Pissing on RSS, Crappy Aggregators, and Lousy Support - What Gives?. I'm really tired of the RSS argument. Grown men acting like five-year-olds does not help anyone, and the latest set-to over some "vendor neutral format" (whatever that means) is a waste of users' time and energy. All you programmers and geeks and boy wonders should get over yourselves. Your technical elegance doesn't mean squat if you can't achieve ubiquity because of your petty egos. The best technical solution rarely wins in the marketplace -- Microsoft is the 9,000lb gorilla that proves it.

RSS 2.0 works fine. It gives me everything I need. Others are adding stuff to it (like ENT) that make it better. As a simple-minded user who wants RSS to serve business and personal goals I'm happy with it. Buff it up a little bit and move on. What I'm not happy with is the state of aggregators.

For a few weeks I've been testing NewzCrawler. Today I downloaded NewsMonster. Now, I'm not programmer but I cannot fathom that it is rocket science to build an RSS feed reader. But apparently it is. Both of these tools are sorely lacking in polish and functionality. Mostly they just crash and are full of bugs.

NewzCrawler has Alzheimers, and can't remember what it has and hasn't read to save its life. Its "Blog this!" feature is a great idea that doesn't quite cut it. And I know it's beta, but it is at version 1.4+ and they are taking money for it. It damn well ought to work.

NewsMonster can't import feeds from an OPML file, despite having a "wizard" for expressly that purpose. How am I supposed to test that? And it hopelessly crashed Mozilla the first time I installed it, forcing me to load another browser and go out and install Java J2RE 1.4.1 -- despite the web page claiming it would run on JRE 1.3+. Why would I spend $30 on a "Pro" version of something so crappy?

I have better hope for Nick Bradbury's FeedDemon, since Bradbury's already got a couple of very solid commercial software successes under his belt. But it's only in Beta (and he is not, by the way, trying to sell it before it actually works.)

I've said this before -- Radio plus myRadio is still the best, most reliable Windoze aggregator experience I've found. I wish it ran faster, but at least it remembers where it's been and doesn't crash. Combined with Mark Paschal's Kit I can get full text search, as well.

But all is not roses here, either. This license renewal thing with Radio is driving people nuts. I introduced a few friends to Radio last year. All had install problems but I helped a bit and we got through it. Then they all universally let it languish. Now the licenses are up for renewal. One friend decided to give it another try and signed up for her renewal. She paid her fee, got her number and -- drum roll, please -- it doesn't work. One month after paying her money she still can't get an answer from Userland or get her software to function.

She got so fed up she went out and downloaded a little program called iBlog for $19.95. She had it up and running in 10 minutes, publishing to her own server, with no help and no problems. She even changed her own templates and stylesheets. In less than an hour she accomplished more with iBlog than she had in weeks of trying to work with Radio.

So between the pissing match going on with the RSS spec people, the wretched state of aggregators, and lousy support at blog software companies all you self-proclaimed gurus are doing little more than filling your own barnyard full of shit.

I no longer feel confident recommending this stuff to anyone because it is all so badly broken, so damned hard to use, or so poorly supported. What happened here? How did this go from being an area of such promise a year ago to a freaking technical quagmire?

If you want to solve population problems just put blog software people in charge of the food supply chain. Within a year a third of the population will die of food poisoning, and a third will die of starvation. The remaining third will be early adopters eating beta versions of GMO foods that will probably kill them within the next year. But the tech people will all think of themselves as geniuses. Talk about your broken business models. [b.cognosco] 
2:55:13 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Problems with Index Listing. I have found some posts listed in my index page that don't belong there. I'm not sure why. They were initially published to private categories, which were subsequently deleted. But apparently the posts were simply moved to the main weblog category. Not good.

This does not seem to have happened to all my deleted categories, or all posts. So I'm not sure what happened. I've just spent some time cleaning up the mess and trying to understand what went wrong.

I have no idea if the index script played any role other than helping me to discover the problem, for which I'm grateful. [b.cognosco] 
2:16:48 PM      comment []   trackback []  



I updated the XML-RPC spec to remove the word ASCII from the definition of string type, and changed the copyright dates from 1998-99 to 1998-2003. [Scripting News] 
4:47:18 AM      comment []   trackback []