiwick of Mozilla Messaging, who work on Thunderbird. Personally, I never liked feeds in an email client, though.
  
  But, that reminds me they've got this thing called Raindrop that I haven't looked at in awhile. It might be interesting.
Robert Kaiser
2011-01-27T14:42:53

Fun that you say that XUL scared you away from doing add-ons, as doing everything that I think should be markup in JS scares me away from doing restartless add-ons or using the new SDK. I guess there's different people thinking differently. ;-)

For the actual topic, I think you're dead-on. I have subscribed to feeds from twitter, statusnet and identica, but as there's no interface to write messages from there, I just don't post anything there (and I intentionally don't have accounts on monolithic services like Facebook or twitter).

We need to get a better integration for pulling together info and communication in the browser. My "RMD" concept - http://wiki.kairo.at/wiki/RMD - could be one possible basis, but it might be overdoing it, given that I very much come from traditional messaging...
- l.m.orchard
  2011-01-28T18:32:07
  
  Yeah, XUL has been one of those things on my to-research list for years and years, but I've never really dove in. Then, Jetpack comes along, and at least the entry point is similar to what I've been doing for the last decade or so.
  
  But even that is sneaky, because I have access now to those "obscure Mozilla APIs" and I'm finding myself learning them now anyway since Jetpack got me in the door. :)
  
  Your RMD concept is interesting, though. Might be more to the point than the piggy-backing I'm doing on Live Bookmarks. I've also been wondering how things like pubsubhubub might feed into things like this
@sull
2011-01-27T19:50:36

Question. Whats your opinion on FF (and other browsers) handling of the direct feed url? I've long wanted browsers to back off from forcing their own baked-in handling (stylesheets, functionality etc). I've just wanted the simple alert dialog (now standardized for all alerts like geolocation, passwords etc) to appear when necessary before the browser takes over (Like you include with Fireriver auto-discovery).

The obvious example is when a feed specifies its own XSL stylesheet but FF ignores this instruction and the sniffer only cares about the presence of the <rss or <feed element before treating this 'document' differently than any other XML document. This can be overcome with some hacks but that is a moot point.

Ideally, the browser will adhere to the content publisher's (or feed generator's) instructions on how to handle the presentation of the data. That plus XSLT is a W3C standard.

Definitely interested in your thoughts on this angle of the "feeds in browser" discussion.

Thanks,

Sull
- l.m.orchard
  2011-01-27T20:52:52
  
  I'm not a fan of the built-in stylesheet for feeds. That change actually cost me a bunch of hours at work back then, trying to figure out why my XSL stopped working.
  
  IMO, that broke something I was using, but didn't go far enough to make it worth breaking. And, it's not really gone much farther since then.
  - @sull
    2011-01-28T03:23:25
    
    thanks for pointing out your post from yesteryear. the issue needs some new noise. FF4 is unchanged.
skierpage
2011-01-28T11:09:07

"We need some services and hosts out there as rendezvous points for our browsers and agents,"

Why? I can e-mail directly to another user at a computer; BitTorrent transfers file chunks directly to other computers. So why can't my computer transfer my pictures, status updates, favorite links, snarky comments, etc. DIRECTLY to the computers of lists of people (misnamed as "friends" by Facebook)?

The correct response to the dangers of centralization is running your own server. That needs to become the norm rather than some scary IT project that only geeks ever attempt! Your "server" could just be Firefox accepting connections from lists of people.
- l.m.orchard
  2011-01-28T18:04:52
  
  No, generally, you can't e-mail directly to another user at a computer. You send a message to a server, which then sends it to their server, and eventually their mail client picks it up. There are intermediaries.
  
  BitTorrent relies on trackers (ie. rendezvous points) before you can start transferring chunks, though the distributed hash stuff helps get away from that. But, if all that were easy (including discovery), it would have taken off long, long ago.
  
  You can't go P2P for everything, at least not easily. Not every P is online at all times, so we need store-and-forward services. Some P's have multiple devices and agents, and most of those are behind firewalls and NAT. So, we need servers out there as accessible fixed points that are (mostly) always available. We can try to build P2P meshes that do the same thing, but servers are simpler.
  
  And, yeah, I do believe that running your own server is the ultimate solution. Or, at least, finding someone to run it for you who cares about keeping it up, whether through direct payment or other direct incentive (ie. they're family or friends). Otherwise, you still have the problem where what they care about doesn't match what you care about (eg. ad supported services).
  But, with the way the user agent picture is splitting up across devices (eg. the cloud, ambient computing), I don't think Firefox will ever be the server. Even if you connect user agents together with something like Jabber/XMPP, you still need a server out there—though at least that's pushing things in the right direction, since an XMPP server can be agnostic about the messages that go through it
  
  I do have another blog post rattling around in my head about hosting. It's too hard right now; charging money smothers a lot of use; etc.
  - @sull
    2011-01-28T21:17:32
    
    Opera Unite is out there but it too leverages a centralized service as a proxy. But it is a great experiment and give them credit for moving it forward and into their browser product. The problem that will creep up is of course bandwidth limitations, especially on the UP. And this is only going to get worse as providers tighten up the pipes.

How to use feed auto-discovery in Firefox 4

2011-01-15T17:20:22+00:00

TL;DR: The feed button is not dead; it's just been sent to sing backup in Firefox 4 because it's not pulling its weight up front. This post discusses how you can still use feed auto-discovery, even restoring the icon to the toolbar with a few clicks and a drag.

There's a brouhaha about Bug 578967, wherein the feed auto-discover icon in the Firefox 4 Beta has been hidden by default. Being a feed nerd, the author of a book on the stuff, and a Mozilla employee—I've got at least a few opinions.

This post is one of several on this subject.

Feeds are too ubiquitous to need an indicator

Feeds are so successful and ubiquitous that it's simpler to assume every site has one, rather than keeping an un-lit indicator around to tell you when one's missing. So, Firefox 4 has an option in the bookmark menu to subscribe to the current page:

The only indicator of a missing feed is that the menu item greys out. Since feeds are everywhere, you should feel comfortable reaching for that subscription menu whenever you like. Of course, this assumes that subscribing to a page falls into the same thought process as bookmarking it—but I don't think that's an unreasonable notion.

On the other hand, if you didn't know that subscribing to a page was possible—or if you worry there might be people (ie. the potential readers of your feeds) who are in that position—this change may seem problematic.

I don't think that's an unreasonable notion, either. But, I'll get back to that in a future post.

The feed icon isn't dead, it's just hiding

Even with the new bookmark menu item, the feed subscription button is still available and ready to return to your toolbar in the Firefox 4 Beta.

First, right-click somewhere in the empty space of your Firefox 4 toolbar. Try somewhere after the tabs, or somewhere between the toolbar buttons. This is how it works on Windows, and this is what it looks like on my Mac:

Click Customize, and you'll get a panel like this:

This lets you customize which buttons and controls appear on the toolbar. If you scroll down in the panel, you'll see a "**Subscribe**" button. Drag that from the panel to a position in the toolbar, and you'll get a result like this: Click "**Done**", and your browser should end up like this: I took my browser screenshots with [Dave Winer's screenshot of the old Firefox feed icon](http://scripting.com/stories/2011/01/15/mozillaPleaseKeepTheRssIco.html) for comparison. The result is different, but not radically so. It even enables and darkens when you visit a site with a feed: The main difference is that Dave's screenshot is the default in Firefox 3.6, whereas mine is the result of the last few screenshots of toolbar customization in Firefox 4 beta 9. That customization is easy, if you know it's possible—but the worry is, as they say: out of sight, out of mind.

Archived Comments

Felix Pleșoianu
2011-01-16T08:00:44

I have to take issue with some of your points, based on my personal experience. :)

"Feeds are so successful and ubiquitous that it’s simpler to assume every site has one,"

Um, no. I follow a hundred webcomics, and while the situation has gotten better recently, many of them still don't have a feed. That's not unique to webcomics, either. Lack of a newsfeed is common enough that being able to tell at first glace is very useful. Heck, many people, even website owners, are ignorant of RSS. More about that in a moment.

Besides, the feed button serves a second purpose, which is to allow easy access to the feed. Just as I don't want to hunt for an "RSS" or "XML" link inside the website, I don't want to hunt for it in the browser's interface.

Last but not least, many people still don't know about RSS. That big prominent orange icon is a big auto-discovery feature, not just in the technical sense, but also because a newbie could see it and click it out of curiosity, and thus learn about feeds. I had to explain what RSS is to someone whose browser didn't have one, and that proved to be quite difficult.

