Tag Archives: RSS feeds

Martin Belam: The death of RSS? Not at the Guardian

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In this post on his Currybet.net blog Martin Belam responds to discussions about the future of RSS feeds. While feeds may remain a niche tool, the latest CMS release at the Guardian, where Belam works as an information architect, sees links to RSS feeds made much more easy to find, he says.

Previously we didn’t automatically link to an RSS feed from an individual article page. This was because articles could ‘belong’ to various different areas of the site, and so it wasn’t always obvious which RSS feed should be chosen as the parent. This blog post of mine, for example, ‘appeared’ on the Open Platform blog, the Datablog, and in the Technology and Politics sections.

We’ve just changed that in release 103 of our CMS, in response to a request on our new Developer Blog. Now in the <HEAD> of our articles you’ll get an auto-discovery link to all of the related keyword feeds.

TechCrunch: Pulse launch – are RSS news apps must-haves for the iPad?

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TechCrunch reports on the launch of Pulse – the RSS-based news aggregator application created for the iPad by two US university graduate students Akshay Kothari and Ankit Gupta.

On sale for $3.99 [£2.76], the app is aimed to please both hardcore RSS reader users and people who are willing to pay top dollars for single publication apps. Pulse’s home screen renders stories from multiple sources on a dynamic mosaic interface. Swipe up and down to see headlines from various sources, and right and left to browse stories from a particular source.

Full story at this link…

The app gets a favourable review from TechCrunch and adds another point to Patrick Smith’s post last week arguing that RSS feeds beat any branded iPhone or iPad news app:

Of course, the everyday Man On The Clapham Omnibus doesn’t care or want to know about RSS, much less mobile apps that create a mobile version of their OPML file. But Journalism.co.uk readers are media professionals – and I’d wager that most of you are capable of using free or cheap software to create a mobile news experience that no branded premium app can match.