An RSS "diff" would be useful
Here’s a problem I have in monitoring a large number of RSS feeds:
- The blog author posts an entry.
- The RSS item for that entry is immediately published and picked up by my newsreader (in this case, Bloglines).
- I read the entry (and it’s marked as “Read,” taking it out of normal view).
- The blog author goes back an posts an update, clarification, addition, or correction. A change of any kind.
- The updated RSS is immediately published.
- The item is “Unread”/”New” again in my newsreader, but I don’t know what’s changed.
In fact, I’ve already blogged about this problem (and apologized for doing it on the jotsheet). At the time, I didn’t really have a solution—except to stop being a perfectionist and correcting spelling errors. Now I think I’ve figured out a feature in newsreaders that could alleviate the problem.
A “diff” feature
If I could diff the original entry to the newest version of the entry, things would be just peachy. For those that don’t know, a diff is:
In computing, diff is a file comparison utility that outputs the differences between two files. The program displays the changes made per line for text files.
The original command-line based diff utilities just showed the differences in plain text, but more advanced programs allow side-by-side comparison, color highlighting, and coordinated scrolling. That’s what I want!
Example
Here are two, short, example text files: diff1 text and diff2 text. Now here’s the output of DiffMerge, a Web-based diff utility: diff result.
If I could do that to compare old vs. new version of blog entries in RSS, I’d be golden!
It looks like nntp//rss has such a diff feature (see Pete Prodoehl’s blog), but it doesn’t operate the way I want. In nntp//rss, every revision to an entry comes up as a new entry. I want only the original and the most recent archived so I can diff them. And I want to see it in Bloglines.
June 17th, 2006 at 1:33 pm
It’s a good idea. That would definitely be a neat feature to have in Bloglines.
Personally, when I do edit my posts I usually put a little update note at the bottom unless I’m fixing a minor spelling mistake or add the post to a new category and etc..
Now, how would you identify which items would be diffed?
For example, if you re-write the whole post, including the title and date, should it be diffed or should it be treated as a new entry?
June 17th, 2006 at 1:45 pm
Design your own RSS reader, yo!
:D
June 17th, 2006 at 3:43 pm
Luke — well, Bloglines already knows (somehow) when a post is updated, because when it is, it shows up as “new” again.
Basically, I’d like Bloglines to store the “original” entry as well as the “newest” entry. (In most cases, there will only be the “original” entry.) Then, Bloglines could display a message like This post has been updated. Compare with original version — or something.
February 14th, 2007 at 5:44 pm
I’d like to see if anyone can create this app; It would be really useful for consolidating the feeds about Congress votes (I just picked a random guy off the list, dunno who he is). You could set up a way to merge the feeds and simply show the bill with a “Yea” section and a “Nay” section, with names of the reps beneath it.But I doubt anyone will even be reading this :D I’m a bit late to the conversation.