Of course, all this talk is for nothing as the decision has already been made but, you know. Just my two cents.
Bruce Wayne
2011-01-16T11:34:59

Nice explaination But by removing the rss indicator Firefox has shifted content aggregation control from an open browser to closed siloed companies. There is no valid excuse for this.... Even the one you have eloquently made.... I'm quiet certain that with this decision Firfox will speed up it's demise...Just to let you know... we are close to launching several application platforms for consumers that use RSS as as a content transport protocol
Meepmeepmeep
2011-01-16T11:38:58

Feeds are too ubiquitous to need an indicator

So why do i need to resort to Yahoo Pipes so often on sites i want to see updates on?
- l.m.orchard
  2011-01-16T21:36:00
  
  I don't know why you need to resort to Yahoo Pipes so often—what kinds of sites are you trying to subscribe to? I haven't touched Yahoo Pipes in years, and I have 1000 feeds in Google Reader, having amassed them over the course of 8 years or so.
  That said, I know there are exceptions—I'm being optimistic in my explanation here. In my experience, most sites really do have feeds.
  - Meepmeepmeep
    2011-01-17T09:14:50
    
    Web Comics, Web 1.0 blogs, software download listings, just to mention a few.
    - l.m.orchard
      2011-01-17T16:13:18
      
      Those sound like exceptions to me—that, or sites whose owners have intentionally chosen not to offer feeds. Either way, the feed icon doesn't really help you there anyway.
      - Meepmeepmeep
        2011-01-17T18:42:08
        
        Of course it does. Its existence leads to more people using it, which translates into pressure on webmasters to implement it.
        
        THAT is the whole damn point of why everyone is upset. Its existence may not be a strong pressure, but it is a constant one. It going away means less webmasters will bother to implement rss feeds. This is a plain fact.
Meepmeepmeep
2011-01-16T11:48:09

out of sight, out of mind.

Wow, you seriously have not managed to understand that that is the ENTIRE crux of the issue?

Dead or hidden does not matter, because it does the exact same thing: It means less people will realize RSS feeds exist and are useful.
- l.m.orchard
  2011-01-16T23:31:21
  
  No, I understand that's the crux of the worry. But barely anyone's using that button anyway—so if the whole existence and usefulness of RSS feeds rest on that one icon, feeds are in big trouble.
  - Meepmeepmeep
    2011-01-17T09:12:38
    
    barely anyone’s using that button anyway
    
    Complete fallacy. 3% out of the group participating in a time-limited beta test clicked on the button during that timeframe to subscribe to new feeds.
    
    Now ponder how often you discover new feeds in comparison to how often you use the reload button.
    
    It just plain has a different use model. A more realistic measurement would've been to compare how often an rss preview was opened via the button versus a link on the page itself.
    - l.m.orchard
      2011-01-17T16:36:15
      
      If you think that'd be an interesting study, go ahead and propose it to the Test Pilot team: https://testpilot.mozillalabs.com/
      - Meepmeepmeep
        2011-01-17T18:45:07
        
        I've tweeted at them, since their site does not provide an email i can send something at. If you know of an email address of theirs or better, an actual chat contact, please let me know.
      - l.m.orchard
        2011-01-17T20:34:39
        
        I don't think there's a direct email contact, but the Test Pilot / Labs site lists all of these things:
        
        Forums - http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla-labs-testpilot/topics
        
        Proposals - https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Test_Pilot#Propose_and_develop_Test_Pilot_studies
        
        IRC - irc://irc.mozilla.org/labs
Craig Overend
2011-01-16T13:06:07

Feed discovery is already a pain in the arse, now it's made even harder. I'm going to miss the bright orange dropdown icon (until someone brings it back as an add-on). Does the new "space wasting" icon drop down with the list of feeds still?
- l.m.orchard
  2011-01-16T23:32:29
  
  Both the icon and the subscribe menu list the available feeds. Have you tried the new beta?
Meepmeepmeep
2011-01-16T16:13:16

More flat out wrong stuff:

subscribing to a page falls into the same thought process as bookmarking it—but I don’t think that’s an unreasonable notion.

It is completely and utterly unreasonable.

One bookmarks a page to be able to quickly visit it later and directly.

One subscribes to its feed in order to avoid having to actually visit it at all.

I sincerely hope i do not need to explain how these concepts are completely and utterly opposed to each other.
- l.m.orchard
  2011-01-16T21:33:47
  
  I disagree. To me, the bookmark menu is the place where I manage a long-term relationship with a page. That's where I'm coming from.
  That menu includes all my bookmarklets for sharing, making new bookmarks—and now, subscribing to a page. Makes sense to me. Maybe it would make more sense if the menu was renamed.
  - Meepmeepmeep
    2011-01-17T09:13:47
    
    a long-term relationship with a page
    
    There are different kinds of relationships.
SilverWave
2011-01-16T17:19:01

I think Mozilla missed fully exploiting RSS in Firefox after a great start with LiveBookMarks...

You can fix it like I did with some small add-ons...

I use Boox with Places Full Tiles and Stay-Open Menu. Then all your feeds are on the BookMark Toolbar and easily accessible, bolded if unread.

RSS nirvana.

Oh yeah - sorry but put the RSS icon back !

Heh ;-)
- l.m.orchard
  2011-01-16T21:31:49
  
  I actually agree that Mozilla (and Microsoft, and Apple, and Google) have missed out on exploiting RSS by not going beyond Live Bookmarks—I'm probably going to write about that in the near future. And, yes, the feed icon can be put back in its former place by way of add-on. But, it won't be going back in Firefox 4
opi
2011-01-16T18:36:51

But if it's not being there by default most of users won't reactivate it so we're going to lose readership. What percent of Firefox users do changes to its chrome? I know I do, but I can dig RSS URI straight from website code.
- l.m.orchard
  2011-01-16T23:35:02
  
  The reason it'll no longer be there by default is because it's rarely used. I doubt you got much readership from it in the first place.
@JoeHobot
2011-01-16T18:48:17

Great article my friend. I liked the fact you pointed out "The feed icon isn’t dead, it’s just hiding"

Anyway, hope that FF4 is coming out soon, out of beta release.

Wish you good day now..

Founder of MWD
Andy Gongea
2011-01-16T20:45:36

I understand that the idea is to make the user interface lighter and without any distractions. On the other hand I also understand that a lot of blogs depend on this feature to increase their readers base.

Let's try a scenario somehow similar to the RSS problem. What if, Firefox would be launched with the Navigation Toolbar hidden? How many will enable it?

I have another one, less scary. What if, Tabs on Top would be unchecked by default? How many people will change this setting?

Similar to these scenarios, RSS usage will drop on FF.
- dude
  2011-01-17T03:33:25
  
  Great point. I have an even scarier proposition, what if tabs were a hidden feature?
Felix Pleșoianu
2011-01-17T06:30:09

I forgot to mention something.

Saying that the feed icon is rarely used misses the point big time. There are websites I've been visiting three times a week for years, but I only needed to click the feed icon once. That's what feeds are for: to spare you from manually clicking a button to check for updates.

Statistics are great, but they don't substitute for common sense.
- l.m.orchard
  2011-01-17T20:38:43
  
  So, if you only use it once per site, then why should it be there in the toolbar all the time for every site? My common sense tells me that's a good candidate to put somewhere less obtrusive. Beyond that, the feature still does everything else you mention.
  - Felix Pleșoianu
    2011-01-18T07:00:57
    
    "So, if you only use it once per site, then why should it be there in the toolbar all the time for every site?"
    
    For the same reason you have fire hydrants everywhere in a city, even if they are very rarely used. Heck, ideally you should never need them; but would you advocate taking them out?
    
    I gave a bunch of reasons why the RSS feed icon is good in my first comment. And I hope all of them were already known, and have been weighted, when the decision was made.
Michael K Pate
2011-01-17T17:53:19

In Chrome, I have the RSS Subscription Extension (by Google). Now in Firefox, I guess I will be installing RSS Icon every time (or at least as soon as it is updated).

I still regard the decision to break functionality as disappointing, though.
- l.m.orchard
  2011-01-17T20:40:45
  
  This is one of those things I file under not pleasing everyone. I'm guessing there are lots of people who are just fine with it, and so aren't a part of these discussions. How much outrage has there been over Chrome lacking a feed icon by default, versus people praising Chrome's UI simplicity over Firefox?
  - dude
    2011-01-18T02:43:52
    
    I read more about Firefox starting slow, Chrome being responsive, than I do praise for "Chrome's UI simplicity", and yes, people do harp on Chrome for the lack of a feed icon as well.
Danny
2011-01-18T19:23:44

If my own experience is anything to go on, the feed icon's benefit in spreading the idea of feeds is being highly exaggerated in some of the comments here. It was a very long time before I noticed it, for pages without an icon in them I would do View Source to find the alternate links.

On the other hand, I reckon having something in the bookmarks menu would give more exposure to people who want to do more with a given resource (bookmarking and subscribing to feeds are both rather unidirectional relationships!).

