The Skim
RSS Has a Wonderful Plan
In Chapter 13, I give y'all a quick sell on the concept of RSS — the mechanism that nearly every site and service uses to inform the world of its latest content — and what a powerful tool it is. But the point of Chapter 13 is to talk about slick ways of accessing news, blogs, and Internet bookmarks.
In this chapter (Chapter 14), I want to focus more on the subject because the more you understand how pervasive site syndication is, the more powerful your iPhone becomes. The App Store has been a boon and a burden. There are a million apps out there (well, tens of thousands, but that's more than enough). The temptation is to download an eBay app to manage your eBay information, and a Twitter client to keep track of your favorite Twitterers, and a Flickr app to find out if your friends have posted new photos from their vacation.
But in truth, it's possible to use just one application — athird-party newsreader app such as RSS Runner (my fave), or even just the powerful RSS reader functions built in to your iPhone's Safari browser — to manage your whole life. True one-stop shopping: is single screen can give you aview on everything in the whole world that interests you.
So here are some elaborations about RSS and some of my favorite ways of exploiting it.
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. Colloquially, it refers to the "newsfeed" of a Web site. There's the site itself, with all of the words and pictures laid out so nicely in pages for the benefit of the humans, but then there's a little file tucked away on the server that contains all that information in a nice, structured database-y sort of format.
So while the humans read the Web pages, software can examine the feed. "Forget the ads and the pictures of the blog's author doing rude things next to the wax statue of Brad Pitt near Times Square," a news aggregator service like Google Reader commands. " is guy last visited your site 21 hours ago. Just show me the articles that have been posted since then. I'll format it nicely along with little summaries so he can pick and choose the articles he actually wants to see."
RSS actually delivers two kinds of flexibility because it pretty much hands off the site's raw data to the software of your choice. This software can search, sort, and filter it any way you choose, and it also has complete control over how that data is formatted and displayed, too. A Web page is concrete; a Web site's feed is clay.
Figure 14.2. When you see a symbol like this on a Web page, it's usually a link to the site's RSS feed.
Chapter 13 talks about some great news "aggregators" — Web-based and native apps that deliver all the fresh content from all your favorite sites in a unified, tidy, scrolling interface.
But Safari has its own built-in RSS reader. If you visit my blog at http://ihnatko.com, you'll see it as a regular Web page (as in Figure 14-1). But if you scrollllllll down to the bottom of the blog, you'll notice a funny-looking blue XML logo shown in Figure 14-2. That's one of the universal symbols meaning "this button is a link to the site's RSS feed." Tap the button, and Safari reads and processes the feed, then presents my blog as a nice, tidy summary, as shown in Figure 14-3. Safari opens the actual Web site only when I tap on the headline of an article I want to read ... and it'll open the page on that specific article.
Figure 14.3. My blog re-interpreted by Safari as just a pile of streamlined iPhone-screen-filling content.
If you tap the New Bookmark button at this point, Safari generates a bookmark to this RSS feed and not to the Web page itself. So every time you open this bookmark, you'll open the site in its RSS view.
Gosh, my blog looks purty in Figure 14-3. is brings us nicely to the first thing I use Safari's RSS reader for.
If I'm about to bookmark a page that I'm apt to visit often, I'll bookmark the page's RSS feed instead of bookmarking the page directly. Because it's always faster and more convenient to see all of a site's content in one slick, scrolling list of plain text than as a Web page — especially on a small screen like the iPhone's. I use it all the time when I bookmark icons directly to the application launcher. I need to know the latest traffic alerts for my county. Tap one button and bang: here's a tidy, summarized list.
It's particularly handy when you don't have a high-speed Wi-Fi connection to the Internet. When you access a site's RSS feed, your iPhone only has to download a small amount of text. When you access the page itself, Safari has to download every article, every photo, every ad, every everything.
Even when you're dealing with an RSS feed with complicated content, RSS sim-plifies your life by integrating it into your newsreader. ink about comics as a prime example. I think the best way to read your daily comic strips on the iPhone isn't via a purpose-built app from the App Store. It's through an RSS newsreader and a Web site that mashes all your favorite strips into a single RSS feed.
