Ask HN: Is RSS still worth the time? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Is RSS still worth the time?

#21

Post by brador » Fri, Sep 11, 2015, 6:36 AM UTC

Aggregators like http://skimfeed.com use RSS/XML feeds to send you free traffic.

As a developer, you need to decide if it's worth your time to implement (it's a single database query and some layout code to build an RSS/XML feed, not difficult at all).

Re: Ask HN: Is RSS still worth the time?

#22

Post by kurttheviking » Fri, Sep 11, 2015, 6:37 AM UTC

+1 for RSS; I use digg reader[1] multiple times per day

[1] https://digg.com/reader

(edit for spelling mistake)

Re: Ask HN: Is RSS still worth the time?

#23

Post by senectus1 » Fri, Sep 11, 2015, 6:37 AM UTC

oh hell yes.

Re: Ask HN: Is RSS still worth the time?

#24

Post by daurnimator » Fri, Sep 11, 2015, 6:38 AM UTC

Yes! I use liferea to keep up to date on many things. e.g.

- You can watch your Github feed: it'll give you notifications of all pushes on repos you watch + things that people you follow do.

- You can watch JIRA and Confluence: I haven't found a better way to catch up on what happened overnight with the team members on other side of the world

- I subscribe to LWN.net for linux security alerts

- I subscribe to ~30 blogs of developers I respect

- I watch various comic strips.

Re: Ask HN: Is RSS still worth the time?

#25

Post by gazab » Fri, Sep 11, 2015, 6:38 AM UTC

It's not dead! Without RSS I can't even use the internet properly. The hole that Google Reader left in my heart has since then been filled by newsblur.com.

Re: Ask HN: Is RSS still worth the time?

#26

Post by avian » Fri, Sep 11, 2015, 6:55 AM UTC

I use The Old Reader to follow around 500 feeds. Basically all of them are blogs and sites that update less than once per week. I get a few new items per day into my reading list this way. I newer use feeds of news sites that have a lot of traffic, like HN. I visit those directly.

For me, RSS or Atom is the only usable way to keep up with rarely-updated sites. Twitter is too-fast moving, since it's very easy to miss interesting things in the noise. I don't like to use email because going through my inbox and acting on mail is very different from reading articles and blog posts and I like to keep them separate.

Re: Ask HN: Is RSS still worth the time?

#27

Post by knight17 » Fri, Sep 11, 2015, 6:56 AM UTC

I use it with Feedly with around 600+ feeds. I also have a Google CSE set up with my subscriptions. Google Reader had the best search ever. Sad that it was shuttered.

The majority of content comes from few big sites so I put them into HF and just scan them and mark as read while others are organised as folders like:

  Interesting	|
  Interesting	| Australians
  Interesting	| Prose

  My state	| General
  My state	| Films
  My state	| Religion

  Religion	| General
  Religion	| Catholic
  Religion	| Orthodox

  Tech		| Personal Computing
  Tech		| Vendors

  Tools		| Excel
  Tools		| Emacs
  Tools		| Vim
  Tools		| PIM

  Career	| General
  Career	| SAP
  Career	| Professional accounting

  Books		| General
  Books		| Public domain
  Books		| University Press

  Language	| Blogs
  Language	| English
  Language	| Advice

  Country	| Defence
  Country	| Nutjobs
  Country	| Foreign media

RSS is really great and I wouldn't replace it with anything else from the restricted web.

Re: Ask HN: Is RSS still worth the time?

#28

Post by alexlatchford » Fri, Sep 11, 2015, 7:00 AM UTC

You also don't want to forget about aggregators who automatically grab your content and make it accessible to their audience. This is either a positive or a negative depending on your viewpoint, it's certainly a positive for me because it allows domain-specific search engines possible simply by collating a few feeds together for example.

Re: Ask HN: Is RSS still worth the time?

#29

Post by alexlatchford » Fri, Sep 11, 2015, 7:00 AM UTC

You also don't want to forget about aggregators who automatically grab your content and make it accessible to their audience. This is either a positive or a negative depending on your viewpoint, it's certainly a positive for me because it allows domain-specific search engines possible simply by collating a few feeds together for example.

Re: Ask HN: Is RSS still worth the time?

#30

Post by cosenal » Fri, Sep 11, 2015, 7:09 AM UTC

It's interesting that you asked that on the very same day that Github introduced a plug-in that automatically generate an Atom (RSS) feed from your posts on Github Pages: https://help.github.com/articles/atom-rss-feeds-for-github-p...

RSS ain't dead!