In fact it would be really useful to have a fully integrated, user-accessible system for handling all such things, ideally one that could be transparently shifted to the Web (with appropriate access control). A built-in HTTP server would be a good start (is there one yet?), plus support for (say) Atom protocol for shoving data out. This could make it a lot easier to work with semi-social sites like del.icio.us and Bloglines. It's notable that these kind of tools have traditionally been very server-driven, with browsers playing (limited) catch up with plugins. Why can't the client set the agenda for a while?
- l.m.orchard
  2011-01-19T03:16:41
  
  FWIW: Firefox Sync does some shifting of things to the web. It's a pretty dumb store, providing just enough structure for the client to push encrypted hunks of data into a storage cloud shared between devices. But, it is a bespoke API for sync and not composed from standards like Atom.
  
  As for a built-in HTTP server... I've been toying with the idea of playing with something like that since I started poking at the new add-on API and seeing a lot in common with node.js. It seems like that's getting easier soon
Dexter
2011-05-03T13:14:26

Thanks for your explanation. Even though it is helpful, FF's decision is still a step back. Fortunatelly, there are addon developers that help fixing FF's stepabacks: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/rss-icon/

What happened to feed auto-discovery in Firefox 4?

2011-01-15T16:18:56+00:00

TL;DR: The feed button is not dead; it's just been sent to sing backup in Firefox 4 because it's not pulling its weight. This post talks about why things have changed.

This post is one of several on this subject.

Defaults are hard to pare down

The feed icon still lives in the Firefox 4 Beta; it's just not there by default any more. But, if you look at the controls available in the toolbar customization panel, you'll notice a lot of things that don't show up by default—there are a lot of things in there, period.

This is the dilemma for the Firefox User Experience team at Mozilla: Like it or not, one of the main themes of this next generation of browsers is minimalism—faster, smaller, less browser to get in the way of what you're browsing. Yet, at the same time, Firefox 4 has the features of Firefox 3.6 and more.

You can't just cram it all in there, so what gets prime real estate by default? People say it's just a few pixels, that feed button—but is it so much more important than anything else that could go there? And before you answer, consider that not just for your personal use, but for the 100's of millions of people using Firefox. How do you check your own biases and make a decision on that scale? You could make an educated guess, make a gut check. A lot of brilliant design happens that way.

You can also gather some telemetry from beta installs to see what people really use. Looking at a heatmap of clicks, the feed button is an absolute stinker. This isn't a random whim of the UX team—seriously, it's an order of magnitude less used than anything else in the toolbar (notice the one black spot):

There have been comments dismissing the validity of that heatmap study. But, as far as I can tell, none of them really stick. So, for the sake of argument and a shorter blog post, let's assume barely anyone is using the feed icon and that it's not pulling its weight in this new age of browser minimalism.

Keep in mind that Firefox isn't the only browser to deprioritize the feed button: Google Chrome doesn't even have a feed button at all, and for many people that's the gold standard for minimal browser UI:

Serving the users

Let's hammer on the point of disuse some more—what's the payoff for clicking that thing, anyway?

+1 — You get an option to create a Live Bookmark, which is really handy for things like Bugzilla searches or light headline reading. (I like those so much that I tried building them on the server at Delicious once, but we never quite worked it out at scale.)
0 — You get a list of sites to which Firefox will delegate subscription, if you happen to have installed a content handler. Useful if you know what it's about; a mystery if you don't—not much more useful than a bookmarklet, to me.
-1 — You get a plainly-styled version of what you were probably already looking at on a site, something I criticized back in 2006, like some are criticizing the feed icon change now. (At the time, I was working for a marketing company, and the change cost me days trying to incorporate branding in feeds on a client's site. I think we gave up after a bit, but I suspect that FeedBurner built a nice business routing around that change.)

That's been status quo for years, and it's less than compelling—I've even had people ask me if they broke the page when the button was clicked on accident.

So, given little reward for clicking that feed icon, pushing it into the background in its current state is a service to the users of Firefox. In other words, that feed button has to get a lot more interesting if it's going to serve alongside UI all-stars like Back, Reload, and Location.

Hell, even with Firebug installed, I use View Source more than the feed button these days, and I've never stuck that on the toolbar.

Leading the web

The most compelling response I've seen to the "removal" of the feed auto-discovery button is the challenge that Mozilla and other browser makers should be improving feed-related features, rather than pushing them into the background. With this, I wholeheartedly agree—but I'm not entirely sure what to do about it.

So, there's a balance here: Make the experience of the web better by improving how Firefox handles what's already out there, and make the web itself better by building more powerful and enabling technologies into Firefox and other products. In the best of times, Mozilla can do and has done both at once. WebGL and technologies associated with HTML5 represent great examples of this.

But, alas, syndication feeds in the browser have stagnated. The feed button has been a weak feature for years. In the meantime, other things have taken priority in the Firefox project. The rise of Twitter and Facebook and more complex applications on the web have reduced the need for most people to interact directly with feeds, so demands for attention to the feed button haven't exactly topped the charts in comparison to things like making sure Flash doesn't crash the browser and getting super fast for everything else.

Ship it!

In the end, Mozilla has a browser to ship. The decision on the feed button has been made and, believe it or not, with a great deal of thought behind it.

I know that this is the first time many people have heard of this change, but many already have heard and have given the UX team a number of earsful. Coming in at this late stage and requesting—nay demanding—a reversal of that decision will do nothing but piss off all the people who've been banging away at this and many other things up to now. They're people who've worked hard, stayed up late—and the last thing anyone wants to do is rehash every conversation ever about the topic.

Archived Comments

Jacques
2011-01-16T07:22:31

I understand that we always try to enhance UI of any software and that it takes a lot of time and discussions to make decisions. And some decisions may not please everyone.

As for the Feed button, the one in the toolbar customization panel does not highlight when there are feeds available or change colour when there are no feeds. You need to click on it to see if Firefox 4 discovered feeds of not.

In Firefox 3.6, you don't need to guess or click on a button to find if a feed is available.

So instead of a feed button that is always shown, feed available or not, it's much more usable to show a button that highlight properly (takes more space), or is shown only when feeds are available (optimal space use).

Using a heatmap of clicks does not do justice to the feeds button, since it's of no use to click on it in Firefox 3.6 to instantly see if or not there is a feeds available.

There are other information that have been removed in Firefox 4 that are open to discussion.

For example, a heatmap does not show loading icons, throbbers, urls loading in the status bar, "done" message in the status bar, etc. In fact, any status information won't show up in a clicks heatmap. So if that information does not show up in a clicks heatmap, it does not mean these statuses must be removed from the UI.
- l.m.orchard
  2011-01-16T21:25:30
  
  Actually, the Feed button in the toolbar does change state depending on the presence or absence of feeds: It's enabled and clickable with a feed, and greys out without a feed. I mentioned that in the post. If that's not noticeable enough for you, then that's a separate bug specific to that button.
  
  As for the validity of the heatmap—what would you suggest get done as an alternative? There's no way to fit a large number of beta users with eye-tracking gear. Also, I personally don't buy that people just like to have the feed indicator around because it's nice to see it light up. It's a call to action (eg. subscribe to this site)—and if barely anyone takes that action, how valuable can it be?
Giuliano
2011-01-16T08:40:45

And if you really miss the feed-autodiscovery feature, just use RSS Icon In Awesombar. ;)
- dude
  2011-01-17T03:17:05
  
  RSS/Atom are standardized web features, it's a shame we have to rely on 3rd parties to enable support. At least Google has an official RSS extension so I can trust the security of the addon, but still, both Mozilla and Google are going backwards on this.
voracity
2011-01-16T11:07:30

Well argued. I am a little disappointed with its removal because RSS is a distributed status update mechanism, and we're currently being swamped by centralised status update mechanisms (twitter and whatnot). But the experience has always been seriously crap (to put it bluntly), so better to remove it until it improves I suppose.

Sadly, my guess is that once its removed, it will never reappear.
antistress
2011-01-16T11:27:15

i agree with the new UI concerning feed subscription (along with bookmarks).

But there is indeed a concern with Firefox 4 concerning feeds. Since Firefox doesn't really handle feeds, Sync doesn't care about them either. Therefore if you have installed an add-on to deal with feeds, they will not be synchronized and that's not a good experience for the user. Bookmarks are synchronized but feeds are not, whereas they supposed to belong to the same scheme
- l.m.orchard
  2011-01-17T00:04:24
  
  Good points. I'd say there are lots of things Firefox could do better with feeds in general.
Pavel Cvrcek (Mozilla.cz)
2011-01-16T11:29:40

I think this is right decision even I'm one of the people who use RSS button which is inside location bar. But we have extensions right? Because this function is important for me I created extension RSS Icon In Awesombar which brings this button back to the location bar.

https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/rss-icon-in-awesombar/
Meepmeepmeep
2011-01-16T11:34:59

The only reason i'll even get to see your follow-up entries to this is because my browser includes an rss reader and a button that tells me you have an rss feed for your blog.
- l.m.orchard
  2011-01-16T21:38:06
  
  So, you mean to tell me that you didn't already think my blog had a feed, before you looked for the feed icon?
  - dude
    2011-01-17T03:22:53
    
    Are you surprised he would be more likely to find an RSS button on his toolbar than somewhere on the side of the page? Or that someone wouldn't assume that all blogs have RSS, especially many older ones? Or that asking Google Reader to test if a URL had a feed is a whole lot more cumbersome than using the browser to get Google Reader to subscribe to it?
  - Meepmeepmeep
    2011-01-17T09:08:24
    
    Yes.
    
