Why you won't find me in the forum much

Rod Whitby rod at whitby.id.au
Thu Jul 26 00:22:38 CEST 2007


Nick Johnson wrote:
> On 7/26/07, Rod Whitby <rod at whitby.id.au> wrote:
>> I have not yet found a forum that allows you to have all new messages
>> emailed to you, or to have *all* past messages since *exactly* the last
>> message you saw provided to you by an RSS feed (all the feeds I've seen
>> will give you the last N messages, or the last day's worth of messages,
>> so if I go away for three days it is not possible to see all the
>> messages I missed).
> 
> That's not how RSS is intended to work, though. With a decent reader
> with offline support (such as Google Reader), you can still engage in
> that usage pattern (for reading, at least) - the reader polls the feed
> at regular intervals and stores the results until you read them. RSS
> feeds aren't really intended to be parsed/read directly as a
> substitute for a medium like email.

Yeah, but you're assuming I'm using a platform that supports Google
Gears.  I use a Treo 650 phone :-)

I agree RSS is not intended to work that way.

So there is still no forum solution that I know of that allows me to
download the full content of all posts I haven't read yet, and read them
on a random small device (e.g. a Treo650, or a Nokia N800, or a Sharp
Zaurus) that supports offline email reading and replying.

-- Rod




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