Re: Re: Can someone explain what's so great about RSS?

On Aug 1, 2005, at 2:10 PM, Justin Patrin wrote:

On 8/1/05, Matthew Weier O'Phinney <mweierophinney@gmail.com> wrote:

* Like NNTP, it's self-expiring -- an RSS feed only contains a set amount of entries at any given time, and pushes older ones off the list (typical counts are 10 items, but for high-volume sites like freshmeat.net, for instance, this may be 50 or 100). This also means that should you not check for a period of time -- several days or weeks -- you will not see old entries, only the newest ones.

Which is another issue, IMHO. If you want to be up to date you want to see *all* entries. Miss a day and *whoops* you missed a bunch of stuff. This is part of why I like my Slashdot e-mails. I can not read them for a week (if I don't have the time) and go back and read them all later on.

That's actually another of the reasons I switched to a bloglines-api-enabled newsreader. I've not dug into how it works, but because bloglines checks the feeds whether I'm online or not, I don't miss entries. One of the topics of discussion over on atom-syntax is a "feed-history" proposal which is designed to provide a standard specific interface for fetching entries older than those displayed in the standard feed. James.