Dave is warning that the RSS feed for Scripting News is likely going to break in most RSS readers. I wonder if that includes River2? Dave says no, it does not. River2 and River3 should handle titleless items just fine.
I haven't really looked at River3 because frankly, it seems to me to be the same as River2. It requires the OPML Editor, and needs to be running to generate the feeds page and I already have that with River2.
Turns out the change isn't going to break as much as Dave feared.
The corollary to the feeds I think are linkblogs. I use Radio2 to create a linkblog that I then publish on the right column of my Wordpress blog using Wordpress's RSS plug-in. In the past I've experimented with title-less updates in Radio2 and the Wordpress plugin has a real problem with them. It expects RSS items to have a title, like Dave is warning about.
The problem, as I see it, is that the title is used for the article that you I am linking to. If you go to my Wordpress blog and click a title for an item in the Updates column, that links to the article I am sharing. The text below the title is my commentary about the link.
I see that Dave's linkblog puts content first, then domain of the article source that links to the actual article. In other words, the exact opposite of how I am doing it with Radio2.
I've added the feed for the "new" version of Scripting News to my Fargo River2. Looks like it turns the entire content of the link description into a link. I don't think I like how that looks. Personally, would prefer a snippet of the description and then an automatic "read more" link generated at the end. Paragraph long hyperlinks look bad.