by Anne Gentle
As feed and subscription technology ages ever so slightly, I think there might be a need for the ability to read RSS feeds only from a certain window of time. The feature I'm suggesting goes beyond the Bloglines "return content from the last Month/Week/72 Hours/48 Hours/24 Hours" and instead should allow users to request feed returns from a particular time span with a beginning and end date. This document outlines some specifications for this RSS speciality.
The general concept is a mash-up of archive.org and an RSS aggregator like Bloglines. One approach would be to design and create a plug-in that would work with many of the popular RSS aggregators, or, another approach is to write a web form where users just enter the feed URL and the date window. For the sake of simplicity, this document only refers to a web form design approach.
To keep the interface simple, the user should be able to enter the Feed URL and then select the date window using a Start Date: and End Date: selector with a calendar interface much like the one on Yahoo's UI library where you choose a day on a calendar month and can easily click arrows to advance either the year or the month.
The Feed URL should be a URL available from either the source site or from the archive.org site.
The Start date should be any date before the current date.
The End date should be any date after the Start date but not after the current date.
The product should return either partial or full text of the feed content, based on the settings from the content provider (hoping not to take up bandwidth that the content provider doesn't want to serve up.) Ideally the headline would link to the original posting, either on the original site or a link to a cached copy from archive.org. The return should be in a similar web-readable format as the Bloglines format, with alternating grey and white backgrounds for each entry.
While I would expect the initial release of the product to be available only for externally-readable feeds, ideally, the product would also be deployable either behind a firewall or accessible from any computer on the Internet.
The web form should work on any browser and platform with priority given to supporting recent versions of Firefox 1.0.x and Internet Explorer 6.x, with the popularity of the platform based on the web statistics from http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp.
One of the constraints for a web-page-based implementation is that you could not access RSS feeds that are behind a firewall, such as enterprise RSS applications that may appear in the future (or already be here.) Hopefully this constraint can be lessened/loosened by creating an internally-deployable version of the web application.
Another potential constraint would be the availability of the archive. Would archive.org supply the feed content from the past, or would the site that you're trying to retrieve content from have the content stored and be willing to serve it? I'm not sure where the bandwidth would be charged to.
I think that one depenency is upon the feed provider to be willing to serve old content.
Another dependency is on the date/time stamp information that an RSS feed provides? While I don't believe that users will initially request time-based (rather than date-based) feed returns, it's possible that time-based returns would be useful in a future release of the product.
I believe the first version of this product should support English first but localization should be considered while creating the first version.
Documentation should be available for using the product, especially to help users understand why they might want to use the product. This documentation could be in the form of web pages initially built as a FAQ.
A brief Google search did not bring up any product that already does what this document describes. In reality, the start and end date feature could be built into Bloglines.
Many thanks to Charlie Wood at Moonwatcher for his use cases so I could expand on those excellent RSS use cases for time-warped RSS use cases. Some of these use cases would require the enterprise RSS that Charlie preaches about on his blog.
Please, let me know your feedback by emailing me at annegentle at austin dot rr dot com with the subject line "time warped RSS." Thanks!