    I stumble upon too many blogs of various kinds that have no feeds to make the assumption that every blog has one. As i mentioned on your other post, Yahoo Pipes is a tool i often need to resort to.
    
    Maybe you need to step outside your Web 2.0 bubble sometime?
Janusz Lewandowski
2011-01-16T12:12:53

I suggest removing the Scroll Left button, it's used only by 1% of Fx users.
- l.m.orchard
  2011-01-16T21:28:22
  
  I'm pretty sure removing the Scroll Left button was discussed—if only for a minute—and a call was made that basic spatial navigation was more important than feeds.
dude
2011-01-16T21:25:26

Janusz, I totally agree, let's remove the site identity, remove bookmark, more info, scroll right, print menu item, save page as, bookmarks all tab, etc., they are obviously never used.
- l.m.orchard
  2011-01-17T00:07:20
  
  Pretty much all of those you list are used more than twice as much as the feed icon, or don't appear on the toolbar at all.
Jim L.
2011-01-16T21:32:14

I can put "View Source" in the toolbar? How?!
- l.m.orchard
  2011-01-16T21:40:34
  
  Actually, for "View Source", I installed the Web Developer add-on. So, that's not built-in like I implied.
Tulapi
2011-01-16T22:23:44

Why do you care about this "Back" button, "Location bar" and so on ? Just put one big "facebook" button and one big "google" button, it's enough...

With this kind of decisions, I think you are not "building a better Internet" as Mozilla Foundation is supposed to do.

RSS and twitter are very different ways to access information, with their "+" and "-". Leaving RSS dying seems to me a regression. I am sorry, but when I read "The rise of Twitter and Facebook and more complex applications on the web have reduced the need for most people to interact directly with feeds", I am a bit frightened, because I understand it a bit like : "Hey guy, why don't you go on Facebook like everybody to surf the web. It's cool and your friends tell you what is interesting to read".

I don'k know about the usability of the feed concept, it could be certainly improved, but I really felt it was going towards "give people tools to take control of their online lives" (Mozilla Mission)
- l.m.orchard
  2011-01-17T00:14:38
  
  So, I did say that Twitter and Facebook has left users with less need to interact with feeds—but I didn't say that I liked it. I'm the last person who'd want closed silos to own the web, and I want to see RSS and Atom and other open web technologies grow.
  - dude
    2011-01-17T03:25:24
    
    I'm currently a Chrome user, wishing that 1 day Firefox will go back to why I liked it in the first place. I've been subsribing to Twitter feeds and Facebook pages more than I have with feeds with Chrome, not only because the prior are established, but also because Chrome doesn't encourage RSS with its exclusion. I don't bother with addons either, I don't think most users do either (yet Mozilla decides addons need a whole bar).
Andrew
2011-01-17T01:39:38

I can't be the only person who, when I decide I want to subscribe to a site, looks for the RSS Icon on the page first before I ever even glance at the auto-discovery icon. In many cases, especially on larger sites, I rarely want what they would consider the "main" feed anyway and on the sites where I do want that, their feed is usually in a place that's easily clicked on.

So, in my case, it was needless clutter that I'm rather happy to see getting removed by default. Of course, I remove a lot more than that from Firefox's chrome, but at least this is one less thing I have to do manually.
fflover
2011-01-17T16:26:58

Sir, looks like you know a lot about FF. Is it a conscious decision to not have Awesombar as the default search bar .i hate it when it gives me google search results. if i type bbc news and hit enter, it should take me to bbc news site, right? not a google search of it? If there is any way i can get my awesombar back, please let me know.

Sincerely, fflover :)
- l.m.orchard
  2011-01-17T17:33:17
  
  Sounds like you might be interested in this add-on:
  
  https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/luckybar/
ffuser
2011-01-17T19:40:00

beta users is not equal to representative user population. how much percent of all Firefox users does your study cover, is it enough to make statistical conclusions?
- l.m.orchard
  2011-01-17T20:46:23
  
  Well, it's not my study, it's the Test Pilot team's study. I'd say it's a decent chunk of users, with some interesting segmentation. But, that's my opinion. If you have an idea of how to execute a study that covers more, feel free to let the Test Pilot team know.
Doug Bromley
2011-01-18T08:46:09

Wow. There's a lot of strong feelings flying around. Well as one of the silent majority I'd just like to offer my support to the removal. I never used the feed button and whenever I wanted a sites feed I normally scanned the page I was on for an icon to click.
Olivier
2011-01-18T18:03:16

Thank you for your post. I, too, would rather have the button clutter up a little than risk RSS being less discovered. But I understand your point and respect your decisions.
rektide
2011-01-22T02:17:52

your metric for evaluating the utility of the feed button -- click rate -- is about as incorrect and contrary as possibly can be conceived.

the entire point of the feed button is that you only need to click it once for a site. after a user clicks it, the user shouldn't have to click it again on that site, and, going further, shouldn't even have to visit the site. those are the signals for success.

if you want a useful metric, dont look at how often the button is clicked. that's entirely the purpose of what it's trying to avoid. look at return rates for sites where a user has clicked the feed button. if you see a precipitous drop in return rates, you know the button is functioning completely as desired. the bigger the drop, the less users return, the better the button works.

baby HCI jesus is weeping in his crib.
- l.m.orchard
  2011-01-22T08:45:28
  
  So... if it only gets used once per site, then it doesn't belong in the same toolbar with navigational controls that get used constantly. It's a special action, used rarely. Thus, it's in the bookmark menu now - you know, bookmarks, another thing you ideally do once per site if at all.
  
  But as I've said in other comments, if you feel strongly enough, come up with a study to propose to the Test Pilot team and spread your HCI jesus gospel

Enter the LizardFeeder

2009-01-06T00:01:54+00:00

[caption id="attachment_1582" align="alignright" width="247" caption="The Mozilla Tree"][/caption]

Behind Firefox is Mozilla, and behind Mozilla is a community. And the Mozilla community acts a lot like an ecosystem, which can be visualized as a kind of living tree—not to confused with the mozilla-central tree. Oh yeah, and Mozilla is the name of both a Foundation and a Corporation.

Confused yet? If not, then we should talk so you can explain it to me, because it all looks pretty tangly and intertwingled to me. Nonetheless, it seems to work, and produces a good chunk of my favorite software and technologies.

There are many efforts to track what's going on—including planets and newsletters and bugzillas and wikis and repositories and tinderboxen. Some of these resources report on, or are driven by, the activity occurring in the others. Some are automated, and others are carefully stitched together by hand. None offer a full picture of what's going on in the Mozilla galaxy in a way that's casually comprehensible by a sane human being.

Of course, that's not a slight against any of these sites or the people maintaining them—extracting an overview from such an organic phenomenon is neither easy nor straightforward. But, it might be fun to try.

As an infovore and avid practitioner of continuous partial attention, my first impulse is to reach for a firehose and stick my head into the stream. Relax, defocus, and try to let my pattern recognizers do their thing—sometimes those pattern recognizers are in my head, and sometimes they're written in Python.

[caption id="attachment_1585" align="alignright" width="225" caption="Firefox Victory!"][/caption]

But, for Mozilla, I couldn't find a stream of sufficient volume or completeness to satisfy me or my robots. Happily, though, my feeding urge found itself aligned with a project to discover the patterns of contribution in the Mozilla community and to find a way to thank the contributors responsible.

So, while we're still working on the thank-you angle, allow me to introduce you to the Lizardfeeder. The LizardFeeder is a feed aggregator, whose source code is built atop Sam Ruby's Planet Venus. The LizardFeeder pulls together and archives activity streams from a wide variety of Mozilla community sources. Beyond the usual human-readable pages produced by a blog-gathering Planet, the LizardFeeder accumulates statistical and historical data meant for consumption and analysis by robots.

At present, the only robot navigating the LizardFeeder archives is an AJAX-ified user interface that animates the firehose as a near real-time or time-lapsed stream of events scrolling by.

This is just meant as a conversation starter, though. I'm hoping to gather feedback and find more sources, as well as to entice creative community members to come up with more sophisticated visualizations of this data.

So, take a look, check it out, and let me know what you think!

