RSS is finally dead.... (Well, it is in Apple's Mountain Lion 10.8)

RSS (Really Simple Syndication - see Do you speak my language: R is for RSS, Router, Root, Ruby) is something I have blogged about many times before (see Blogging: RSS is dead. Long live RSS! Using RSS in eLearning for example) and is something that I've predicted is going to "die" for some time (see - 10 eLearning Predictions for 2011 (now with an extra 10% for free)). However, it is hung on in there, until maybe now.

Last week the saw the launch of Apple's Mountain Lion Mac OS X 10.8 and it seems to be another nail in the coffin of RSS as Apple has removed the RSS capabilities from Safari and Apple Mail. Now in both cases they were not great RSS readers, and I have always used a third-party RSS client (I am currently using Reeder as it synchronises between my desktop, and my iPhone), but I did use Apple Mail RSS capabilities as a sort of an alert system for various servers and systems that I run. That is, an RSS feed from the systems alerted me to any problems, or changes, for example, edits made to pages on a wiki I run with the students.

Now in fairness it is not only Apple that seems to be bailing on RSS. In the last few months I have noticed that RSS feeds seem to have vanished from Facebook (well I can't find many more), and Twitter. So does this really mean the end of RSS as we know it? Or will it just be used as the "pipes" to push information around the Internet?

So, what to do? How was I going to get my RSS alert feeds back?

Turns out the solution was fairly simple, and that was to use IFTTT....

IFTTT stands for "if this then that" and it is basically a trigger mechanism which you can set up. The idea is that "if this" happens then the IFTTT system does "that".

The IFTTT system comes with a whole series of what it calls channels which are aimed at doing specific tasks. For example, one of the channels is an RSS feed channel and another is e-mail. Therefore it is possible to set up an IFTTT which basically says "if a new post appears on an RSS feed then e-mail Nick". To set this up all you have to do is create a new "recipe", select the RSS feed channel, add the URL, and then tell the system that the "that" is to e-mail the account holder, i.e. me. All very easy to do, and relatively painless, and you don't need to be a computer programmer or computer whizz to use the system.

This all means that I now have my RSS alerts back. The IFTTT system picks up the RSS feed alert and then sends me an e-mail. Simple.

The IFTTT system comes with over 50 different channels, which will "talk" to a whole range of services (e.g. Twitter, Facebook etc. etc.), and a number of the IFTTT users have made some of their recipes available for anyone to try, and use.

Having played with the system I am now wondering what else I can use it for in my teaching.... Any ideas? If you have, then why not share them below?

3 Comments

August 09, 2012 | 09:50 AM

Posted By: Nick Morris

Thanks for the comment Andrew, and thanks for the interesting lead on Yahoo pipes - something I played with years ago. I have just had a look at Yahoo pipes again (http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/) and there does seem to be activity on the site... May be I will have a closer look.

I was aware of the rss feed on Twitter in the API, but I am sure they used to have a RSS icon on the page that you could just click.

August 05, 2012 | 06:15 PM

Posted By: Andrew Flaus

A lot of people seem confused about RSS: My explanation is that it's a way to request files of tidily packaged information. This makes RSS feeds a convenient substrate for personalised viewers, and processing by scripts.

Maybe Apple dropping RSS in Safari is collateral damage of "there's an app for that”? Google Reader makes it easy for viewer apps to aggregate/sync feeds, plus enables reading of feeds directly in a browser. There's little point in Safari displaying RSS when better viewers are available and Google provides rss-to-html translation.

RSS enables personalisation of info: I have a personal Wordpress homepage that mashes up my interests using RSS, including PubMed search feeds and this blog. Two useful tools are Yahoo Pipes for graphical scripting of feed reformatting, and Page2RSS to generate feeds of webpage changes.

Pipes is also useful for removing @replies from Twitter RSS feeds, available for any public ID in a couple of ways: https://dev.twitter.com/discussions/844

August 03, 2012 | 08:04 AM

Posted By: Nick Morris

Getting some comments on this post over at Google+... Why not check it out and join the discussion?

https://plus.google.com/113904255779548789425/posts/11BzvcA5csH

RSS is finally dead.... (Well, it is in Apple's Mountain Lion 10.8)

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