But RSS isn't just a way of reading Web pages. Syndication is such apowerful, flex -ible, and ubiquitous concept on the Web that it tends to turn up in the strangest places.
No kiddin'. Many sites not only let you do searches, but their servers will deliver the results of that search as an RSS feed that they build for you on the fly. Some examples:
Figure 14.5. RSS search results show you all the info you'd get if you were actually looking at eBay's Web page.
Indeed, nearly every service you can name is wired up with RSS. Open http://delicious.com/tag/iphone to see the latest hot iPhone pages and apps posted to the Delicious service. Then click on the RSS badge on the page and bookmark it. Presto: You'll never be more than a step away from breaking events in the iPhone world.
I swear, your eyes will become so keenly tuned to spotting RSS badges on Web pages as a hawk's are for spotting small, scared scampering things in a meadow. Whether you use Google Reader or a standalone iPhone app as your newsreader, it'll quickly become the center of your iPhone world.
Most sites have a syndication feed attached. It's a feature delivered by the software that the owner uses to publish content. But there are still a few holdouts.
If you encounter a great site with no syndication feed, try plugging its URL into http://feedity.com. Feedity is a service that analyzes the content on a page and builds an RSS feed for the content therein. It spits out a URL to a custom RSS feed that you can then give to Google Reader or any other newsreader.
And sometimes, no single RSS feed can collect the info you want. Take online comic strips, for example. They're usually published online by their creators. These strips are wonderful but do I really want to click on 40 separate links each and every morning while I eat my Froot Loops?
Fortunately, there are some simple tools that allow you to build your own RSS feeds. My favorite tool is hosted by Yahoo, and it's called Yahoo Pipes (http://pipes. yahoo.com).
On your desktop browser, you literally sketch out what you'd like your new RSS feed to look like. It's really very simple. Figure 14-6 shows you one of my pipes. " the Ethicist" is a great column on the New York Times's site that answers questions about ethics sent in by readers. Snarky site Gawker.com published a funny parody of it called the " Un- Ethicist" that answers the samexplo questions, but from a slightly different point of view.
I like both columns, and this pipe mashes them together into a single feed. It's actually doing two tricky things. Neither column has its own separate RSS feed, so this pipe searches www.nytimes.com's and www.gawker.com's RSS feeds, culls out only the articles that match those two column titles, and then combines them into a single new feed that I can subscribe to in Safari.
And Yahoo Pipes does far more than simply mash together multiple RSS feeds. Maybe you're not interested in all of the Washington Post's political stories. If you only want to read the ones that mention the secretary of agriculture, have Yahoo Pipes filter the Post's feed for mentions of "Vilsack."
Better: If you're spending a week at a big consumer electronics conference, and you want to make bloody sure you don't miss any news about Nintendo's new Blrgf gaming console, Yahoo Pipes can quickly build you an RSS feed that contains every article on Gizmodo and Engadget that contains amention of that product, plus any mentions of "Nintendo," or "Blrgf," or "Nasally-Fitted Game Controller," on Twitter, along with any similarly tagged photos on Flickr. One simple feed gives you acomprehensive periscope.
There are tons of ways to exploit this ... which you'll quickly grok once you start combing through Yahoo Pipes to look at the pipes that other users have already built and which are available for you to modify and exploit.
Because wouldn't you know it? It takes advantage of Safari's RSS reader.
Observe the following points:
The iPhone and the iPod Touch both have wicked-fast Wi-Fi connections to the Internet, baked right in.
The iPhone has a wicked-fast 3G connection to the Internet, from nearly anywhere in the country.
It's damned-near impossible to listen to anything on your iPhone or iPod Touch unless you have access to aMac or PC and a sync cable and can sync the media file to your phone via iTunes.
A lot of the stuff you like to listen to — like podcasts — are disposable entertainment. You listen to the newscast and you're done with it; from that point onward, the podcast is just taking up valuable space.
