Why RSS
July 2nd, 2008 | robots + kittens
Just briefly wanted to mention a couple thoughts about RSS that have been on my mind since launching SimplerTimes.
I think it’s a mistake to think that we’ve “figured everything out” with respect to presenting content on the Web. The content, readers, platforms, contexts are so slippery that there really isn’t one best approach — there’s several. It all depends on your point of view.
SimplerTimes was designed to show me what I was missing throughout the day, creating “light reads” of the NYTimes to accompany my more substantial read every morning. The NYTimes is such a great paper that I was annoyed, knowing that I was missing great articles that I didn’t have time to dig around for.
Now the beauty of RSS is that it flattens out all the complexity inherent in the content. Everything I need is there, from any source, in one format. This frees me to think about other things, like how to customize the display of content.
Because hardware (and software) are so cheap, it’s really no big deal to set up a new app to vaccuum up RSS and repurpose it in new ways. It’s very light weight, you don’t have to store everything in perpetuity (SimplerTimes stores items for 30 days, then deletes them).
For most internal projects, it doesn’t make any sense to go from DB -> RSS -> DB, but once your infrastructure gets the least bit complex, or you’re dealing with multiple sites, it just might be the answer to keeping things simple and allowing you to focus on your ideas.