inluminent

Jon Gales joins the RSS discussion here.

Welcome to the discussion Jon. In response to Jon’s reference to an email from one of the MacMinute staff members, that thanked Jon for standing up for MacMinute, I’d like to point out that I’m not against MacMinute… I just chose them as my target for this discussion about full RSS feeds because I really enjoy reading MacMinute over any other general Mac news site. It’s better than all the others, and doesn’t have any of the fluff but has all of the substance.

That being said, there are others providing better RSS feeds:

myapplemenu

SpyMac

MacDevCenter

Just to name a few.

I’d really like to see a full RSS feed from MacMinute, possibly with an advertisement from a good commodity provider who’s prices change often like RamJet* (my favorite place to buy Ram, btw). It’d be a natural, and would truly be targeted to the Mac geeks out there that acutally use RSS feeds (who are more likely to buy Ram when its cheap just because its cheap).

Think outside the box publishers. RSS is what the ‘web’ was back in 1995 or so… and, I think Stan’s the only publisher to really come out of the 90’s ahead, so I’d expect him to do it again… Get ahead of the curve.

I applaud their addition of some copy to the MacMinute homepage in their current RSS feed, but I also get enough news from myapplemenu to not need to ever visit their page again, except to perhaps read some of the conversations hitting their forums every once and a while.

I haven’t sent Stan a personal email about this matter, nor do I think I need to. I know that the MacMinute staff is reading what I write every once and a while, as is the MacWorld/MacCentral staff. One of them will do it before the other, and then the other will follow… such is the Macintosh Publishing world.

I look forward to picking the first provider as my prefered provider in the near future and hope you do as well.

Oh, and btw, that screen-scraped feed that was provided by them.ws was broken last time I checked it (as it should be — I don’t agree with scraping in principle) … something tells me MacMinute would rather waste time breaking screen-scraped feeds than embracing the idea and doing it themselves. Which is sort of funny to me.

This will hopefully be my last post on this topic, unless I post to announce that there is a real MacMinute provided complete RSS feed with advertising in it soon. (But I’ll likely find that out from myapplemenu.)

*disclaimer: I consider the RamJet folks very good friends, so I’m biased I’m sure, but I’ve also never been disappointed with my purchases from them and I’ve spent well over $1000 with them over the years, I’m sure.