Christopher Kobayashi <chriskk@gmail.com> writes:
> Someone on this list must have built a web-based RSS reader that you
> can view using any keitai browser. hint hint - free the code ;-p
I may know of one such thing. But I'd guess that if someone were
to have something like that, it might be some ad-hoc thing based
on spaghetti code that might cause others to laugh and scorn.
The other problem with sharing stuff like that is that once you
give it other people, they end up wanting help and wonder if you
might be able to change a couple things or at least answer a
couple of questions. And you are the only one who knows the code
(and mess such as it is, the only one who would care to know it).
But then, if somebody else (or several somebody elses) were to
agree to work together on something, and write it in sound,
maintainable code from the get-go, something useful might result.
Something one would be happy to share with others, without fear of
scorn. Or laughter.
> Anyway, if you're looking for Japan specific content, why not use a
> combination of existing technologies like Technorati+RSS.
>
> BUT then again, this might only pull in the headline and first few sentences ...
> We need more _full_ RSS feeds,
I agree. If you have a handset in which the browser has not been
hobbled by spec into limiting the maximum page size to 40K.
> and something that'll separate long content into multiple pages!
I also agree with that. Though it will become less important as
handsets with full browsers and adequate RAM are available.
Then the issue will just be the amount of scrolling you need to
do -- the fact that you have a very limited number of lines on the
screen at a time, and the scrolling interfaces on handsets are not
quite a familar and easy as the ones on PCs. Though is has been
made less painful by use of keys as Page Up and Page Down, so that
you can jump to the next screenful..
I think another solution to paging may end up being smart user
Javascript that dynamically pages the content on the client side
and generates the appropriate navigation and page counts.
For example, look at the International Herald Tribune site:
http://www.iht.com/
Open one of the news stories there. Notice the "PAGE X : Y"
counter near the middle of the left column, then resize your
browser window. You'll notice that it gets repaginated
dynamically.
Something similar could be implemented on handsets. Of course it
would need to be tuned to the font size and the height and width
of the screen on the handset.
Anyway, I imagine that some client-side solution for paging on
handsets will end up being the normal. Rather than expecting
website designers to add paging on the server side. (Though I wish
a lot more would. I personally don't like scrolling on PCs much
more than I like it handsets.)
> If you're into coding PHP, you can use Magpie RSS and mash something
> up pretty easily.
Magpie is great.
> I'm sure Perl, Python, and any server-side scripting language
> has a similar library.
Python has Universal Feed Parser:
http://feedparser.org/
Mark Pilgrim wrote that and is still maintaining it activelyx, I
think. (That despite the fact that he seems to have personally
give up on blogging. I don't know why. Kind of like the way that
Donald Knuth gave up on e-mail.)
> If you're not a code junky, then you can convince somebody on
> this list to whip something up for a few mugs of Ebisu :-)
hmm. Or maybe some people on the list might get together and
collaborate on building a mobile-optimized feed reader...
--Mike
P.S. RSS is dead. Long live Atom. (RFC 4287)
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4287.txt
--
Michael(tm) Smith
http://tokyo.metblogs.com/
http://sideshowbarker.net/
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/890
Received on Tue Dec 27 10:50:34 2005