Note: I haven’t touched on it much on my site, but I will in the coming weeks. I’ve become a huge fan of Ruby on Rails and have been doing a lot of coding in it during my spare time. It has brought back the fun I used to have developing Internet software from years ago.

Ruby Inside has posted an interview with the developer of Trawlr, Ben Smith. Some of my favorite highlights are:

Almost all the readers I looked at kept each feed separate and behaved like email where you had to keep marking items or feeds as read to prevent a huge, overwhelming backlog.

The way I use RSS is to subscribe to a large number of feeds (over 300) and then simply ‘dip in’ and read when I have time.

When I first discovered the REST features in Rails (via DHH’s “World of Resources” presentation) I didn’t really get it. Once I started to understand that REST is all about modeling ‘things’ and their relationships by creating rich associations it started to make sense.

The additional benefit of using the same code to respond according to the requesting user agent is a major bonus. Within trawlr I mainly use the REST features to keep the code DRY for different response types; rss and opml being two current examples. In the future I hope to add a mobile version.

Read the entire article at Ruby Inside.

While its surprising to some, there are actually users who aren’t yet familiar with the wonders of RSS and have yet to experience it, and are curious what the icons and links on websites are used for.

Read More »

Over on NoahBrier.com, he posted a good summary of the advantages of using Firefox for readings blogs. Of course, its not only good for blogs, but for any web browsing. Firefox has definitely improved my web experience.

I’d like to add one more extension suggestion to what Noah lists, which will enhance your RSS experience even further:

Sage
This extension enhances RSS reading. I absolutely love this extension. It displays your RSS feeds, which you place in a bookmark folder specified in Sage preferences. It keeps track of which RSS entries you have read. Its divided into two segments, the top segment showing the RSS feeds, and the bottom segment showing you the entries for each RSS feed as you click on it. You can mark them read w/o reading them, mark all entries, read, read the summary of an entry by hovering over it, and then read the entire entry in the current window, a new window, or a new tab.