This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz
by James Robertson.
Original Post: Jon Udell misses on formats
Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants
Feed URL: http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/rssBlog/rssBlogView.xml
Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general.
Jon Udell points to Dare's post on not being able to read Atom feeds in RSS Bandit - by saying "sure you can", and pointing to Atom2RSS:
How? Just search Google for atom2rss. There are a bunch of translators floating around. The one I picked comes from the folks at 2rss.com. Here is their translator: http://www.2rss.com/software.php?page=atom2rss. And they are kindly making this service available for free. You can go to the site, plug in an Atom URL, generate the corresponding RSS URL, and subscribe to that.
That glib "just follow these simple steps..." misses quite a bit. First off, here's what most people are going to do (assuming they understand aggregators, which is assuming a lot already):
Try to add the feed from the page in question to their aggregator
Watch it fail
Move along, figuring that either
The feed is broken
Their aggregator is broken
The liklihood of your average aggregator user deciding to do a search in Google for format translators is too amusing for words. Heck, I announced this PR Feed internally, and got 2 emails from people in my group asking what they were supposed to do with an XML file that showed up in their browser as a DOM tree. I've been working on BottomFeeder for a long while now, and - even so - plenty of people in my own work group have no idea what a feed is. Expecting an end user to go find a conversion tool is a fantasy - other than a handful of highly motivated geeks, it's simply not going to happen.
The simple truth is, aggregator authors have to just buck up and support this new format. I've written more than once on what a colossal waste of time and effort I think the Atom syndication format is, but it doesn't matter what I think - my users don't care about the "inside baseball" aspect of all this. They want to read content when they find it, and would prefer not to have to care about any of the technical details. Expecting them to wander off in search of a conversion site is expecting them to know about details they shouldn't have to care about - and more importantly, about details that they just won't care about....
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