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Synchronizing RSS Subscriptions

July 1st, 2003

Hmmm. Dave Winer is working on the problem that has plagued the news aggregator of my dreams: synchronizing subscription lists.
I don’t see why this is such a challenging problem. I’m not a programmer, so maybe I don’t get the complexities of it. But I am a fairly technical guy, and if I had the mad programming skills to solve this problem, I’d do it like this:

  1. Make the subscription list a severable data file (XML, OPML, WordStar for DOS, whatever).
  2. Reference the subscription file’s location by configuring a URI in the aggregator options. If it’s a local file, it’s just a URI pointing to your local file system, but you could also put that data file on any old remote HTTP server, with or without authentication.
    1. Hosting the subscription file on an HTTP server gives me the capability to share my subscription list with others, just by pointing them to a URI.
    2. Or hell with my own subscription list — maybe I just point my aggregator at someone else’s! If the aggregator allows you to define by URI the location of the subscription file, I could just point to someone else’s publicly available subscription list instead of my own.
    3. Even niftier: the aggregator could support pointing at multiple subscription files living on multiple HTTP servers (e.g. just configure multiple URIs). E.g. in addition to being a news aggregator, it becomes a subscription list aggregator.1 There would probably have to be some pre-processing before aggregation to weed out redundancies. The complexities of that could be a bit more challenging.
      1Ooh — and then we could syndicate our subscription lists via RSS! Talk about recursive!
  3. Whenever I want to “subscribe” to a new feed, the aggregator updates the remote subscription file on the remote HTTP server.
  4. Whenever I want to “aggregate” my feeds, the aggregator pulls down the remote subscription file from the remote HTTP server.

Clear as mud.
UPDATE 3:57pm: Someone should make sure this idea of “online subscription lists” (and the technology to manage and process them) goes into the discussion of the emergingEcho (or Pie) project (whatever it’s called now), if it hasn’t already. For those who haven’t been following the brouhaha, Echo is a project to build a next-generation specification that combines a syndication format and weblog publishing API.

Greg Syndication & Aggregation

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