The iPod app can look for and download new editions of your favorite podcasts, but if you want to listen to any past show, or if you haven't already subscribed to the podcast in iTunes, you're generally out of luck.
And now consider the ongoing disappointments that points 3, 4. and 5 engender. You're in a waiting room somewhere. Your dentist is running late. If you knew that you'd be stuck here for two hours instead of 20 minutes, you'd have brought a book. As it is, you have your iPhone. But you forgot to sync it this morning and you've already heard all of yesterday's podcasts.
Ah! But you know that there's a brand-new episode of Fanboy Radio up on the podcast's Web server. Just sitting there waiting for you.
You can't sync it to your iPhone from here. But you can play that episode "live," streaming it directly from the server.
Or! You're having lunch with a friend and he simply cannot stop talking about the Bugle, his absolute favorite weekly podcast. You bicker over the splitting of the check and part, leaving you to face a 50-minute drive home. You'd love to check out the Bugle but you haven't subscribed to it in iTunes, obviously. Well, you can still stream it live, directly from the server.
How?
A podcast exists on the server as two components. There's the audio or video file that iTunes downloads, and then there's (yes indeed) the RSS feed file that describes the content and helps iTunes (or any other pod-catcher app) figure out that a new show has been uploaded.
So if you bookmark this podcast feed directly — either directly in Safari, or via Google Reader, Manifesto, or any other RSS newsreader — you'll be able to play any pod-cast you want whenever you want ... so long as you have a live Internet connection. The bookmark will eventually lead you to a list of new episodes, and to alink that downloads and plays the MP3 episode you want to hear.
All you need to do is find the podcast or video podcast's RSS file or direct Web site, and open or bookmark it in Safari or your newsreader. That's simple enough.
Find the show in your list of subscribed podcasts. Just click on the Podcasts item under Library in your iTunes window.
Right-click (or, on the Mac, Control+click) on the title to bring up the item's pop-up menu. Make sure you click on the title of the overall podcast, not on any individual episode.
Choose Show Description from the pop-up menu. iTunes opens a little window describing the show. The URL for the podcast's RSS feed is right at the top (see Figure 14-7).
If you want to use a podcast that you haven't subscribed to in iTunes, you'll have to do a Google search for the podcast's Web page. If you examine the Web page, you should be able to spot an orange RSS button that links to the feed.
Open this feed URL in Safari on your iPhone, and look at what happens: You wind up with a nice, RSS-y list of all the shows in the podcast (as shown in Figure 14-8). Just choose an episode that seems interesting. And sure, you can subscribe to this feed in Google Reader, RSS Runner, or any other RSS app on your iPhone.
But let's focus on Safari's RSS reader. So we can stop to curse Apple, just a little bit.
In previous editions of Safari for iPhone and iPod Touch, the built-in Safari reader was more than happy to play a linked media file directly from the Safari reader. rilled to, in fact. "Aren't you clever for figuring out this trick?" The Safari reader seemed to say.
But today? Nothing doing. You have to tap the item to open it in the podcast's Web page, where you will find a link to the episode's actual MP3 audio file (see Figure 14-9). Tap the little bar that represents the actual file, and your iPhone happily starts streaming the audio or video in the standard iPhone player (see Figure 14-10). If it's a media type that the iPhone or iPod Touch can handle (but that's almost a certainty).
It works flawlessly. If you have a Wi-Fi connection to the Internet you can stream audio or video. But even a mere 3G connection can keep up with streaming audio just fine.
RSS, whether experienced through Safari, Google Reader, or a newsreader app, is truly my kind of feature. It's nice to have something as muscular and well-articulated as the iPhone's iPod application, but it never does more for you than what Apple intended it to do. A feature like RSS is so broad and powerful that it invites you to keep coming up with new ways to exploit it.
And so long as developers of Web sites and services keep coming up with new ways to incorporate feeds into the online world, Safari will continue to become more and more powerful and flexible. RSS works great with a newsreader app — again I urge you to (re-)read Chapter 13 — but like a nice ripe banana, it's even good raw.