In trolling one of my fave sites, The Register, looking for the announcement of their mobile-friendly version (not yet... :( ), I noticed they do offer a RSS feed of the 10 latest headlines.

Anyone here been playing with RSS feeds? They are basically a XML-coded pages, but need a news aggregator to read them. These RSS feeds are apparently popular with Weblogs as news feeds, and a Google search revealed there are a lot of readers/aggregators out there. There is even a PocketPC converter available, but alas, I didn't find a PalmOS converter...yet.

The RSS feeds might be a new type of mobile content we should look at, and will research more into that area when I have time.

In the meantime, would like to hear from anyone else here who knows about the RSS feeds, how to implement, use (especially if anyone knows how to get them onto a PalmOS PDA), etc.

Interesting.

Hey Gary,

I've been looking at RSS feeds for quite some time. It is actually one of my most-wanted features for a future version of iSilo.

One of the most prominent RSS sites I know of is NewsIsFree (http://www.newsisfree.com/).

Btw, I think someone just released a tool that allows to convert RSS feeds to a Plucker-readable format. Can anyone comment on this?

Originally posted by Alexander
One of the most prominent RSS sites I know of is NewsIsFree (http://www.newsisfree.com/).

If there's a site to collect RSS feeds and display, then one can create a channel/clip obviously. Could even create a blog to hold feeds, etc., and link to that. Probably lots of ways to work (automate) RSS feeds into an iSilo/HS/? format for use.

Question is do these offer something pda-friendly sites don't? In some cases, RSS feeds are out there when the pda-friendly html isn't (such as The Register).

May be the next mobile content area to explore. And yeah...add RSS to the list of things to twiddle with when there's time... :D

Plucker now has a tool that supports RSS feeds.

http://jpluck.sourceforge.net/blogpluck/

Another potential option: Amphetadesk (www.disobey.com/amphetadesk/ ) (which I like to call 'Amphetamine' :) ).

It's a news aggregator that sits on your desktop and downloads the latest feeds that interest you. You can choose among thousands on the net, and call it repeatedly throughout the day.

Coupled with the iSilo clipping function in IE, you can clip the index page (w/o off-site links, sorry) and get a variety of feeds.

Best of all: it's free. I use it all day, and love it. It's amazingly easy to set up and use.

Just an idea. :)

You may want to try our feed :) It is available here: http://www.turcic.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=541

Originally posted by gvtexas
In trolling one of my fave sites, The Register, looking for the announcement of their mobile-friendly version (not yet... :( ), I noticed they do offer a RSS feed of the 10 latest headlines.

JPluck can transform pages on-the-fly using XSL transformation. The Register is the best example of this yet. The XSLT stylesheets reformat the pages to a PDA-friendly layout.

To try this out download JPluck:
http://jpluck.sourceforge.net/download.html
and the updated Showcase:
http://jpluck.sourceforge.net/showcase/index.html

Then load "theregister.jxl" (from the showcase) into JPluck X and convert... :p

Of course you need Plucker to view it, but you can run that alongside iSilo.

I will roll out a new beta in a few days which will have everything in one convenient and up-to-date package.

One more thing that I failed to mention about Amphetadesk: the content depends on the feed. Some feeds only pop up with the headline, which also serves as a link to the story. Others come up with the whole feed.

This can make a difference depending on what you're interests in off-line reading are.

I'm playing with FeedReader (http://www.feedreader.com), and open source free reader, and it's very interesting. Shows new messages, and the preview pane is a browser pane where you can respond to messages, all in the same window. Will report on it's full workings later after I've played with it some more.

If you're only interested in a rss news reader for this site, however, all these really do is give you notification when a new posting occurs. But there's a HUGE world out there re: rss feeds that make this technology something worth exploring.

BBC has released over 60 RSS newsfeeds. Something here for everyone, it seems...

List of BBC News RSS Newsfeeds from Userland Site (http://backend.userland.com/2003/06/24#a302)

Can you convert an RSS feed with iSilox?

Craig.