SpaziDigitali » OPML

On The ideal RSS reader

lm — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 14:11:18 +0000

Paolo Vademarin shares his whishes for an ideal RSS reader and i agree with most of his points.
While i’ve been a blogs reader from a few years now, I should say that I’ve never been able to use an aggregator for much time, I always felt that the mail-like interface many are offering was not fitting well the flow of news coming from the net.

I also wanted something that was available over the web (since I was most of the time out of my office or without my own PC) and i did use bloglines but the user-experience was just not right…

I was intrigued by the description of the way RoN readers works and some days ago I’ve started using the newsRiver tool for the OPML editor. I should say that the feeling is better than the tools I’ve used before (i’d also like a more dynamic interface for it, maybe with async calls to the server for page update…).
I was reading very few blogs regularly and use them as starting points to find the relevant news, but using the newsRiver I’m able to keep track of many more feeds than i was used to.

Wrt reading lists i view them strictly as topic or subject related, that is i don’t consider my subscriptions to be a single reading list. I would rather build some reading list out of those subscriptions bundling together those feeds which are relevant for some subjects. My aggregator would then allow me to filter the river of news by reading list showing me only the posts from those feeds.

Test from OPML

lm@opml — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 09:03:22 +0000

ok this is my first post from the opml editor to wordpress…

Just a few toughts about How RSS can bust through

lm — Sun, 05 Feb 2006 16:50:11 +0000

A post over my OPML blog: Just a few toughts from reading Dave Winer’s essay.

What’s up?

lm — Fri, 19 Aug 2005 09:15:47 +0000

just a quick note on the blog, from the start of august, having a contract being postponed to late september (In Italy august is the month when almost everybody is on vacation), I had some time to play with some technology I find quite interesting, but never really had time to try out.

The first is the OPML editor recently released by Dave Winer, which goes into the line of applications started by Frontier and followed by Radio Userland. I think it is the first complete application to build upon the open source Frontier kernel and it could be the killer app for that. It has an approach different from anything else I have seen befor for it puts outlining at the hearth of the system: almost anything is viewed and edited as an outline.

I have now come to appreciate the way it lets me keep a focus on the priorities I have and to organize and develop my ideas (the more i use the outliner the more i feel hooked into this way of working ).

I have done some exploring and hacking of the program (which is open source and contains a big bunch of code to learn from) and the results have been:

An in browser OPML viewer (here is the post and some examples)
A small tool with the necessary to turn an opml file into and S5 presentation (here is the post and the example)

On the other side I’ve just started to explore Ruby and Ruby on Rails since it stroke to me as a tool a developer should at least have to know, since having first read of it from the signal vs noise blog. I haven’t done this before because I wanted to do this by trying the tool on an real project, now that I have the time I’ll put some effort into developing a mini system I needed for my consulting job using rails. More on this in the next few days.

Ah… and I’m planning to release the Log4Js library I’ve developed to help debug and trace javacript-heavy sites.