quickSub and Syndication Subscription Service
I’ve been really happy with Morten Frederiksen’s Syndication Subscription Service, which neatly solved what was becoming a nasty problem at the time: there was a coffee cup icon for one-click subscription to an RSS feed in Radio, and a pill icon for one-click subscription in AmphetaDesk, and the glasses icon for Headline Viewer, and what I think may be a dyspeptic humpy salmon for Bottom Feeder, and more on the way: it was looking like you would need a separate column just for RSS subscription icons. SynSubServ solved the problem by giving you an icon linked to a page on Morten’s server that lists all the one-click subscription URLs he knows, customized for your feed URL.
quickSub starts off at the same problem from a slightly different angle, aiming to make the orange XML button linked to a feed into something that’s a bit simpler for RSS newbies to deal with, hoping to forestall the “I clicked on the link, but all I got was a bunch of nonsense in my browser!” problem by adding a Javascript popup when you mouse over the icon, which includes one-click subscription links for all the aggregators that support a subscription URL (that Jason knows about, anyway).
The end result’s the same: if you use an aggregator that listens on its own localhost port (or listens on Radio’s port, for Radio’s URL) then you get a link to subscribe, if you don’t, there’s a way to get to the direct link to the feed. If you aren’t using one of the one-click links, with SynSubServ, you click the link and go to a page that has a link back to the feed, or if your aggregator supports autodiscovery you can just give the link to the SynSubServ page to your aggregator, since the page with the one-click links also supports autodiscovery for the feed. With quickSub, the link’s right there, linked from the icon: if you don’t want one of the links in the popup, you can just ignore it and proceed the way you usually do. Since when I use my own RSS icon, it’s ususually because I either want to look at something in my feed’s source, or because I’ve forgotten the URL (again), I’d like to have it right there in the page, but two Javascript includes, one 4KB and one 27KB, seems a bit heavy for a dozen links, and I don’t much want to be responsible for adding new links as new aggregators come along. With SynSubServ, it’s up to Morten to add them (or not). I’d like quickSub a lot better if there was some way to factor the actual links out into a third file, which could be updated periodically by a cron job, so I wouldn’t have to actually remember to do something. Dunno, dunno…
Phil,
Good points, I actually think the decentralized approach is better, if only it weren’t for the update problem…
However, the list of aggregators is available as RDF/XML from the SynSubServ, and if people were to download that once a week to update their JS, that would be quite allright. Hey, if someone created some XSLT to transform the list of aggregators into quicksub-like JS, I could serve that up – even though there’d probably be people who had it load on every pageload…
In any case – if there’s an aggregator missing, let me know, I’ve added every single one so far (that is, the ones that have a HTTP GET interface for subscriptions).
The only ones that I know are ”missing” are things like SharpReader and Syndirella that listen on Radio’s port for Radio’s URL, which makes for a complicated choice about listing them.
For SharpReader at least (can’t remember about Syndirella), you have to turn on listening, so it doesn’t work out of the box. No idea how many times you would have to say ”no, it works, you just have to enable it in Options-General.”
But, unless you’ve been around a bit, you won’t know that ”Listen for subscriptions on port 5335” means ”Click the Radio Userland link in SynSubServ”.
Then there’s the whole social issue: as a user, I want SharpReader listening on 5335, no question, it provides the most possible utility, but there are certainly stepping-on-toes issues involved.
Phil, SharpReader does listen to port 5335 ”out of the box”. In case someone also has Radio installed on their system, there’s the option to turn listening to port 5335 off in SharpReader, but by default, it’s on.
I agree ”Listen for subscriptions on port 5335” probably doesn’t mean much for most users – if you have a suggestion for a better title for that option, please let me know…
No good idea that would fit, anyway: even if you skate out onto the ice to something like ”Listen for coffee cup icon clicks” that still doesn’t cover autosubscribe bookmarklets (which I use far more, despite having been dense enough to not think about them for far too long).
I really wonder about brain artifacts like my assertion that it comes turned off: I had absolutely no reason to think I knew (it’s been a long time since I saw a brand-new, preference-free install), but I never for a second doubted that it shipped off. I guess I’m lucky I remember to get dressed, most mornings.