Archived Comments

dria
2009-01-06T01:26:18

Is there a list of what sources are already being read by the LizardFeeder anywhere? I scanned through the various links here but didn't see anything obvious :)
l.m.orchard
2009-01-06T01:37:15

Yeah, that part could use some improvement. There's a monster list here:

http://feeds.mozilla.com/sources.opml
Brian King
2009-01-06T10:11:46

Excellent stuff. I was going to ask about access to the list of sources for each category, but Dria beat me to it.
l.m.orchard
2009-01-06T15:26:50

Actually, it occurs to me that this config file might work as a more readable version of the list of sources:

https://svn.mozilla.org/projects/lizardfeeder/trunk/conf/config.ini-dist

There's also this, which is where most of the previous list came from:

https://svn.mozilla.org/projects/lizardfeeder/trunk/conf/hg-feeds.opml-dist
Austin King
2009-01-06T20:55:52

Thanks for the background surrounding lizard feeder. Great post!

+1 Dria and Brian

Maybe make the title of the link to the OPML more descriptive than just "Feeds" and/or link to it in the body of the UI too and write something around it to encourage other's visualizations.

Awesome work Les.
Sanjay Parekh
2009-02-04T20:38:04

Is the AJAX UI available anywhere for download? I'd like to hack it for another use altogether. Great visualization and great application. Good job.
Deen Seth.
2009-09-16T18:21:02

This is a very good idea. Can we accomplish the same result using Yahoo Pipe? Do you plan to add events from Bugzilla, and mailing list to the feed?

I am more interested in development activities. There aren't much in code category.

I am interested in analyzing development related events.

OPML reading lists in FeedMagick2

2007-10-17T07:22:47+00:00

For anyone who's interested: I've been hacking a little bit on FeedMagick2 again, with the latest addition being an OPML reading list feed blender.

What's an OPML reading list? Basically, it's the same as as OPML export of a feed reader's subscription list - only rather than doing a one-time import into another program, the OPML is itself treated as a live feed. A feed reader that supports OPML reading lists will continually check the list for updates and sync RSS/Atom feed subscriptions with its contents, maybe in a special sub-folder.

Here's a quick demo:

The itch I mean to eventually scratch is to replace the front page of decafbad.com with a live updating aggregation of the stuff I create and capture daily on the web. It'll be basically a self-assembling tumblelog pulled from many different services across the web. It'll also replace the footer of accumulated crud I've got on this very blog - which I thought was a good idea at one point, but now consider NeatLikeDigitalWatches.

With that in mind, the next thing I plan to develop is an hAtom module or XSL transform. This will turn the blended feed into an XHTML page. Maybe someday, hAtomic will launch, and I'll have a nice pretty style for the page too. Some time after that, I might work up a module that stows away dated historical archives of the feed and pages. I have further plans and ideas, but I'm trying to focus on the itchy spots first so that I might actually get something done in this round of serial enthusiasm.

Say hello to FeedMagick2

2007-04-30T03:06:32+00:00

Yeah, things have been basically silent around here thanks to post-work brain fryage and a general lack of things to say. Really, everyone else around the blogosphere seems to be covering things satisfactorily. However, I have been idly working on a new project over the past few weeks, namely a total rewrite and redesign of my format-ignorant feed filtering and munging kit dubbed FeedMagick.

You can find a demo installation of FeedMagick2 here and find it ready for checkout from SVN over here. It's basically just a step away from being a proof of concept, but I'm hoping to get around to fleshing out docs and battening down the hatches with tests. In any case, if my serial enthusiasm holds out, this thing could eventually subsume everything else I've done with feeds.

For now, peek at some of these highlights:

Master Personal Feed - One big feed blended from 10 other personal metadata feeds pulled from various Web-2.0-ish sites.
Feed to JSON via Magpie - Get feed data parsed by way of Magpie into JSON data structures
Flickr Favorites Feed - Feed of photos marked as favorites by a Flickr user, pulled via the API
jbox.com scraper - Pipeline composed of HTML Tidy and XSL to scrape jbox.com to build an RSS feed of new items for sale.

Beyond practical examples, there are some things under the hood that seem keen to me. Apropos of my pipes-via-web ramblings back in February, I'm trying out a few different approaches to pipelining feed content through processor modules. My original FeedMagick relied on feeding URLs to URLs as parameters. That, unfortunately, can be mighty cumbersome and inefficient. So, FeedMagick2 explores a few more approaches:

The first and obvious approach is to chain them together in a single script. So, I've got objects instances that pass content from one to the next. The thing is, the pipe works in reverse: The driver script asks the last module in the pipe for content, which then asks the one before it for content, and so on. At any point along the way, modules can cache the output of previous modules, and refrain from calling up the chain.
The second way to chain pipelines together is just like the first FeedMagick: Some pipelines start with fetching a URL. That can be an original feed, or a URL leading to the output of an antecedent pipeline. And, oh yeah, most pipelines are run via parameterized URLs, so there's that bit of handy recursion.
The third way to chain pipelines together is with HTTP POST: A pipeline can accept feed data via the request body of an HTTP POST, thus allowing antecedent pipelines (or even cURL scripts) to push data into the pipeline rather than getting pulled via URL. This is kind of like my years-old jiggery pokery with pipelines via XML-RPC, only much much simpler.

I'm also poking around at making all of the above available at the command line via PHP-CLI, and I'm having gratuitous fun exploring PEAR to roll my own stripped-down web framework. I still hate PHP, but I'm at least finding ways to entertain myself while I'm holding my nose. Of course, I find weird things entertaining.

And, as a side note, the only reason I'm using PHP is because I'd like to play around with the idea of the de facto WordPress installation requirements standard. That is: If you can run WordPress, you can run this. In reality, I don't think I'm there, but I'm hoping to get close. For one, I'm refusing to play with anything older than PHP 5.

Anyway, play with it, tell me what you think and give me a reason to keep hacking at it. :)

Archived Comments

jamesv
2007-04-30T11:39:15

Aw man, now I've got to port all the code you wrote while you were here over to this new hotness ;) I really like (and appreciate) the single script approach.

Is caching at a module level done automatically, or is that something I need to flag in my original call? Some installs of the original code base are now aggregating large sections of a pool of around 400 feeds, and eeking out even minor performances gains would be just lovely.
dRAUPP
2007-04-30T13:40:16

hawt.
l.m.orchard
2007-04-30T14:43:54

@jamesv: Take a look at the source to this big-ish pipeline, all the way at the end:

http://decafbad.com/2007/04/FeedMagick2/pipelines/masterfeed

You can basically slap a Cacher module at the tail-end or even middle of a long string of modules, and it'll cache the results of everything before it. I've got a cache lifetime set in the conf/config.php, and you can also set the lifetime in the Cacher parameters. There can multiple Cacher's per pipeline too.

This thing might not quite yet be even as stable / in working order as the original FeedMagick, but it might be worth poking at for you. :)
kellan
2007-04-30T16:02:31

For one, I’m refusing to play with anything older than PHP 5.

That must be nice.

And curse you, this looks interesting, now I've got to find time to look at it.
John Manoogian III (jm3)
2007-04-30T17:53:08

addendum to README:
Installation
cp conf/config.php-dist conf/config.php chmod a+w logs - RewriteBase /~lorchard/FeedMagick2 + RewriteBase /FeedMagick2
l.m.orchard
2007-04-30T17:58:49

@jm3: Ah! Good catch. I really need to eventually installer-ify that kind of stuff.
megalar
2007-08-05T12:25:34
Yesterday my host upgraded to php5 so I ran over to your svn dump and installed feedmagick2. After editing the $baseurl and rewritebase i tested it and it worked like a charm, so I took a nap. Upon waking I was gonna go play with it and see what hacks I could get going with it but something was fubar. Warning: fopen(/home/megalar/www/html/feedmagick/logs/feedmagick2-debug-20070805.log) [function.fopen]: failed to open stream: Permission denied in /usr/share/php/Log/file.php on line 216 are the errors I get as you can see @ my site. If it hadn't worked to begin with I would think module problems on my server. To my knowledge, and my host's knowledge, nothing has changed since the upgrade so I'm wondering if it is some sort of bug or a server problem that waited a few hours to reveal itself. The latter doesn't really make much sense to me but I can't rule it out since I'm not r00t on the box and am not 100% certain my host didn't bork something while I slept.
```
              anyhoo, your thoughts?
```

Ficlets enhanced author feed, an XSL scraper hack

2007-04-05T05:37:00+00:00

I've been trying to get myself serious about writing and even set up a personal slush pile for my output. Then, I found Ficlets, and spewed a few quick starter stories there. And then... I stopped. I'm hoping to pick it up again very soon, but I guess that's the nature of my serial enthusiasm—it doesn't just apply to hacking.

So, here's something ironic: I just spent a few hours tonight throwing together a hack for Ficlets. See, Ficlets runs on original stories, comments, ratings, and sequels and prequels to stories. You can get an Atom feed of an author's stories and a feed of comments—but it seems like there's no way to get notified of prequels and sequels, which are a very gratifying part of the whole shebang.

