Archive for the ‘windows’ Category

Windows / RSS

Sunday, August 6th, 2006

Microsoft’s new version of IE will have RSS feed management based on the new Microsoft Feeds API. This API is also going to be used by the upcoming Office 2007, notably in Outlook.

This is actually a great development. I’ve been a big fan of using mail reader based feedreaders, and totally love the fact that now I don’t have to use third party software. What I’m not happy about is feed synchronization.

I fairly regularly use three computers: a desktop at work, a desktop at home, and a laptop that I bring back and forth. I run Outlook 2007 (beta, of course) on my laptop. However, I sometimes want access to my feeds on one of the other machines, whether because I quickly want to check one of the blogs, or because I find a site that I want to add to my Outlook reading list. But, being on another machine, I’m out of luck.

Outlook makers thought of this, somewhat. Since feeds get delivered into Exchange folders, I can actually just read the posts being retrieved by my laptop from wherever I can run Outlook. But what if I don’t want to run Outlook everywhere?

The solution has got to be feed synchronization. A simple service can receive OPML files containing your blogroll and then synchronize them across Windows devices. Run a small client software, and it keeps track of your feeds — updating any clients with changes from other clients. All your machines would of course start checking all your feeds, but that’s a small cost to pay for keeping your computing environments synchronized.

Requirements for such a service:
  1. Create and manage an account
  2. Support initial import of an OPML file
  3. Configure itself as either a reader only, or full synchronizer
  4. Regularly query the service and update the local Common Feed List with new feeds
  5. Regularly query the local Common Feed List and upload any changes to the service
  6. Support export of OPML file

It would really be best if a service like Bloglines just built an API for this; they already have OPML capabilities and have a feed-savvy account base.

Thoughts, anyone?

Posted in Software, rss, windows | No Comments »