Monthly Archives: February 2012

Things I wish were easier to do with RSS

I’m having a rough day with RSS feeds today, but there’s SO much potential there still. We should all give thanks every day to Dave Winer and the other geeks who helped build RSS into what it is today. I just wish I could do more with it. I met with one of the biggest tech companies in the world last week and they too said they live on RSS feeds and love them. These are the things that I’m crying about today and have found myself upset about again and again.

  • Programatically look at a list of hundreds of webpage URLs and determine what their RSS feed URLs are. All the methods we’ve tried break or miss feeds.
  • Send a feed to a feed publishing service like Feedburner and have it cache non-live items in the feed it publishes.
  • Build spaghetti-ball messes of ornate processes with lots of RSS feeds without the apps using them timing out.

Anybody know good, scalable solutions to any of these problems?