Interesting. I look forward to trying Safari’s RSS features when I eventually upgrade to 10.4.

It’s behavior of downloading and storing the feed locally is indeed a common feature. The reason is that the feed might change unexpectedly. Slashdot, for example, rolls items off its RSS pretty fast. If you don’t check and store the feed every day, you wil miss stories if you only read the RSS.

Chris

Safari already knows how many new posts it’s received since it displays the number in the bookmark bar folder entry. For it, I think it’s just a minor UI addition. Maybe I’ll poke around in the JS for the RSS display page and see what I can break

Oh, and one more nice feature that I just noticed, it (probably common among feed readers…) really downloads the feeds locally so that they’re available when you’re off-line… like on the bus!

Matt,

That’s one feature I was experimenting with under PlanetPlanet. If you visit http://www.chrisdolan.net/planet/ and then start clicking “x’ buttons, stories you have clicked will permanently leave the page. This feature is fragile, however, and it’s tedious to click all of the links. We need something more like trn (nntp reader) which flags articles you view and hides them from future visits.

Chris

I’m just starting to use feeds and only with Safari right now, but one thing I wish it had is the ability to only show me the new posts. Right now, you can only limit by Date (although you can sort by New-ness). This would make looking at aggregate “folders” of feeds much easier for me.

Actually, that “Best of…” feature you mention should be something easy for NetNewsWire or some other aggregator software maker to integrate, once they figured out a mechanism for actually distributing the information.

Hmmm, one way to do it would be to have an “incoming” blog, where friends would post articles to that blog, and then you’d subscribe to the RSS feed for that blog. Except, if I had to post the same cool article to a dozen friends incoming blogs, I’d get tired of that REAL fast.

–T