With that in mind, check out this RSS feed:

http://decafbad.com/2005/12/FeedMagick/www-bin/ficlets.php?author=l_m_orchard

That's a blend of all my stories, comments on my stories, as well as prequels and sequels found for my stories. Subscribing to that feed will give me updates whenever there's anything new in all the above. It's thrown together using a semi-crazy mix of my FeedMagick package for caching, and some XSL for scraping. If you'd like a feed like this of your own, just replace l_m_orchard for your own author name in the author parameter.

Please note, however, that this little service is hosted on my site and may go away at any time for any reason.

In case you're interested in what's under the hood, here's the quick and dirty XSL that's behind it:

http://decafbad.com/2007/04/ficlets.xsl

This thing's made possible because the Ficlets feeds are XML, and so are the XHTML pages happily infested with microformats. If they ever go invalid, this scraper breaks. But, that's the nature of scrapers, and it works for now. Oh, and although they provide Atom, this feed is RSS 2.0. Why? Because it was easier that way. I might put some more effort into an Atom feed, but my itch has so far been scratched.

Archived Comments

megalar
2007-04-05T09:31:48

I had already decided I was gonna grab your FeedMagick source and try to do something with it but this just gives me more incentive as a Ficlets lover. I recently read your thoughts on pipes and feel much the same way => meh to GUI, especially a buggy one. It seems much more satisfying to just tell php what I want done and watch it go rather than spend 20 minutes fiddling with a silly applet.
l.m.orchard
2007-04-05T14:04:06

@meglar: Well, just to warn ya - FeedMagick needs a lot of work. :) I've got ideas for it, but have yet to get back around to it.
Kevin Lawver
2007-04-05T14:59:37

That may be the coolest thing ever. Good job!
l.m.orchard
2007-04-05T15:14:00

@Kevin: One thing that might not be cool is that this XSL hits Ficlets.com once for each story in the feed to pick up the additional info, but I try to cache the feed on my end for about 20 minutes per author... so hopefully it doesn't put any more stress on your site than I might have done manually in opening all my stories in tabs to check for comments and prequels/sequels. :)
Kevin Lawver
2007-04-05T15:44:25

That's fine. I think we can handle it. We'll get prequels/sequels added to either the author feed or their own feed in the near future.
l.m.orchard
2007-04-05T21:05:26

@Kevin: Yeah, I think the bare author feed is a good thing to leave alone. But, a personal author feed with comments and prequels/sequels and possibly notes would be excellent! You know, basically, notifications of significant events that'd bring me back to the site.

I'm also thinking it might be neat to gently spider through prequels and sequels on stories to map them out and track progress, but that's just a future hackery idea.
Roger Costello
2007-04-06T13:54:55

Is there any way for me to view the documents you are mashing up to generate the resulting RSS document? I am particularly interested in seeing how Microformats are being mashed up. Thanks!
l.m.orchard
2007-04-06T14:25:44

Roger: Sure... Really, the only things I'm mashing up are the author Atom feed, like mine here:

http://ficlets.com/feeds/author/lmorchard

And then, I chase down each story in the feed, like this one:

http://ficlets.com/stories/1763

You can view source on a story page and see all the information sprinkled in there - look for 'abbr' tags and class names like 'pubdate' and 'hentry'. The pages are also valid XML, so they can be manipulated right in XSL.
Bill
2009-01-28T00:36:02

I'm sure that many Ficlets fans are sad that Ficlets.com is no more. We are in the process of constructing Blurbtree.com a site that might be helpful for them. It's not a replacement for Ficlets, but it's a clean start and we'll build the site based on the feedback we get from the online community. Please give it a try and let us know what we can do to make it fit your needs. You can also get more information at our Blurbtree FAQ.

Thoughts on Pipes on the Web - Part II

2007-02-15T08:49:56+00:00

In the last post, I expressed concern for my own well-being over a lack of head-over-heels love for Yahoo! Pipes. On the surface, I think it's because it's not a freshly discovered concept for me, and also probably because I'm tired and a bit hacked out right now. But, I think there's a bit more to it.

First of all, I'm not impressed by GUI builders for most things. Don't get me wrong: That Pipes GUI is pretty sweet and quite an impressive implementation — but as a rule, such things don't quite get my geek on. So, there's that.

Another thing is that I've done something kinda like Yahoo! Pipes, called FeedMagick — only, it doesn't have a GUI and I mostly abandoned it after releasing the code and having used it for a project at my old job. It's one of those serial enthusiasms that I've figured I'd circle back to eventually. I still think it's a pretty cool idea.

All kudos to the Yahoo! Pipes team though: Unlike me, they've actually got a living and breathing project — which trumps a paged-to-disk serial enthusiasm most days.

So what else is really curbing my enthusiasm? Well, Yahoo! Pipes looks like a pretty self-contained pipes engine — data goes in one end, frobnication happens in the middle, data comes out the other side.

But, what I like about the notion of the URL-line is that you can take one URL and supply it as a parameter to another URL — making messy pipelined URLs while building a crazy web-wide distributed execution environment powered by HTTP and REST. This is the kernel of the notion that I think really excites me about pipe on the web — I just haven't had a chance to do much with it lately.

Depending on the perspective, true pipes on the web — that is, URLs fetching URLs — look to me like functional programming ala Lisp. Consider an idempotent GET request as a pure function call with no side-effects. Then, consider a GET request that accepts a URL as a parameter — it's a nested function call: the outer GET must make an inner GET to fetch the parameter-supplied URL. Give the inner URL another URL as a parameter, and you've got yet another nested function call.

But, if you like, ignore the theoretical benefits of functional programming — flip the nested function calls inside out and you've got a pipe. And, since you're using HTTP GET, you can get all the benefits of HTTP — like caching of execution results and a web full of distributed processing nodes, among other things.

I haven't explored Yahoo! Pipes deeply enough yet, so maybe I'm missing the features that pipe authors can used to call on other distributed pipe elements out on the web at large. But, I think that's what ultimately gets me psyched about pipes the web and hasn't yet for Yahoo! Pipes.

And, of course, I think I'm just a little hacked out and tired of whizbang new stuff right now. :)

Archived Comments

John Evans
2007-02-15T13:59:01

The thing that struck me about Pipes is that it seemed rather limiting to someone who can code but too geeky to someone who can't. Maybe I am wrong but I wonder that once the hype dies down who exactly the audience will be long term.
Stuart Robinson
2007-02-15T19:35:41

Don't be so apologetic! Conceptually it's cool, but the UI quickly becomes frustrating for anyone with text-based coding experience. I guess this is the web's visual basic and we are all going to be more interested in it's perl.

Thoughts on Pipes on the Web

2007-02-15T08:09:56+00:00

By way of my meme tracker, I found something like 15 entries linking to Yahoo! Pipes from my feed subscriptions. That's crazy — I've usually never seen more than 3-5 feeds linking to anyone thing, maybe as many as 8 if it's something really hot. I read about it over morning coffee and aggregator skimming; I heard about it on TWiT on the bus to work; I was told all about it in the hallway once I got to work. Yahoo! Pipes has been hard to miss.

With that in mind, it seems weird to me that I didn't get as excited about the release of Pipes as everyone else in my local blogosphere seems to have. Pipes has all the ingredients of something that should really set me off. Pipes, filters, mashups, RSS, Atom, RDF — (singing) these are a few of my favorite things! So, what gives? I'm genuinely worried that I'm sick, depressed, losing it, or otherwise replaced by a pod alien. Possibly all the above.

I knew about Pipes as an internal project at Yahoo! quite awhile ago — possibly even in my first week or two after having joined. I'm fuzzy on the timing here, but it's not important. Someone mentioned it to me at some point, I poked at it a bit from the internal network, and thought it was neat / keen. My main impression at the time was, "Cool, someone's doing FeedMagick, but done right and with a slick visual layout tool."

Then, I got really busy with del.icio.us and wandered off. So, the release wasn't big surprising news to me — my reaction was something like, "Huh, so they did a public release of that? Nice." Clearly I need more caffeine.

The thing is that the idea of pipes on the web is not itself a new concept to me. I think my XmlRpcFilteringPipes seems kinda silly in retrospect, and I'm all about the Power of the URL-line nowadays — but suffice it to say that I've been thinking about pipes on the web since as long ago as 2002 or so.

So, while I'm all jaded and apparently incapable of feeling the wonder, this seems to be one of the biggest revelations to people playing with Yahoo! Pipes:

Pipes? On the web? BRILLIANT!

So, it's not you, it's me. I think I've got a serious deficit of enthusiasm for what's really a pretty cool thing. I want to think a bit more about why that is.

Archived Comments

Kenneth
2007-02-15T14:06:37

http://yakubovich.blogspot.com/2007/01/visipipe-visual-version-of-core-utils.html

Might have been buried in all the buzz about Yahoo, but this sounds like a neat idea.

Kenneth Writer
Jeff Daly
2007-02-16T01:08:54

You're not alone. I was excited when I learned about Pipes, but ultimately I was let down by the lack of parsing tools. Pipes is seriously limited without any XPath/regular expression parsing capabilities. Fortunately, there is a post on XPath in the feature request page.

rss feeds of bookmarklets?

