straight to the point… Yahoo now has several RSS feeds for Yahoo! News.

I’m very happy.. that’s all

http://news.yahoo.com/rss

use it and be happy.

So I used to have a Costco card but for some reason stopped using it, and couldn’t remember why… well now I remember.

After a few years without one, we decided to get one and do some browsing, but definitely not buy anything. 2 hours and $110 later we walk out with the following purchases:
-2 Ralph Lauren pillows
-2 loafs of bread
-2 large boxes of frosted mini wheats
-2 2L bottles of pink grapefruit juice
-3 lbs. blueberries
-3 liter bottle of margarita mix
-6 pounds of chicken
-24 pack of frozen chimichungas
-24 pack Rockstar

Did we need ANY of that? no… Why did we buy any of it? I don’t know… but it was all damn cheap.

My only thought as we left the store, “Rockstar comes in bulk? I wish I knew that a long time ago.”

So yesterday I planned to rush over to the DMV bright and early and stand in a short line (since it’s so early in the morning) to get my paperwork done REAL QUICK! Yeah right. So I got to the Redwood City DMV at 8:20am… I left at 12:30pm (4hrs later) because I was going to be late for a staff meeting. Yeah that’s right, I didn’t even finish what I was there to do!

One more time… 4 hours later I had accomplished NOTHING!

So today I tried my luck again. This time I knew the Fremont DMV wasn’t opening untill 8:30am (yesterday they opened at 7:30am which was part of the problem). My plan: get there BEFORE opening, stand in line as if I were waiting for Britney Spears tickets, get out of there in 2 hours.

So I got there at 8:00am sharp. What time did I leave? 8:45am. What the… yeah, so there was that much difference. So let’s recap:

Tuesday morning
-Redwood City DMV
-50min after opening
-4hr wait and nothing accomplished
Wed morning:
-Fremont DMV
-30min before opening
-45min and I’m done

Now to make this even more absurd, I checked the average wait times for those 2 offices. On Tuesday morning the average wait time at the Redwood City DMV was 4hr30min. Even better, the Hayward DMV had an average wait time for 6hr10min. The Fremont DMV? 1hr10min.

In case you’re at all curious, here’s a list of California DMV offices where you can pick your favorite office, and during the day check what the wait times are like. BTW, the average wait times if I had made an appointment? 2mins… but the earliest appointment tends to be 3-4 weeks away.

brian once started telling me about some “power struggle” in the world of RSS… mighty forces clashing in a battle over RSS standards… two men enter, one man leaves…

i just came across this article on cnet news.
http://news.com.com/2009-1032_3-5059006.html

anyway. this article gives way more background than i even care for. i started reading this article twice this morning and both times gave up on it, not because it’s a bad article, but because the bickering and fighting going on between the various groups is just lame. it’s so annoying that… well i think you should just read through the article once.

it’s kinda interesting to see this article pop up right after randals whole spiel about RSS excerpts and such.

once again… Why can’t we all just get along?

so rand pointed out that by default MT creates RSS feeds that essentially chop the message body of entries into an excerpt of the story… blah blah annoying yes I agree.. and my initial reaction was to simply make the changes to feed the entire story as well.

after putting a bit more thought into this I realized that it doesn’t actually make as much sense as I initially thought. Without going into too much detail, what Rand proposes is to change the <description> section to include more text. but just think about it for a moment… we’re increasing the description???

lets use cnet as an example. in a given day, if they included the full body for all articles in every rss feed.. that would be a pretty fat feed that would be pulled down everytime a user’s aggregator simply polled for new content! to combat this they would have to do something harsh, like only provide the most recently few articles.
so thinking about how I would ideally do it… there would still be a very limited <description> section. then there would be of course a <link> that points to the full version of the entry. now what if I were an organization such as CNET? my <link> would lead to a relatively large chunk of content, complete with style sheets, fat html, some images, way too much CRAP. so to combat this i would also include a &lttextlink&gt that would be a URL but to a light version of the message body.

why? i think it’s the job of the aggregator to pull the correct content. the user should tell his aggregator whether to only display excerpts (which often will be enough for the full body), fat content (with images), or the light content. if the user will be pulling the content to then carry on another device or to even republish, the light content would be ideal.

of course this would require a change to the RSS spec. so for now i agree with brian’s approach, which is to create two different feeds. a light and a heavy.

as much as i agree with randal, i think it’s a bad idea to just blast content in the <description> field. i’ll use brian’s compromise solution… and remain open to some mental kung-fu over the matter later.