Category: Syndication

I’ve seen a number of posts lately in which the market share of RSS readers is determined by the number of hits the author sees from each RSS reader in his or her server logs, and while FeedDemon is always ranked near the top, I can’t help but point out how flawed this method is. For starters, FeedDemon defaults to updating feeds – that is, checking for new items – every three hours, whereas many RSS readers default to updating every single hour. And unlike a number of RSS readers, FeedDemon honors the feed’s <ttl>, so that the feed’s author can specify how often it’s updated. A large number of feeds (including some of my own) specify a <ttl> of 1440 minutes, so that the feed is updated once a day rather than once an hour.

Perhaps more importantly, FeedDemon only automatically updates feeds in the current channel group. This approach has caused some controversy with a handful of customers, but I stand by this design. Before creating FeedDemon I studied existing RSS readers, and it struck me how bandwidth-unfriendly many of them were. In my opinion, having a huge treeview of feeds that are constantly updating is wasteful – not only does it unnecessarily consume bandwidth, but it also slows down the application. It makes far more sense to me to regularly update only the feeds you regularly read.

In other words, a well-behaved RSS reader like FeedDemon is designed not to hit your server very frequently – so basing RSS reader market share on your server logs is wildly inaccurate.

The use of BitTorrent with RSS has been getting some attention lately, but there have been so many feed-related ideas tossed around recently that it’s hard to tell which ones have any merit. For the record, I believe this one is very worthwhile. But before we jump into why BitTorrent is so useful here, perhaps a little background is necessary?

It all starts with enclosures, which provide a way to link multimedia files with items in an RSS feed. For example, this feed from IT Conversations uses enclosures to link to MP3 audio files. RSS readers such as FeedDemon often display enclosures in a manner resembling email attachments, but unlike email attachments, enclosures aren’t automatically downloaded until you click on them.

Enclosures were a neglected part of RSS 2.0 until podcasting came along. Podcasting refers to tools which automatically download RSS enclosures and synchronize them with a portable media player such as an Apple iPod. For example, you might tell your RSS reader to automatically download audio enclosures overnight and sync them with your iPod, so that when you get up in the morning you can grab your iPod and listen to all the new stuff on the way to work. It’s still very rough around the edges, and there’s a lot of unnecessary hype about podcasting being tossed around, but it’s an interesting concept which I believe will grow into something far more useful (and usable).

But there’s a big problem: bandwidth. RSS has been blamed for consuming too much bandwidth, and RSS is just text. So how can multimedia files possibly be distributed the same way? The answer is BitTorrent. When you download a torrent file, BitTorrent shares the bandwidth consumption between everyone who downloads that file. The more people that download a torrent file, the more bandwidth there is available.

In a stroke of good timing, last week I spent some time integrating support for torrents into FeedDemon’s support for podcasting. At the moment it’s too unreliable to expose, and I’ve had trouble automating BitTorrent to do what I want, but given how “alpha” the whole idea of BitTorrent enclosures is, I don’t believe it’s important that FeedDemon supports them right away. However, I do believe it’s important that I announce my intentions to do so. Which I’ve just done :)

I’ve been thinking about how to support podcasting in FeedDemon ever since the concept was introduced to me at Gnomedex, and I’m pleased to announce that I’ve moved beyond thinking about it to actually implementing it.

It’s not available yet, but the next beta of FeedDemon will include podcasting tools, along with much better handling of RSS enclosures. I’ll announce the beta here as soon as it’s ready (most likely next week).

In the meantime, if you’d like a sneak peek at how it will work, I have a rough draft of the documentation available:

http://www.bradsoft.com/feeddemon/help/1.0/enclosures/

PS: My thanks to Dave Winer and Adam Curry for their work with enclosures and podcasting. I’ll try not to take so long to see the light next time :)