2007-01-03T20:29:31+00:00

Hmm, a quick idea: Has anyone yet tried making an RSS feed of bookmarklets? I'd use it by dragging it to the Firefox bookmark toolbar to get a drop-down menu of usable bookmarklets, dynamically generated by an online app. In particular, say I had an outline in XoxoOutliner, and I wanted to treat the first level of items each as a loosely categorized inbox for ideas. The RSS feed would offer bookmarklets to append a new idea via quick pop-up to each of the top-level branches.

Archived Comments

Scytrin dai Kinthra
2007-01-03T23:30:42

I used to do this from my home page once browsers started integrating rss into bookmark thingies. These days I've been using the Firefox del.icio.us 1.3.x extention and store my bookmarklets and smart bookmarks (hello galeon) on my account. However, del.icio.us doesn't allow sharing of certain types of bookmarks and bookmarklets are one of them (being javascript and all), so sharing of them is not very well enabled. It'd be nice being able to peruse a del.icio.us/tag/bookmarklet and pickout nifties.
Chris Messina
2007-01-03T23:32:42

Not sure, but that's a great idea! The bookmarklets that load remote scripts and are therefore always up to date IMO are genius... this simply adds some depth to them I guess... and takes advantage of the Firefox UI.

Would you be able to execute Javascript loaded from feeds that aren't top level locations? That seems like a security issue, no?
James Robinson, III
2007-01-04T01:34:56

Haven't tried it in FF 2.0.0.1, but older versions filtered out bookmarklets from the feed due to the JS.
Shawn Medero
2007-01-04T05:03:17

James is right about Firefox - I wanted to have a feed of bookmarklets as a live bookmark that people at work would subscribe to for a certain project but Firefox 1.x filtered out any Javascript. Going back to unstable Firefox (it worked up until 0.9 or something) didn't seem like a great idea so I canned it. Kinda stinks because it would be really useful for internal usage where security shouldn't be an issue.

Vienna is now my weapon of choice for feeds

2007-01-02T21:37:48+00:00

In the last few days, I've switched news aggregators again - this time to Vienna.

I've got a long, long, long history of doing this - partially because of my serial enthusiasm, and partially because none of the aggregators I've used so far have satisfied all of my itches. Some tie up my laptop in terms of memory and CPU, some aren't fast enough UI-wise to help me really blaze through skimming, and some aren't flexible enough for me to tweak to my particular liking.

At this point, though, Vienna comes really close to what I've been wanting for years. It's open source (check it out!); uses WebKit to offer a theme-able feed item display (hello Colloquy!); and uses SQLite 3 for persistence (with schema documentation!). Out of the box, it's a pretty nice app, but it was even nicer when I started poking under the hood. I've even submitted my first small patch, which got accepted into the codebase.

When last I tried Vienna, it was on my poor old PowerBook G4 12" 867Mhz and it was a somewhat rough and bad tasting experience. At the time, NetNewsWire was my tool of choice, and Vienna was lacking some features - like, say, a user-sortable list of subscription folders and feeds. It also thrashed a lot and generally made me Force Quit it and move on. But now, on my new-ish MacBook Pro, the performance is stellar with my set of 500+ feeds and my few showstopper missing features are no longer missing.

Now, it seems like NetNewsWire is the app that thrashes for me and gets a Force Quit. I need to try NNW a bit more and figure out if it's just my initial import of subscriptions that drags things down - but Vienna's got me now. It's catching up mightily fast with the feature list of NNW. And, nothing beats open source software for tossing in a few tweaks to things that are just not quite doing what I'd like.

Again, since I'm a serial enthusiast, I have no idea if I'll be a regular contributor of patches to Vienna or even offer any commitment to the project - but I'm definitely happy with it at the moment.

Archived Comments

Craig
2007-01-02T22:20:49

Not sure if you care much for web-based aggregators, but ReBlog is my current favorite. I prefer the web-based aggregators because it allows me to have the same feed list between home and work... er, I mean my other home. http://www.reblog.org/ Hope this helps!
jose
2007-01-03T01:36:43

hi les

i had used vienna before, it has more features than NNW that i like (IIRC it had flagging etc), but it had just lousy performance. it consumed gobs of memory and CPU and invariably fell apart under my feed load (over 100 feeds).

i've tried probably a half dozen RSS readers on the Mac and they all stink. i miss RSS Bandit for Windows, which had all of the features i like but sadly runs on windows (which i don't use routinely). :-/

hope all is well.
l.m.orchard
2007-01-03T03:54:01

@Craig: I have tried using BlogLines and then Gregarius... ReBlog i've used before, too, but actually as a sort of newsdesk for a team at work - they skimmed through news stories and flagged items for republishing, which our CMS then plucked out of the outgoing ReBlog RSS feed. Nice aggregator. But, for me, nothing beats a desktop aggregator for swift skimming speed. For what it's worth, the Vienna team is working on BlogLines integration.

@jose: Not sure when you tried Vienna last - it seems to have improved markedly, though that might just be my mileage with the MacBook Pro now.
Michal Migurski
2007-01-03T08:17:14

I almost feel bad for wanting to switch. =)

Vienna is really good.
brian cors
2007-01-03T16:45:29

I checked out Vienna today a bit, and it's mucho nice.

However, the one thing that I use the most on NNW is the ability to sync to NewsGator. I use that on my cell to read feeds when I am out and about, and not at the desk. And that setup is particularly nice because it syncs history between NewsGator and NNW, so I dont end up reading things again that I have already read.

I'll definitely look at this as a freeware feed aggregator to use at work though, on our workstations. I need to get a decent, easy to use one for people here to learn about RSS. This might be the ticket. Thanks for pointing it out!
Adam Lipkin
2007-01-03T23:35:34

I've been a complete Google Reader addict for the last two months (although I also suffer from Serial Enthusiasm). It seems to toe the line nicely between web-based reader and true app, and combined with Firefox 2.0's nice handling of tabs and links (closing an article I head to from Google Read will pop me back to the Reader tab), it's integrated pretty seamlessly into my browsing.
jank
2007-01-08T21:57:02

I'm checking out Vienna, too, but, like Brian, having the ability to sync with a non-mac client (preferably a web-based one) is the biggest thing that NNW has going for it.
l.m.orchard
2007-01-08T22:42:53

Ironically, I've never spent much time with an aggregator that syncs with any other client - web-based or not. So, that's a feature of NNW I've never really appreciated or had much use for. I tend to have a laptop with me at all times, so my aggregator tends to go with me.
Peter Miller
2007-01-11T08:24:55

Thanks for opening my eyes to Vienna. I was using Bloglines for the longest time and never knew what I was missing!

content sniffing sucks

2006-11-24T06:28:11+00:00

If you’re using FF2.0 go here and you’ll see why.
No, I don’t want to subscribe to a PHP template used to generate Atom feeds, thank you very much.

Source: snellspace.com » Blog Archive » Content Sniffing Sucks

I know this is just taunting the Happy Fun Ball I said I was done taunting , but there's a false-positive for ya. :)

firefox, rss, xsl - from anger to apathy

2006-11-07T21:46:35+00:00

Having skimmed through this Mozilla newsgroup thread, I'm perturbed anew about the new Firefox 2.0 misfeature with regard to RSS feeds and client-side XSL. My original grief was that it cost me a significant bit of pointless debugging time even discovering that it was a brand new gotcha. But, the "we know what's good for you" sentiment is clear - I feel like posting any newsgroup responses would be just more time wasted. At least shoving an arbitrary 512 bytes into the feed fixes the bug. (This seems to compress well: "AAAAAAAAAAAA ... AAAAAAAAAARGH!")

Brilliant: I'll just add that to the body of obscure CSS hacks and bug workarounds that'll someday make me give up web development for raising sheep. Thanks a million, guys.

Archived Comments

Mad William Flint
2006-11-07T22:00:34

Some days man, I'm not sure raising sheep would be such a bad idea.

30 years behind the keyboard is a long time.

Especially at 37.
l.m.orchard
2006-11-07T22:38:55

I'm about 6 years behind you, so let me know if you hit the sheep herding phase before me, and let me know how it treats ya. :)
Joe Grossberg
2006-11-07T23:13:23

Not to be pedantic, but don't you think there's a lot of random shit a shepherd needs to memorize too?

And you get to work indoors, avoid anthrax and keep your hands free of ovine feces.

I agree that the overriding of RSS styling is wack, but maybe you should go on a sheep-herding vacation if for no other reason than to realize this is a speck on a mote on a flea's arse on the giant ewe of web development. :)
Robert Sayre
2006-11-08T00:19:42

les, your feedback seems to fall into the "IT IS OBJECTIVELY WRONG" bucket. It does fail to account for the behavior of Safari 2 and IE 7, and doesn't account for authors who would like their stylesheet to show only in older browsers without RSS support. Why do you think it's good for the Web for Firefox to diverge from the new de-facto standard? Seems like pissing in the wind to me.

BTW, I can't say framing the decision as some collective character flaw of the Mozilla project is particularly productive.
l.m.orchard
2006-11-08T01:26:32

Joe: Sheep farming has always been my frustrated-programmer joke. It would be something different to memorize - not necessarily easier. But, hmm, I never thought about anthrax. I suppose that would be a job hazard to consider, beyond simple wasted time.

Robert: Admittedly, I'm frustrated. This change breaks things I've invested hours into across several jobs, and into which I've been investing hours again. At least I've been paid for those hours, and I'm glad I don't have to go back and explain / fix the stuff now broken at previous jobs.

From my perspective, I'm seeing all the latest generation browsers now breaking something I thought was standard - but about that I guess was mistaken. At least, it "smelled" like a fairly clean quasi-standard approach to me. I really don't have standards all memorized or even well studied.

But, in the new defacto standard, I get to stuff 512 random bytes into a feed to get the old behavior back. That certainly doesn't "smell" like a clean standard to me, even if IE 7 does it and Firefox 2 now follows. It still doesn't work in Safari. It seems a defacto standard to me in the same way that exploiting CSS parser errors to filter by browser is a defacto standard. Yet another weird edge case to memorize.

From my perspective, the defacto standard has been what FeedBurner and others have been doing with client-side XSL for feeds. And there've been some exciting things starting there - so there's some personal disappointment invoked. And now, all those feeds are broken in that respect. Retroactive wind-blown urine, at this point, I guess.

Maybe all this was really just a neat geeky trick best now forgotten, and the decision really will be the right one in the end. Nonetheless, I don't like it. So, perhaps not "IT IS OBJECTIVELY WRONG". But, from my perspective, it was an unexpected and unwanted surprise.

As for being productive, the decision seems made and others have already registered the same or better objections than I would just rehash. And I can't see with what collective character flaw I've painted the team - I'm perturbed, but I certainly don't think everyone involved is a villain. My apologies if my frustration vents that way. It's just that taking over feed styling from content providers strikes me as "we can do user experience better", and the explanations I've read don't seem to disagree with that notion.

But, I disagree and I don't like it. So, fine, from here on out I use the 512-byte-hack if I want custom XSL styling for feeds. Another trick in the bag. That's pretty much my last word on the subject, unless the capability disappears entirely.

All I have left to say is that I hope the client-side XSL-styled World of Warcraft home page never switches to an Atom or RSS format - whether or not using a non-HTML format for a front page was a good idea in the first place. I thought it was, but that could be my whole problem. :)
CraigM
2006-11-08T02:42:06

My "frustrated with technology" catch-phrase has always been to become a Buddhist Monk. That complete detatchment of technology seems to be quite the fantasy of all coders everywhere. Maybe that's saying something.
Robert Sayre
2006-11-08T03:07:32

By "collective character flaw", I meant that I've read you and other web authors writing "they think they know better than us". That's not how the decision was made. And to be honest, it bothers me somewhat to read a rant on the subject that only focuses on Firefox. To me, it seems like taking advantage of an open product development process because you know we will listen, while other vendors won't. A rant that claims "Firefox and IE and Safari suck" would be different, because then it is an opinion on a behavior. Criticism of browser behavior is welcome, criticism of people based on tech religion is not so welcome.

I understand that FeedBurner and others have a business interest here, but you have to understand that at least some of the things they do directly conflict with capabilities that are beneficial to browser users (that we can't deliver if it only works with half of the feeds out there). We want our users to have a coherent feed experience, with browser-specific preferences and minimal click-through screens. To that end, the screen that supplants the XSL was termed the "feed preview". It should show what's in the feed, and default to user-specified feed preferences. If the feed doesn't contain ads for aggregators and feed services (and wrong instructions), a preview that shows that stuff deceives our users. Not in an evil way, but in a "bad usability" way. When combined with authors who want a browser feed screen with a stylesheet for older browsers, and Safari/IE7 behavior, the scales tilted away from using the XSL.

I understand that people disagree here. But the fact that all browser vendors have done something that doesn't align with the way they used to do it should tell you that the issue is more complicated than "author's intent", for better or worse.
l.m.orchard
2006-11-08T04:38:57

Robert: You have a great point there - I do in fact think that Firefox, IE, and Safari all suck with this current change in feed handling. And yeah, the only reason I ranted about Firefox is because I think it's the only one of the three there's much chance in affecting. It's also the only browser I use, so it's the first one where the feed handling change really sunk in for me. I really haven't cared about it until just now.

Of course, I've been nowhere near participating in the newsgroups or code checkins or anything whatsoever related to actually contributing to Firefox - so this is all blog-chair quarterbacking from a syndication feeds enthusiast.

As for the "they think they know better than us" issue, I think it can be found in a newsgroup response like Mike Shaver's:

... one significant motivation was that very many uses of XSLT-on-RSS was to create a page that said "this is not for you browsers, go to the main site instead", which is not what we wanted the user's experience to be. Distinguishing those cases from the "righteous use of XSLT for dual presentation" ones is a publishable result, I submit.

To this, the most vocal respondents say, "But I really want my users to experience my righteous XSLT!" Even if it has flaming GIFs, dancing hamsters, and cat pictures. It's righteous, damn it. (Yeah, the quoted "righteous" is a little off-putting when you actually think the XSLT thing is kind of keen.)

Why not apply the new-and-improved styling by default and bow out when there's a processing instruction? Then, spread the word - "Get rid of your cruddy not-for-you XSLT!" I'm sure you'd get lots of converts grateful to stop screwing with their feeds, which would leave the outlier nutters like me and FeedBurner to keep happily shooting themselves in the feet. Instead, I see, "style 'em all and let hacks sort 'em out," which totally rubs me the wrong way.

At this point, I'm really just mildly disappointed, and feel like I've gotten a downgrade in an otherwise all-around great new browser. I'm not actually looking to farm sheep over this. There is a hack-around available for IE7 and FF2, so at least there's that.

I guess what would make me feel like I'd gotten a decent consolation prize would be if that Feed Preview screen were significantly richer and easier on the eyes than the other browsers' offerings. I'm assuming that's projected for the future. Maybe what I need is to do a checkout and dig around.
Mad William Flint
2006-11-08T04:41:06

CraigM: You may want to reconsider. I've known WAY too many buddhist monk programmers in my day.
Jason Clark
2006-11-08T13:19:11

conscious Robert: Why do you keep seeing people writing "they think they know better than us"? Because Mozilla has chosen to ignore an Author's preferences when displaying a feed. Period. You can explain it all you want, your reasoning may even be right- but the bottom line is, Mozilla made a conscious decision to ignore styling instructions included by the feed's author. The only reasons I can think of to do this is to be perverse (which I doubt), or because you think you know better (and from here on out, I use the collective you for Mozilla, because I'm tired of typing Mozilla).

You claim it's better for users. I say you think you know better what is good for your users than the feed author does. This is the same feed author that created the feed's content, and the stylesheet, and decided to present the feed to users with the stylesheet. I'm sorry, I just don't buy it.

Another non-starter is the IE7/Safari argument. I don't care what those browsers do; I chose Firefox because it decided to lead, not follow, when it comes to standards. Whether you believe that displaying RSS feeds with stylesheets is a standards issue or not, you can't deny it was a de-facto standard until recently.

And what about those authors who only want their stylesheets applied in older browsers that aren't as enlightened as IE7? Not that I've seen a public outcry from these authors in any of the forums discussing this "feature", but let's assume they must exist. They were smart enought to add the stylesheet to their feed, why not allow them to also add to their feed an indication that a browser's built in styling may trump the linked stylesheet (perhaps a PI)? Wouldn't that allow both types of authors to get what they want without wasting bandwidth in 1/2 kb increments of sheer hack?

I've read the arguments, here, on the buglist, and in the newsgroups. To me, and I suspect, to many others, Mozilla (or those who made this decision within Mozilla) has acted as though they think they know better than web site authors. Explanations such as yours appear to me as an explanation of why you think that, not a refutation that you don't.
Jason Clark
2006-11-08T13:21:50

Regarding the above: Sorry about the extra "conscious" at the beginning.... I was typing my comment in a text editor, and used the comment form to check the spelling of that word. Forgot to delete it when I pasted in my comment. It is not a poorly-formed attack on Robert :)
Tim
2006-11-27T04:16:54

I, as a user, don't think feeds should be styled. Feeds are used in ways where styles are not easy to apply, would cause theming chaos, and just look good when all in the same style.

That said, I heard Firefox 2.0 has an ugly default style, which, I guess, should be improved. I like IE7s feed view. Oh, and the arbitrary 512 byte switch is odd - reminds me of Internet Explorer's Friendly HTTP errors... Which weren't that friendly.

Hm, I might not be thinking in the same way a regular user is thinking...